OmniPayments tunes in to microservices

Technology moves quickly – it’s a fast changing world. People’s expectations evolve and reflect developing trends, with some at the forefront whereas others may prefer a more leisurely approach. Irrespective of the time taken to embrace new technology, businesses remain sensitive to the correlation that may exist between new technology and their customers desire to exploit. When it comes to Financial Institutions and the networks of user devices they support, there’s little time to spare when it comes to keeping existing customers while attracting new ones. From desktop PCs, to laptops to smartphones and tablets to wearables – it’s never easy predicting which technology on the move has to be addressed. Obviously, for a company like OmniPayments, LLC. it is people’s expectations that drive much of what OmniPayments supports, even as our clients continue to innovate using OmniPayments applications.

“We were among the first to openly embrace Service Oriented Architecture (SOA),” said OmniPaymnets CEO Yash Kapadia. “We embrace thin clients but even here, the option to follow SOA models has proved beneficial and significantly cut into development times. We depend upon the presence of a simple browser for all systems interaction, but today we are seeing the rise in requests to embrace another architecture, micrsoservices.” OmniPayments sees a clear path ahead to microservices and has many of the prerequisite elements already in place.

In an upcoming article for the April issue of Tandemworld, Microservice in the Payments World, OmniPayments’ EMEA Sales and Business Development VP, Craig Lawrance noted how, “The payments industry is seeing an increasing amount of dialogue in the shape of “Micro-Services”. The great idea behind a microservice architecture is that developers can pick and choose the services that they want to build their own solutions. Each microservice provides a small yet key component that an existing process can simply plug into to gain the benefit of its service.” Furthermore, according to Lawarance, “Omnipayments users are well aware that the uniqueness of their business offering is predicated on configuring the appropriate Business Logic Modules (BLMs) for their business. In that sense, Omnipayments is already providing microservices to the payments business. These microservices are already available to enable existing infrastructure to plug into them.”

Banking Technology Editor, Tanya Andreasyan, in the Editor’s Note in the March 2017 issue of her magazine asks, “How to ensure that your bank remains relevant in today’s fast-changing world? You have to completely change your mindset from ‘build it and they will come’ to ‘outside in’ – in other words, it is no longer about the product as it used to be. Now it is all about customer experience.” Accepting this premise shouldn’t be all that difficult as everywhere you turn today you hear technology pundits championing the significance of the “consumer experience” and microservices happens to be an architecture that supports the flexibility and timeliness payments solutions vendors like OmniPayments provide.

According to Pyalla Technology, LLC. Cofounder and CEO, Richard Buckle, in a March 29, 2017, post to the LinkedIn blog, Pulse Make sure you “identify the right partners to create an ecosystem;” FIs deploying NonStop turn to microservices … (where you will also find the above quote by Tanya Andreasyan) he provides additional insight into microservices. “Microservices, or more correctly microservices architecture, has captured the mindshare of many CIOs within these FIs. Roll out a set of microservices, say to support a deposit or to print a statement, and they can be accessed from any device. Omnichannel support? Check; got that one covered! Add capabilities to combine the output of a number of them and you can respond to changing markets. Headless ATMs accessed from mobile phones? Check! Got that one covered, too!”

OmniPayment’s Lawrance agrees with the above, adding, “Microservices are all about avoiding monolith programming, something we at OmniPayments have been doing for over 20 years – with implementation options including SOAP, REST, or JSON methods, our users will always have flexibility for the future.” Microservices architecture owes its roots to SOA and is prospering for the simple fact that it is nowhere near as burdensome as SOA turned out to be. Almost always single threaded and event-driven, with non-blocking I/O that is particularly suited to I/O bound applications, microservices architecture will likely be making an appearance at your shop very soon. However, there is a downside – microservices, as the name implies, are typically light on functionality and rely on communicating with other microservices to complete any action. The impact on the network if not addressed in the initial design may degrade to where the expected benefits from the microservices architecture will fail to materialize.

“The microservices architecture is one we can identify with,” said OmniPayment’s Yash. “We have always approached providing functionality on a modular basis. When it comes to our BLMs, we can even let users develop their own, for a fee, but more often where we see potential market opportunity, we will develop them ourselves as part of the OmniPayments product offering. We simply couldn’t contemplate pursuing this model if we didn’t embrace modularity and our own use of the microservices architecture will become even more apparent over time.”

Technology does move quickly and it hasn’t always been an easy task to recognize those models and architectures that have the potential to stay the course over time. However, if the pundits are correct with their assessments that it is all about the consumer experience, traditional approaches to application development will need to change. Embracing a microservice architecture looks to be one such example that will have longevity and with OmniPayments already moving on from SOA and towards microservices, its customers will surely benefit. “Build it and they will come,” as the basis of development has certainly seen its last days and with that, vendors can focus on what truly matters – further enriching the customer experience!

Should you want even more information about OmniPayments and how it is approaching support of a microservice architecture, please feel free to contact yash@omnipayments.com or call us at +1 408 446 9274

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