IPC, a leading global provider of secure, compliant communications and networking solutions for global financial market participants, has entered into a strategic partnership with tekVizion to streamline software certification and deployment workflows for its enterprise trading communications customers.
tekVizion's onPOINT FS automated testing solution accelerates software upgrades, break and fix updates, and security patches, while enhancing the workflow efficiencies of IPC solutions. Using tekVizion's onPOINT FS testing solution enables IPC to offer new services to clients to support faster adoption of new Unigy software and testing of software upgrades and security fixes.
"IPC is expanding its focus in delivering value-added services to customers to help them manage and operate the Unigy platform through its entire life cycle," said Bruce Bolcer, Director of Product Management at IPC. "Financial institutions are under tremendous pressure to deploy software updates, especially security patches, within a short period of their release, but they risk the new software creating compatibility issues, which can lead to costly downtime. tekVizion's onPOINT FS utilises IPC's Blue Wave APIs to seamlessly integrate with IPC communications and compliance solutions so that our customers can increase uptime and improve productivity. This partnership with tekVizion enables IPC to accelerate the certification of new Unigy software in their labs, enabling them to implement new features and address new security threats required by their users. Clients use their labs to perform testing of Unigy software under their network and environmental conditions with the system configured to their specifications prior to implementing into a production environment."
Most financial companies currently certify new software manually, which can be a laborious and time consuming process which can take up to three months to complete. onPOINT FS reduces the certification cycle to hours – at the most a few days -- enabling financial companies to minimise the window of potential security vulnerabilities, address quality issues with the most current patches, and increase trader productivity with the most up-to-date features and functionality.
"Downtime is costly in the financial markets -- as high as $9.3 million is lost per hour for voice trading companies – and damaging to a firm's reputation. Plus, financial firms have pressures to deploy security patches and updates within 30 days of their release," said Israel Hersh, SVP of Business Development for tekVizion. "onPOINT FS automates the certification of software that IPC delivers to its customers as well as the software deployment validation and day two assurance of end-to-end system operation. This is possible because onPOINT accelerates software validation workflows and increases the quality of the software through the elimination of human errors and an increased test coverage. We are excited about the opportunity to work closely with IPC to take our test automation to new levels in the marketplace."