NAB looks cloud-wards for future technology infrastructure

NAB's chief information officer has signalled that the bank does not plan to own much software in the future. Instead, wherever possible it will rent it 'as-a-service' in a bid to become more agile and better able to respond to changing business needs.

Speaking at the CeBIT conference in Sydney yesterday, NAB CIO David Boyle challenged the computer industry to step up its efforts to develop robust cloud based solutions and to better support enterprises moving off legacy platforms into as-a-service environments which he said would drive value for the bank's customers and shareholders.

But Boyle warned that it was not enough to move legacy applications onto cloud based infrastructure. "If you took a horse and cart and put it on a freeway...yes you would get from A to B faster. But that doesn't make it a Ferrari."

Boyle and his team are currently trying to turn their information systems into Ferrari-class computing courtesy of the NextGen transformation program and an annual A$1 billion IT budget.

But Boyle doesn't want to do it all himself - he wants the IT industry to share the heavy lifting associated with moving to a more agile as-a-service technology infrastructure.

"My challenge to the industry is: what are you doing to be faster at the business application layer?" said Boyle.  At present, he said, many were still "stuck in the old world and addicted to the drug of upfront revenue recognition and flogging products."

That description might once have been levelled at Oracle, NAB's partner in the seven year NextGen transformation program, as the company was famously late to embrace 'as-a-service' solutions.

Boyle said yesterday however that NAB was "very pleased" with its relationship with Oracle but added that the "entire industry is still incented by revenue recognition on sales," and that needed to change if cloud solutions were to reach their full potential.

As it stands, according to Boyle: "If you are still asking for upfront licences rather than having an as-a-service platform for your software offering, then it's no longer relevant - we're no longer going to buy technology that way."