Asia Commercial Bank (ACB) is one of many firms to embrace the Windows NT platform as an alternative to a Unix system, citing flexibility, wider product range and better security as advantages.
William Chan, ACB assistant general manager and IT manager, said the bank was running several applications on NT, including FFBS, its retail system that covered savings, current and fixed-deposit accounts.
ACB also was running several packaged applications on NT, such as the stock monitoring system, and recently migrated its Web server to NT from Unix. It still used some Unix-based applications, but planned also to migrate those to NT.
'After some comparison, we found NT is the trend, so we have chosen NT as our development platform,' Mr Chan said.
While Unix was a more mature system, the firm could not see any future direction for it, and Microsoft was continuing to improve Windows NT, he said.
'I think Windows NT can provide quite a lot of features and flexibility, and more products are being built on NT, so it's quite easy to find them, rather than with the mainframe.' Mr Chan said his technical staff had assured him the level of security offered by NT was better than Unix, mostly because Unix needed external security tools.