NonStop CEOs have their say

What is the business of OmniPayments, Inc. and how do you work with the HPE NonStop team today? HPE is one of your partners indeed, your largest partner – how would you rate HPE today?

OmniPayments had built a business over many decades that include use of our products by the banks and other financial institutions (including payments switch providers), retailers, and telcos. Our success has a lot to do with the modular architecture we have been supporting from the very beginning as much as it does with our use of key NonStop middleware and services. Today we are functionally very rich even as we continue to add new products and support new capabilities, but perhaps we are best recognized for the value-pricing model inherent across our complete product line.

It was only a short time ago that we introduced biometric support as part of a project we undertook in Colombia, along with a new security offering we elected to develop so that it could run not only with OmniPayments but with other third-party payment switch software including BASE24. More recently, we added support for loyalty card programs now popular with retailers along with making our first entry into the mobile wallet marketplace.

When it comes to working with the HPE NonStop team we have enjoyed a lengthy and productive experience with everyone in NonStop. This has led to us becoming a NonStop VAR for all of South America where we can assemble our own hardware solutions all of which feature NonStop. As for the NonStop team being able to sell OmniPayments then yes, we have had the OmniPayments products on the HPE NonStop price book for some time allowing any prospect anywhere in the world to buy OmniPayments from their local NonStop sales team. These relationships have gone a long way in explaining why OmniPayments has enjoyed a number of successes recently and we anticipate this continuing well into the future.

What have you learnt about NonStop this year that has you excited for the future of NonStop? Will NonStop continue to play a dominant role when it comes to your product development at OmniPayments?

We have always centered our products on NonStop and we have no plans to do anything different in the future. While an OmniPayments solution already leverages other platforms like Windows and Unix, as part of the support we now include for configuration and operation where our customers benefit from the graphical interfaces we provide. OmniPayments was among the very first solution vendors to support Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but we have no plans to support OmniPayments solely on an open platform. NonStop remains a key differentiator for us and has demonstrated time and time again that it can meet the performance criteria of even the biggest enterprise.

A good part of how we have been able to value-price the OmniPayments product offerings has come about from our extensive reliance on NonStop provided middleware, services, tools and utilities. When our clients deploy OmniPayments they need no additional third-party products for monitoring, replication or even data base (we have a special run-time license for NonStop SQL from the HPE NonStop team). We have found that this not only helps us and our clients manage costs but adds considerably to our ability to provide superior support for OmniPayments.

What is the status of your work with NonStop X – do you have customers now? In the near term? And, do you see NonStop customers planning on upgrading to NonStop X? Have you installed NonStop X for your own usage?

OmniPayments was among the very first solutions vendors to validate their products on NonStop X and we experienced very few difficulties in making the switch. Indeed, the headroom provided by the extra processing power of the Intel x86 architecture allowed us to bring back onto NonStop a feature we had initially planned on running off-platform. Today we have multiple data centers running NonStop X and we have shipped a number of NonStop X systems to customers in the western hemisphere.

Perhaps more interesting for the rest of the NonStop community is our roll-out of OmniPayments on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) basis. We have moved rapidly to build-out our own cloud supporting multiple mid-size and smaller clients so that they don’t have to deploy any on-premise servers. This cloud is populated with NonStop X systems and we believe that this is a first for the NonStop community and for HPE.

What role do you anticipate seeing for the new Virtualized NonStop (vNS) within the traditional NonStop community? Will this be for testing and pilots or will this be for production systems? Will you be ready or do you have concerns? Do you see it having the potential to open new markets for NonStop?

We believe vNS will offer challenges as it will open up new markets for OmniPayments. We have been among the first vendors, once again, to be testing with vNS and unlike other vendors we believe we will be able to configure OmniPayments on vNS to be every bit as available and scalable as NonStop is today on traditional systems. This is a very important consideration for OmniPayments as we are also looking to further develop our cloud offering utilizing vNS as in time, it will enhance our flexibility even as it further helps us provide even better value-pricing model.

For some time now and following the introduction of browser interfaces to OmniPayments, we have been providing a hybrid platform in a box. We have supplied a mix of NonStop, Atalla and Unix systems where the presence of NonStop isn’t visible to the end-user. Taking off the table any further discussion about the choice of the NonStop platform will go even further as we embrace vNS and we see that this will not only open new markets for OmniPayments but it wouldn’t surprise us to see additional solutions vendors enter the marketplace with NonStop. After all this time – and yes, we have considered alternatives – no other platform has the reliability and robustness of the always-available NonStop platform and in today’s always-on, always-connected world, this remains a huge positive selling statement for OmniPayments!