GoldenGate Software, a leading provider of high availability and real-time data integration solutions, today announced that it is working with Bankart, Slovenia's leading payment processing organization.
GoldenGate is helping Bankart to improve the availability of its ATM and bank card payment processing services by running on two 'Active/Active' systems and providing real-time updates to both systems concurrently. Running on HP NonStop servers, the GoldenGate solution enables the two databases to remain consistent, so that in the event of an outage occurring with one of the systems, the other will immediately support all transactional payment processing until the original system comes back online, with no loss of data or payment processing.
Bankart is owned by a number of Slovenian banks and runs a network of ATMs in Slovenia on their behalf. The company also looks after credit card transactions for these banks and helps to provide reports and updates on payments to its customers. At the end of 2006 Bankart controlled 14,351 POS terminals, or 50% of the Slovenian market. It also controls around 50% of all credit payments made in the country. It realized that with increased volumes of data, it needed to build contingency into its system to provide continuous customer service, through any planned or unplanned outage.
Gregor Pirc, IT Manager at Bankart, said: "We decided to take an Active/Active system solution approach and run the two HP NonStop servers concurrently. This would mean that one system would carry on supporting transactions if the other had a planned or unplanned outage. Having looked at possible solutions to facilitate this, our ISV partners providing transaction processing software, recommended we deploy GoldenGate, a best-of-breed solution, to move data transactions, in real-time across the two active environments."
In addition to the two Active/Active systems, the GoldenGate solutions also provide real-time data to Bankart's system monitoring solutions. With this in place, Bankart's IT team is automatically made aware of any technical issues—such as if any ATM machine in the network stops working, or payments are dropped by the ATM, or any y of the other card payments at point of sale (POS) systems supported by Bankart—enabling it to rectify the problem quickly and help ensure that the reliability of the system is maintained effectively. The GoldenGate solutions also provide real-time transactional data feeds to Bankart's proprietary back office reporting system, run on the Microsoft SQL Server database; so that reports of payments can be sent to member banks on a daily basis.
"We had been using GoldenGate for some time to highlight operational issues in our ATM network and also to help our back office reporting. With its real-time data integration capabilities, it provided the functionality we needed to be able to execute effectively for our customers," said Pirc.
"Since this new system went live in September 2007, we have had no system issues or performance problems," he added. "We are delighted with the support and scalability of the GoldenGate solution and the benefits it has given us."
Richard Dobber, Managing Director for EMEA at GoldenGate BV, said: "Our technology can support a number of business processes and functions, and provide high levels of system performance and reliability. In sectors such as banking and finance, the availability of payment systems is critical not only to the bank, but also the businesses that are its clients and in turn to their customers. We are pleased that GoldenGate has made such a contribution to Bankart and we look forward to helping them in the future."
Looking ahead, Bankart plans to use the GoldenGate solutions to enable it to send SMS alerts to notify bank customers in real-time when money is debited from their account via an ATM or a credit card transaction, in order to help prevent fraud and additionally to help customers better manage and monitor account balances.
"Using a proprietary application developed in-house and running on a SQL Server platform, GoldenGate will help us to feed real-time data from our transactional databases to mobile operators' gateways. This in turn will then be sent on to their customers' phones when relevant transactions take place," said Pirc.
"GoldenGate is helping us maintain our current levels of service as well as future services and ultimately will advance our market position," Pirc concluded.