paulruizendaal wrote:

> This looks like great news!
>
> My portugese is minimal at best, but from the web page I get the
> impression that is not so much about the internal systems of the bank,
> but about the e-banking packages for customers of BB. Is that correct?
>
> Paul
>

Paul,

You are 100% correct (so your portuguese seem very good !)

I don't know how the banks operates in other countries, but in Brazil
they have a lot of systems that is deployed to the costumers, the mainly
used interface is web (of course) but there are systems that is
installed on the costumer machines to send/recieve information to the
banks main system (like payments and receivements).

A bit of history:
The information system of Brazillian banks was the most advanced in the
world (on the past, don't know how it is positioned nowadays) in the
80's we live with 80%/month of inflation, so *every* bank costumer has
automatic applications to make the money don't got eaten by the
inflation and a lot of other things to help the bank system run smoothly
when the money you catch on the morning lost it's value along the day.

Today the inflation is at a low rate (for our parameters) and a lot of
this crap it's not necessary anymore. But the history says that the
banks was one of the most important players on brazillian IT industry. A
lot of computer manufacturers was created inside the banks and become
big players on the Brazillian IT market (Itautec was from Banco Itau,
SID was from Banco Bradesco, Digired was from another bank that I
forgot, and so on).

Until the late 80's we have a market reserve (a kind of protection of
the national industries) that impose a lot of taxes and even other
dificulties, after the president Fernando Collor open the IT market a
lot of joint ventures was made between the big international players and
the Brazillian industries. That market reserve make us walk slowly on IT
adoption that reflects on the economy as a whole.

My first IT job was as a computer operator on a machine that has a 68000
motorola processor running at 6mhz (if i remember correctly) with 2MB of
ram and 20MB of HD, that computer runs EDIX5 (a Unix System V clone) and
serves 8 machines, that computer costed a *lot* of money, that industry
was one of the first to have a computer system on the region (between
the small industries of course) and to buy it was used a government
incentive to pay it on 50 monthly payments, and each of this payment was
big money. :-(


Coming back to the topic:
My main concern about this is that the guys who do this kind of widely
deployed program, is that hey don't consider the fact the the computers
could already have a FB server on the network and use it, or even on the
same machine, so they install a FB 1.0 (for example) on top of a 1.5
instalation, uses "masterkey" as the password (sometimes forcing it to
be masterkey and connect using SYSDBA as default) or broke the current
installation in a way or another. These kind of software is a clear
candidate for FB embedded (it's usually mono-user), or if it has some
particularity it should be installed on anothe rport, on another
directory and so on, trying to minimize the chance to interfere with
other systems. So far as I saw that was not the case, the guy who passes
this information to Artur had a briefly talk to me on msn I have asked
this question and he said that as far as he saw the installation
procedure was carefully designed to not clash with others, but he is not
part of the development team and could not provide more information than
we could get running the installation program (what I didn't do).

Anyway is good to have FB on a widely used and deployed system as this.


see you !

--
Alexandre Benson Smith
Development
THOR Software e Comercial Ltda
Santo Andre - Sao Paulo - Brazil
www.thorsoftware.com.br