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Case Study

 

Payment Services Company

 

Cleo’s Transaction Processing Software helps a large services organization transition from legacy technology to new technology

A high-performance payment services company's core corporate organization includes a global funds transfer group serving retail businesses and a payment systems division that services financial institutions. Company products are available in more than 100,000 locations worldwide. The company's automated phone applications handle a high volume of calls per day from customers around the world. Currently, the company manages a number of proprietary IVR platforms serving these customers.

The Challenge

To keep its market leadership position, the company needed to rapidly introduce new customer products and more effective user interfaces. They decided that the best way to meet these business challenges over time was to base their IVR systems on Voice XML IVR platforms and speech recognition tools. The first critical part of the process was to move the current host communications from the proprietary systems to an independent Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Communication Server. This SOA server had to provide an interface to the proprietary IVR systems while also providing a Java and/or VoiceXML interface for the new tools and platforms.

Looking forward, the SOA solution needed to have the ability to communicate with a variety of backend data sources and be accessed from a wide variety of local and/or remote IVR platforms.

The Solution

After reviewing and testing a variety of commercial products, including those from well-known 3270 emulator companies, as well as several open source alternatives, the company choose Cleo's SOA Transaction Processing solution.

The Transaction Processing Suite is comprised of the Transaction Designer and the Transaction Processor. The Transaction Designer records screens or XML documents and creates transactions. The Transaction Processor processes the transactions in real time, provides the basic API functions and manages all the host sessions. The Transaction Processor also includes an Administration GUI that provides a Configuration and an Administration tool.

The company found that Transactio Processing was the only solution designed for developers with Java API's and access from VXML. Other products were focused on providing "nice" graphical front ends for presenting and publishing the data, but did not offer the application efficiency and portability that Cleo offered. The other solutions were also more expensive.

Cleo products are designed for use by mission-critical application programs with the appropriate API's and controls. This was a critical factor in the company's decision. Also, important was Cleo's history of providing reliable products and service. The company's long history of using Cleo products had shown them that Cleo consistently demonstrates dependability, support, and service. This experience reassured the company about the products' reliability in production. In fact in their many years of utilizing Cleo legacy products within their proprietary IVR system, they have almost never had to intervene to restart communications.

Benefits at a Glance

  • Increased application efficiency
  • Enhanced application portability
  • Expanded system administration
  • Reduced development costs

The Solution at Work

When the company began to use the Transaction Designer to create the transactions for their application, they found it was extremely easy to use. "By utilizing the Transaction Designer we reduced our development costs significantly. It is much faster than any of the other tools we evaluated," states the manager of Technical Operations at the company."

Session management was also key since this meant that the company did not need to manage the mainframe interactions. "This is a tremendous feature that significantly simplifies our applications," adds the manager. The web-based administration and configuration tool are also extremely important for the company's production environment.

The most important result, however, was that the Transaction Processor provided the company with the SOA communications server they were seeking to transition from the legacy technology to the new technology they are deploying today and in the future.

Cleo Communications helps companies of all sizes connect with and utilize mainframe data and applications. To discuss the benefits of Transaction Processing for your mission-critical applications, contact Cleo today.