...to an 18-person team at Deloitte to rebuild the online part. "Deloitte provides the online and development team for Oyster Online," said Robinson. "Tfl manages the user experience and business processes."
Before the changeover, Tfl had no control over any innovations because the architecture was inflexible, said Robinson: "The data layer was locked into a proprietary data model, with passwords encrypted using a hashing algorithm." Changes meant that at the time Tfl had to make all its customers re-register online for new passwords, but the new system uses a model where "that sort of thing won't happen".
Tfl was also at the mercy of the original supplier. "If you are locked into one organisation, they can afford to charge whatever they like — there is no competing with anyone else."
Deloitte built a web front-end that interfaces to the EDS back-end using web services. The new online system is based on open standards and open-source software, including the Apache web server, JBoss middleware and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, said Robinson.
For some parts of the system, they stuck with proprietary software — for instance, the online service is based on an Oracle database, in order to get clustering and high availability, said Robinson. "It could have been done with MySQL or Postgres, but that would have taken more consultancy time," he explained.
In cases like this, Deloitte kept away from lock-in: "We used open standards, not a proprietary flavour of them; for instance SQL, but not the Oracle flavour of it," he said, adding that "open-source products tend to be better at complying with open standards".
Read this
Case study: Specsavers sees clear benefits in open source
One of the UK's fastest growing retailers is profiting from using community-developed software across the organisation
The new site went live in 2007, and immediately cut the regular charges for licensing and hosting by 80 percent, by allowing Tfl to shop around for the best hosting deal. This saving alone will cover the cost of the Deloitte project in a year, said Robinson, even apart from benefits such as PCI compliance and flexibility.
The site now works faster and performs better and allows new applications and code to be added with no downtime. This means the online site can now entice users to move to automatic top-up by offering them vouchers for free tracks on iTunes, something the old system would have been incapable of doing. "The Deloitte team all de-registered their Oysters, and re-registered to get the iTunes," joked Robinson.
Talkback
How can switching to open source save them any money? Haven't they read any of Micro$oft's studies showing that windoze is the fastest, most innovative, and lowest TCO, in the industry? I'm sure Redmond will have a different version of this story.
"It could have been done with MySQL or Postgres, but that would have taken more consultancy time"
The question is whether hiring a competent MySQL / PostgreSQL consultancy to do the work would have cost more than Oracle's licensing fees.
It would be interesting to know the nature of the Deliotte / Oracle UK relationship. Audits, anyone?
That is a good point, and one I'll certainly follow up if I get to return to this story.
The impression given was that Oracle included pre-built features, that would have taken time and money to develop and support in other databases.
Whether that is true, and whether the time and money would actually have been greater than the Oracle fees, is part of the usual grey areas in these sort of projects.
I suspect it was more to do with TfL and Deloitte's comfort zones - and also with Deloitte's Oracle relationship - and also the necessity for Deloitte to put together a scheme that makes money for them, and which TfL is prepared to buy into.
Peter
I have now had an email from someone at Deloitte, sounding mildly irritated at our guesswork around Oracle fees.
"The implied suggestion is that TfL had to incur a cost to obtain an Oracle license or support," we are told. "That's not necessarily true - it's quite feasible for an organisation of that size to have an 'unlimited' type of licensing arrangement for one vendor's products."
Perhaps everyone else knows this, but that sort of licensing is actually a new thing to me. It would indeed explain TfL's use of Oracle much more simply than my guesswork. It's there, it's got the features, and it's paid for, so they used it.
Unlimited licences certainly do exist. Here's Gartner advising on them.
http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=498258
I'm now interested to know how they work, both in practical terms and in terms of how they shape the market.
If memory serves the Deliotte consultant claimed to have undertaken an assessment of the alternatives and chose Oracle because it had more relevant features.
Perhaps I can make two points:
Firstly, 'unlimited licensing' arrangements with Oracle must be reassuringly expensive unlike PostgreSQL or MySQL that offers 'unlimited licensing' for nothing.
And secondly, if TfL had unlimited access to Oracle why did Deliotte even bother to test the suitability of PostgreSQL and MySQL as claimed?
Thanks - both those questions occurred to me.
However, TfL and Deloitte are free to use whatever technology they want to use, whatever they pay for it, I would have thought.
And open source people are free to point out what they believe would be a cheaper option.
Maybe Deloitte bothered to evaluate open source databases (your point 2) precisely because they were free (your point 1).