SkySoft-ATM was built more than 10 years ago with the idea to provide secured and reliable ATM solutions based on COTS hardware.
At that point of time nobody thought it was possible to replace proprietary (and very expensive) hardware with COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) hardware.
What is a example of COTS hardware? This is a normal PC you can find from any vendor.
Even the video card was a discussion point.
The idea behind that was to take best of the breed “common hardware” with better performances than proprietary ones, with less complexity at 1/10 of the original price. On the graphic card topic it was even 1/100 of the price! Replacement parts are easy to find and interconnections between systems are standard. MTBF (Mean Time Between failure) of the selected COTS hardware is more than good enough (6 000 days and + are common today).
This was a wide usage of commoditization.
Just have a look to the new air traffic centers and you’ll be surprised to see how COTS hardware is more and more deployed (on the client AND serve sides). Major industries are also working on COTS based solution and open development languages.
Today, we see open source software (OSS) as the next step in that commoditization direction. It already happened in ATM with the Linux usage (Ben will detailed that soon).
The difference is that the aim of Albatross is not only to use but to create and share algorithms, ideas, code and complete products to increase its adoption.
Quality and security will be easier to ensure due to the OSS business model.
The COTS hardware experience showed that mass market and commonly used system are reliable (even more). Let’s redo it with OSS!