TrustCommerce Interview

Interviewed by Jono Bacon

TrustCommerce are a company that deals with a variety of E-Commerce solutions. I spoke to Adam Wiggins who recently submitted a report on their use of Open Source software and KDE.

What is the companies line of business? What kind of products/services do you offer?

TrustCommerce provides all sorts of e-commerce solutions, though our core business is payment processing. Basically, if you want to take credit card payments, either online or in a retail environment, we're the one you should call.

We offer a ton of services: payment processing, recurring/subscription billing, secure hosting, shopping cart software, web design/consulting, and so on. Not exactly super-exciting stuff, really - but quite vital to anyone doing business online.

What is your typical customers requirements?

A payment system that doesn't suck! There are so many shoddy payment engines out there. It's not hard for us to look good when the competition is so bad...

What are your IT requirements for the business?

Most of our business is heavy back-end work. That's my interest, and why I was hired. My background in distributed networking and high-availability systems began with a research project while I was an undergrad at UC San Diego. The same sort of technology is used at TrustCommerce. Our geographically distributed processing network allows us to boast a 100% uptime as well as linear scalability. Which is awesome - but creating and maintaining such a complex system is an order of magnitude more difficult than a traditional, monolithic server setup. Needless to say, most payment engines use the later.

So mostly our engineer time is spent trying to figure out more efficient ways to push transactions through the system (scalability), and ensure that there are as few "single points of failure" as possible (reliability).

On the desktop, we need the same things most businesses need - email, document composition, spreadsheets, web browsing, some light desktop publishing, web graphics creation, and CRM.

How does KDE fit into your IT requirements and what solutions does it offer?

It's simple: KDE makes the UNIX desktop usable for non-IT workers. If it wasn't for KDE, we'd have to pay a lot of money for proprietary hardware (Apple) or software (Microsoft). More importantly, the machines are more stable and easier for our sysadmin to maintain. That's a big savings in cost - not having to hire another sysadmin as our employee count continues to grow.

Since most of our tools (CRM, contact lists, account management, etc) are managed through web-based software, the availability of local apps are less important. KMail, Konqueror, KOrganizer, and Kate are the most used (roughly in that order). None of them have all the features everyone wants. But they are clean, slick, and have a consistent look. Lots of our work is done with non-KDE free software, such as StarOffice. But the workers don't like using non-KDE apps - StarOffice in particular has horrible desktop integration on UNIX.

Here's a funny story - when I was snapping a few photos to accompany this interview, I mentioned that it was an interview for KDE. One of the employees being photographed said, "What's KDE?" I pointed to his screen. "Wait," he said, "I thought that was Linux?" I spent a few minutes trying to explain the difference, but didn't have much luck. He did finally say, "Ohh...so THAT'S why so many of these programs start with the letter K!"

How many machines does KDE run on and what Operating Systems do you use?

We are up to about twenty installs - not everyone in the company, but a fair portion. All of them use either Red Hat Linux 7.2 or Mandrake Linux 8.1 on AMD Athlon-based systems.

What items did you take into consideration in choosing KDE, and what made you finalise upon it?

KDE is the only game in town for the open source desktop, to my mind. I've used it ever since 2.0 came out, and have long felt that it was usable enough for non-technical users as well. TrustCommerce's transition to KDE on new employee's desktops has proven that it is indeed a viable option - worthy if not better than its proprietary contemporaries (MacOS, BeOS, MS Windows, and OS X).

Did you consider other desktop environments such as GNOME, and why did you settle on KDE?

I've always liked GNOME, especially a few years back - I always found KDE 1.0 rather ugly, whereas GNOME had that friendly GTK look that I had come to like from using the Gimp. But GNOME had massive stability problems at the time, and no window manager - so it just wasn't very usable. With the release of 2.0 I feel that KDE massively outpaced the GNOME team.

