In this piece John Power (CEO - Ostia Solutions) comments on two recent articles and three infographics on developments in the Fintech sector.

A quote attributed to Bill Gates in 1997 where he had said, “We need banking but

On the one hand, business is being pushed to deliver a better customer experience responding to opportunities in weeks, and on the other hand, core IT is tasked with delivering a stable service 24/7 which can only be delivered in

There are many examples of projects where the risks of failure were never seen up front and the project either didn’t deliver what it promised or didn’t deliver at all while still costing millions in the process. This has generally

There is a myth around the concept of Continuous Delivery that it simply involves buying lots of tools, making them all work together, the button gets pushed and off you go. However, the reality is a lot more complex.

There

While the concept of Continuous Delivery is relatively straight forward, the actual delivery of it is by no means easy. It requires a total culture shift in an organization around how they prototype, develop, test and deliver software.

It means

There are a number of other approaches to software development, with the most common used, until the ‘agile age’, being the Waterfall method. The Waterfall method generally followed a very sequential path as follows:

• Analyse the requirements
• Plan how to

Continuous Delivery essentially does what it says on the tin…..by adopting a continuous delivery approach to your development, you choose when you wish to deliver apps to your customer. This really means that at all times, your application is ready

 Today’s app development projects aim to deliver applications to mobile devices including smart phones, tablets and the plethora of other mobile devices out there. These projects have a number of things in common including the following:

• Massive investment must be

Definition of Docker

Docker and the concept of software containers are getting a lot of airtime these days.

According to Wikipedia “Docker is an open-source project that automates the deployment of applications inside software containers, by providing an additional layer

The concept of Service Virtualization has been in use for some time now and is beginning to gain traction as a capability that can improve the ability to prototype new applications and then develop, test and support those applications in

Application Development

In today’s world, the customer is king! Whether the customer is an internal customer of the business, an external B2B customer or a consumer, the same phrase applies.

Gone are the days when customer requirements were gathered over

A major part of any application development and delivery process is the risk assessment. In many cases, the application development effort is a significant cost; however, the budget for the roll out of the application could potentially be even greater.

Delivery of an application to market in a timely fashion is essential. The concept of timely has now gone from months or years to literally delivering an application within weeks of requirements being identified.

The pace of change is so

"The adoption of cloud computing continues to grow as on-premise experiences a rebirth. According to a well-known industry analyst firm, the ITSM SaaS model will continue to grow until 2015, but will level off to roughly 50% cloud and 50%

This Infographic is based on the E-Commerce and ICT Activity Report released in 2014.

Estimates of the values of e-commerce and the adoption and use of Information and Communication Tech by UK businesses are provided in the report. The source

A recent survey of CIOs and IT decision makers in the U.S. banking industry about their budgets and project priorities highlighted some interesting information, such as:

1. The two largest sectors of IT spending for U.S. banks for 2015 are

As stated by J.Peter Bruzzese in an article he wrote in 2014 (see link at end of page )

John Power has some strong thoughts in relation to this article.

The key to this article really is the Microsoft focus

In relation to this article, I believe the answer to this is a firm ‘yes’, however, the article seems very much committed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater implying the only way to address this is to

This is a huge nod to something people have not accepted…..until now.

For many years we have been told time and time again that the applications are the most valuable IT asset that organisations which invest in IT have available.

Look at all the Fintech startups that can create an online digital business and make large profits with charges that are a fraction of what the traditional financial services organisations charge.

Gone is the traditional view where your banker or