IRD demands open technology

By RICHARD WOOD

The Inland Revenue Department is checking up on adherence to "open standards" from its technology suppliers and will consider open source software.

Open standards are specifications that allow software and hardware from competing vendors to inter-operate. Open source is software that is free to use, modify and distribute, usually on the condition that any modifications remain open source.

Following online strategy announcements in September, the department has completed a full review of its underlying technology strategy and will begin feasibility studies early next year to determine which specific technologies it will use for upcoming projects.

Investigations will include the areas of mainframe platform, server platform, communications protocols and development environment.

The general manager of business development and systems, Colin MacDonald, said the IRD would look closely at Sun Microsystems' Java J2EE and Microsoft.Net application software development environments to see if they were truly open because it would affect the decision on which server platforms it used.

"The benefit of both those environments, if what their proponents say is true, is that they are both standards-based.

"As standards-based products you'd hope to be able to run them on standards-based [platforms].

"We want to get a handle on the degree to which they are."

MacDonald said the IRD was considering the possibility of using both .Net and J2EE and it was not a straightforward choice.

He said .Net was new but with the "grunt" Microsoft is putting behind it he would expect it to be pretty successful.

Other parts of the IRD's technology direction were just as important but may not change much.

The FIRST Unisys Clearpath A-series mainframe system would remain, but with a more targeted role playing to its strengths as a secure, high-volume transaction system for customer registration, payment processing and returns processing.

The internet protocol TCP/IP would remain the communications technology for data, and IP telephony solutions would be investigated, which might also use that network.

MacDonald said open source software was becoming more of a reality in larger organisations and the IRD would look at whether it was relevant on a case-by-case basis.

"Large commercial organisations are committing to it in certain parts of their environment.

"We would seek to understand the benefits they are seeing and what issues arise."