One thing that makes me excited about GNOME right now are the apps. Unlike KDE which has a large set of very functional, but very basic apps (KMail being a prime example), GNOME has some apps that are pushing the envelope a bit more. Evolution for one. Galeon is another. I guess when KDE 3.0 and GNOME 2.0 come out, I will have to compare them head to head and see if KDE has managed to maintain its lead!

For our workers, though, they are now attached to the KDE look and feel and probably wouldn't want to switch even if GNOME becomes comparable or superior to KDE.

What particular KDE software do you utilise in your business? KOffice? KDevelop?

For me, Konsole is pretty much my only app, but then I'm a traditionalist. I did do one small project with KDevelop and was very impressed. I use the Personal Time Tracker to track some of my hours on certain projects. Klipper is one of those apps that I have no idea how I ever lived without it. For our workers, the big ones are Konqueror, KMail, KOrganizer, Kate, KFax, and KGhostView.

Not a specific app, but: the KDE print architecture rocks. That was one of the best recent additions to KDE - I still marvel over how much it has simplified document creation (especially PDFs) every day.

What commercial software would you like to see available for KDE?

Several of our sales guys talk about something called "Goldmine" that I think is only available for Windows. I've never seen it but it sounds like a very useful app. We've been borrowing features from it for our own in-house CRM software, in fact. Microsoft Office, of course, would make most everyone's day. A good accounting package, ala Quicken - I haven't checked into The Kompany's offerings in this area but I'm excited about what I've seen so far. And finally, a vector drawing program that is as mature as the Gimp is for photopaint - and can read and write Adobe Illustrator files.

Outside the workplace, I am a musician, so I would really love to see a good sequencer - my personal favorite is Logic Audio - available on Linux in full KDE glory. Right now I have a Mac (G4 Cube) with MacOS 9.1 for all my music needs, and it's very unstable - not to mention the dumbed-down interface makes even the simplest task (ie, copying files) excruciating.

Do you feel KDE is a cost effective platform?

Absolutely, and that's really the #1 reason that TrustCommerce chose to adopt it. I pushed for it because I love open source, but appeals to politics or philosophy aren't going to convince management.

Where would you like to see the future of KDE go, and what would you like to see in future releases?

I could write pages answering that! I'll try to keep it pseudo-short. There's lots of features for specific apps that I'd like to see, such as shared calendars for KOrganizer, an auto-spellchecker for KWord and the KMail composer, smarter file browsing (such as using KFax to view multipage TIFFs, by default), and multi-user login support for KDM, ala GDM or Windows XP.

Speed is a really big issue. Things like clicking on the "Home" icon on my desktop still takes way too long to pop up. The draw speed of Konqueror, especially when you have a lot of windows open, is pretty abysmal - especially when compared to recent builds of Mozilla.

But most of all, what KDE needs now is a "killer app." GNOME has got a few: Evolution, the Gimp (not strictly GNOME, but it has the same look and feel due to GTK), and Galeon. KDE has lots of good apps, but none of them are _great_. Some of the apps in KOffice might make it there, but probably not any time soon. A good CRM solution, for example, would make all the difference in getting it onto business desktops. Sure, there are a web-based ones, but that's not going to sell anyone on KDE itself.

Finally, I'll tell you my dream operating system: KLinux. The UNIX desktop still suffers from a severe lack of integration. This is actually a "feature" - the windowing system is decoupled from the desktop environment, etc - but try explaining that to users when they want to know how they can get rid of that ugly black-and-white checkerboard that appears for a few seconds while X Windows is starting. I'd like to see a distribution that is entirely based around KDE. No non-KDE apps; all configuration is done through the KDE control panel, and the system is designed from the ground up to never, ever need to access it at the shell level. Redmond Linux seems to have gone this route to a certain degree, but not enough, to my mind. KLinux, if done properly, would be an absolutely awesome product, and I think would bridge that final gap necessary to bring open source, free software, UNIX, Linux, and KDE to the masses.

TrustCommerce - http://www.trustcommerce.com/

Interview by Jono Bacon for KDE::Enterprise - http://enterprise.kde.org/

[ Edit ]