The world’s financial systems run on computers that are intended to stay up, and when they come down for any reason, then the computers ensure that the results of computations in the database are not corrupted, thanks to the ACID properties of serialized transactional distributed databases on mainframe systems supporting a certain set of fundamentals. While they are up, they must not give inconsistent or incorrect results, so as not to inject uncertainty (which breeds chaos) into the world’s financial systems. The answers are always the right answers. Finally, these systems keep up with demand traffic, running as fast as the traders need them to.  This ensures fairness in the system, as the only really fair price for anything is from a multilateral transaction (many buyers and sellers).  And any queue time (waiting) creates possibilities for arbitrage for someone in the queue.

These underlying fundamentals have proven over the years to be necessary to keep all transactions consistent and correct.  Hence they are known as fundamentals.  As Moore’s Law continues to enhance hardware performance and drives cost of commodity down, and the open source movement establishes itself as a viable business models, the next natural evolution step for the industry is to evolve toward open source on open systems and commodity off-the-shelf hardware.  The users’ demand for transparency based on open solutions and standard interfaces, along with the advent of open source and cloud computing, combine to create perfect conditions for a disruptive paradigm shift to open systems.

Valverde intends to replace and functionally extend/advance the reliability of mainframe systems with open source software.  Valverde proposes to build a new, mainframe-style back end for the PostgreSQL database, while preserving the astonishingly wonderful object-relational front-end of PostgreSQL.  Technical feasibility for this architecture in an open environment has already been proven, and the Valverde team can duplicate this success.Take a look at our developers’ site here for in-depth presentations and videos.