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Lessons worth learning

We asked what advice the BullionVault team would offer to other companies. Edwards suggested a process of constant change; "Evolve your systems, It's amazing how much you don't have to spend for good quality components". Jenkins added to that saying "Pick good active open source growing with you, even if they are in beta". As for architecture and deployment, Edwards offered "Plan for clustering and scalability and redundancy" while Jenkins offered the simpler "Plan for one machine blowing up". Both agreed on the importance of adopting open source as fundamental part of developing and deploying an online service, but also the open source is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.

The BullionVault logo, rendered in Lego The team at BullionVault are proud of what they have created with limited people resources. "For two of us to create a service this big using open source and banking technology is impressive", says Jenkins. The company now has fifteen employees, mostly in the front office dealing with customers. Asked what features they'd like to see in open source in the future, Edwards hoped to see Thunderbird expand its capabilities to include a customer relationship management extension and make the front office more integrated. Jenkins was looking for more real time accounting applications for the back office to handle the flow of transactions that a web site which manages money (or gold) needs to keep tabs on their financial status.

Conclusion

Using a pragmatic mix of open source and proprietary software, BullionVault has created a novel way to deal in gold twenty four hours a day. It's that approach which has seen them awarded a Queens Award For Enterprise for Innovation this year.

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