Globalcollect

GlobalCollect Finds Recipe for Success in Actian and HVR

SUCCESS STORY HIGHLIGHTS

GlobalCollect is a leading electronic payment service provider headquartered in Hoofddorp, near Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With a client base that spans more than 200 countries across all time zones, GlobalCollect helps its customers expand their e-commerce activities by providing an unrivalled portfolio of local payment methods for 170 currencies in 28 languages. Because their customers expect to transact business around the clock, GlobalCollect requires highly reliable and scalable IT systems that include built-in redundancy and high-speed data replication. Using Ingres Database and HVR Software, GlobalCollect helps customers process customer-not-present transactions and successfully moves updated transaction information between 25-30 channels, across 14 databases.

CHALLENGE

For international payment services provider GlobalCollect, dependable IT systems that perform faultlessly 24x7 are not just important to its business, they're absolutely critical. Just ask the customers and vendors who depended on GlobalCollect last year to make more than 40 million payments and conduct in excess of 80 million transactions collectively worth over US$1.5 billion. With GlobalCollect's services, companies such as KLM, Skype, Vodafone, Nike, Sony, and Apple iTunes enable their telephone, internet, and mail order customers to complete customer-not-present purchases for a list of goods, including tunes, tickets, software, and computers.

While most payment service providers go no further than offering a technical link to payment acquirers, GlobalCollect does much more. Its complete offering includes contractual and technical connections to payment processors worldwide, bank account network management, matching, reporting and - in the last stage - funds remittance.

This transparent, end-to-end service lets vendors concentrate on selling without worries about getting paid. In turn, customers can choose from the largest range of local currencies and the widest range of payment options, including debit and credit cards, direct debits, bank transfers, innovative real-time bank transfers, and e-Wallets like PayPal, as well as cash over the counter, prepayment schemes, checks, and invoices.

The customer base of GlobalCollect spans more than 200 countries in all time zones of the world - and most of these customers expect to transact business 24 hours a day so GlobalCollect's systems need to run without fail. Additionally, close and timely tracking of these countries' currencies is essential to the international nature of GlobalCollect's payment processing business. Thus, keeping the information up-to-date and synchronized across all the company's systems is absolutely critical.

"That's why we need to build so much redundancy into our systems," says GlobalCollect Chief Technology Officer Eric Couwenberg. "We require many fall-back systems and much redundant infrastructure."

SOLUTION

Forming the all-important back office system is Ingres Database, the leading open source database that helps organizations develop and manage business-critical applications at an affordable cost, along with the companion database replication tool High Volume Replicator (HVR) from Dutch software company HVR.

"Everything we do relies on those Ingres back office systems. Fully 70% of all the work here goes on in the back office," explains Couwenberg. "Ingres has the best query optimizer and offers by far the quickest route to setting up and building databases. We believe it is the best solution for our back office architecture."

This "back office architecture" comprises no less than 14 back-end Ingres Databases, the largest of which contain from six to nine million records each. It is here that HVR software plays a key role in moving data from the core database out to all the remaining systems.

"We are pleased to see the partnership between Actian and HVR Software accelerate as both companies continue their focus on delivering robust enterprise solutions for business critical workloads," says Couwenberg.

After reviewing other data replication tools, Couwenberg and his colleagues concluded that HVR was the only one that offered the speed, flexibility, and sheer volume performance that GlobalCollect needed. "To begin with, our replication needs were relatively modest, starting with just two channels moving data - central system to archive and vice versa - but today we're at 25 to 30 different channels across 14 databases, and that's growing all the time as new applications come on line," he says.

While replication technology is most often thought of in terms of archiving or backup, it is also a powerful way of applying new data to multiple systems in the least amount of time. One example is the way GlobalCollect works with international exchange rates. This is where HVR helps GlobalCollect meet one of its key challenges with ease. "We read new rates every day into the central system," explains Couwenberg. "Once they're authorized, they get replicated to the other systems with HVR. It's quick and it's efficient."

HVR also served as a vital migration aid when GlobalCollect moved to a newer version of its core database. By starting a replication channel then buffering the data, the IT team was able to capture everything in HVR for the duration of the switchover, then simply resume the channel to get the information into the new database.

RESULTS

Using Ingres Database and HVR Software on the back-end to build a successful record of reliability, GlobalCollect has achieved year-on-year growth to become a leader in electronic payment processing.

A new payout system-involving a C component communicating directly with the central database-has just gone live without incident at GlobalCollect. Development is also now under way of a reporting system that will eventually see GlobalCollect's merchant clients being able to build their own reports online then download them securely to their own systems.

And in a move that perhaps owes more than a little to the Open Source philosophy that underpins Ingres, Couwenberg and his colleagues are now beginning a switch of operating system from proprietary Unix to open source Linux.

"The experience with Actian support has always been good. Not that we have to use it much, but when we do they always give good service. Now with Linux, we're moving to open source in a broader sense," he says. "We've found that the user community is working very well and it's fast. There are no concerns about the organization going open source."