The Dovetail Payments Solution together with Sun's service-oriented architecture create a scalable, flexible, high-performing transaction processing solution with unprecedented speed, resilience, and versatility.

This follows the completion of a series of benchmarks at the Sun center in Menlo Park, California in which Dovetail's component-based system was proven to be the first universal payments platform to handle complex high-value wire payments and highvolume ACH payments within a single system. The benchmark also demonstrated near linear horizontal scalability in running payments processing across a number of application servers.

"This is a powerful combination," said Pieter Heyn, (Global Industry Sales Manager, Payments) of Sun. "Dovetail's component-based technology is one of the leaders in the market. In combination with our technical team, Dovetail were able to load, optimize and achieve the target performance despite a very aggressive target turnaround from our customer. We are looking forward to increasing our collaboration with Dovetail in both engineering and joint-marketing opportunities."

The benchmarks were carried out using an 8-way Sun Fire Enterprise Server as the
database server running Oracle 10g, and up to five 4 way Sun Fire V series servers as the application servers. The Dovetail Payments System was configured with two payment workflows: a complex, high value flow for individual, urgent US wire payments and a simple ACH flow, SEPA Credit Transfer using ISO20022 formats from the client and out to the Clearing and Settlement mechanism.

Both tests demonstrated near linear scalability as V490 application servers were added to increase capacity. For the high-value workflow, sustained rates of 90,000 payments per hour were achieved on a single V490; and for the SEPA workflow, sustained rates in excess of 900,000 payments per hour were achieved for a single V490. Across five V490s, the Dovetail Payments System processed 4.3 million SEPA Credit Transfers per hour. No performance limitations were identified that would prevent scaling beyond the hardware available for this test.

"We are delighted with the results," said Martin Coen, CEO of Dovetail, "and we're looking forward to working closely with the team at Sun. Together, we'll offer clients the optimum way to renovate their payments systems at low risk and at a pace that they can dictate. And, at last, they can have a single system for all payments."