OmniCloudX delivers OmniPayments’ products via the cloud!

There is rarely a press announcement or a news story written anywhere in the world today without a reference to cloud computing. Cloud services providers have set a standard whereby all other modes of providing computing are being measured. Not surprisingly, the NonStop community hasn’t been left out of these conversations and when it comes to payments providers depending upon NonStop they too are finding that they have options; new ways to run solutions without major up front investments are proving to be an attractive option and with the introduction of OmniCloudX, OmniPayments, LLC., brings new freedom to all financial institutions looking to best run payments switches and even networks of ATMs, POSs and mobile devices.

OmniPayments interest in providing payments solutions from within a cloud environment has its origins in NonStop Systems. When HPE invested in NonStop, porting it to the Intel x86 architecture and then electing to offer a virtualized NonStop for those with x86 equipment already deployed, OmniPayments management realized that this would bring sizable advantages to the company.  For customers and prospects alike, having an opportunity to deploy “OmniPayments-as-a-Service” meant OmniPayments could bring more products to even more users. For instance, for the tier two and three retailers there would now be an inexpensive way to connect to card processors and for tier one retailers and indeed financial institutions of all types, be they traditional banks or emerging fintechs, there would be a way to pilot new applications without any impact on existing resources and solutions. HPE with NonStop X and virtualized NonStop (vNS) opened the door to completely new ways to bring true, 24 X 7, availability to a much broader marketplace.

When you consider existing offerings by public cloud vendors there is no doubt that every financial institution is being bombarded with offerings of every kind. When it comes to running payments solutions, 24 X 7, in the real world (with compute, storage and networking resources allocated 24 X 7) the final numbers provided by these public cloud providers do not look as appealing as the initial slide presentations promised. There is no magic with clouds – locking down the same size resources as existed on-premises oftentimes proves to be more expensive as additional networking expenses are typically incurred. Clouds offer tremendous value, but only when you can leverage their APIs and services-on-offer – move the whole data center and even the prospect of reduced IT staffing levels becomes a moot point as duplication rapidly escalates as monitoring takes place at all levels.

As a company active in the payments industry, OmniPayments has built out a network of NonStop X systems across the globe, with sites in California, Texas, Colombia, Chile and Mexico and additional sites are already in the planning stages. Following the success of OmniPayments in Latin America, 2020 will see the company expanding its support of OmniCloudX across Europe and South Africa. With such an infrastructure in place, OmniPayments has become one of the largest users of NonStop X and the immediate offerings of OmniPayments-as-a-Service via OmniCloudX have already found customers. Whereas 2018 was all about building out the network and validating the financial models, 2019 has seen OmniPayments gaining real world experience in supporting these customers. In many respects, OmniCloudX is addressing a long-standing issue among OmniPayments users – finding IT professionals trained in NonStop. In many situations, providing OmniPayments solutions on the basis of a service, 24 X 7, is done without specific references to NonStop, given that the NonStop X systems are situated within OmniPayments’ data centers and are managed by OmniPayments’ staff!

“Even as we continue to build out the required infrastructure, plans are already in place to migrate OmniCloudX to vNS in 2020; we have already completed testing on the newly-announced NonStop NS2 Converged Virtualized NonStop system,” said OmniPayments CEO, Yash Kapadia. “When it comes to tracking individual users’ resource consumption, we enhanced our solution to feed system usage to a splunk> dashboard and perhaps best of all, we now have a classic tier one financial institution using OmniCloudX as part of its contingency plans even as this institution processes 500 million transactions per month.”

As one OmniPayments consultant recently stated, “OmniPayments doesn’t make any demands on the prospect to sign upfront for new hardware. For an industry that is risk averse in almost every aspect of its business, removing this hardware requirement lessens any perceived pain that may otherwise have been anticipated when embracing something entirely new.” Another consultant familiar with OmniPayments expressed it even more succinctly noting that, “With the OmniCloudX payments service, institutions simply plug their existing business workflow into the OmniCloudX service.  They don’t have to worry about any of the infrastructure overheads, e.g. where the system is located, who runs it, the knowledge and skills to run the system.  All this is handled by the OmniCloudX service.   All the client gets are the benefits of the card payments service.”

However, it is probably best described by Yash, when he told the NonStop community of how, “when even the biggest retailers look to migrate away from their legacy providers, being able to run OmniCloudX in a non-disruptive manner, paralleling existing operations, gives them the opportunity to ‘test drive’ the full OmniPayments solution without any additional hardware purchases. OmniPayments-as-a-Service was the only way one large retailer could even conceive of looking at an alternative and given how OmniPayments won the business by first relying on OmniCloudX, what more could we have asked for? Better still; what more could the prospect have asked for!” OmniPayments had originally turned to HPE NonStop for its fault tolerance properties and now, this critical property is being provided as a service and financial institutions are recognizing that such a focused cloud offering has considerable upside potential.

Today you will find OmniPayments once again working with the HPE NonStop team on providing OmniPayments-as-a-Service out of OmniCloudX running on virtualized machines. In the competitive world where retailers operate, cost justifying expensive solutions is proving much harder to do and bringing in hardware of any kind on the understanding that the solution will most likely work, is a risk that is too great for nearly all retailers. Provisioning OmniPayments services on demand offers not only greater risk mitigation, but a competitive edge in times that are changing rapidly for retailers. New features developed in response to changing client tastes that can be introduced immediately signal a better way to stay ahead of the competition.

With OmniCloudX in all its variants – and yes, there are no restrictions on bringing any OmniCloudX offering on-premises should the need arise – retailers and financial institutions of all sizes can now level the playing field and provide the payments services that previously were only the domain of the biggest financial institutions in the world. OmniCloudX lowers the bar for all such businesses and in so doing, is changing the landscape in terms of what is possible and what is financially prudent – isn’t it time to take a look at how best to modernize your payments processing and to deliver the competitive business edge your stakeholders demand?

Yash Kapadia | CEO
Yash@OmniPayments.com | tel +1 408 446 9274
http://www.omnipayments.com