Paragon – when it comes to the NonStop community and payments APIs, the story is “virtual!”

The building storyline for almost everyone looking at their NonStop systems, particularly those NonStop systems that support payments solutions, is virtualization. But this narrative is equally about bringing NonStop systems closer to the center of operations within the data center and is part of what many observers call the modernization of NonStop. Just as banks are under pressure to compete with all sorts of innovative fintech companies, their traditional suppliers of payment system solutions for the NonStop platform are looking to position themselves in the hybrid world.  To do this, both need to be able to better externalize their payment solutions by supporting APIs.

But even as NonStop tracks towards greater usage as a virtualized workload where mission critical applications are externalized through APIs, what about testing? With DevOps and other models being well supported and the need for continuous automated testing, will the NonStop community be well prepared in this respect? The latest post to be published in the blog on the Paragon web site, “APIs place demands on automated test tools; Paragon responds to help banks, payment processors and fintechs!” includes this statement from our CEO, Jim Perry. “At Paragon, we have a lot of experience with virtualizing and automating every aspect of a financial transaction. And we believe much of what we have learned so far is appropriate for testing via APIs.  Any bank or fintech concerned about integration and testing via APIs can simply call us – we would be happy to cover all that we can do for them today!”

The challenge for developers of automated test tools, like Paragon, is to ensure that any steps taken to modernize the payments platform, be it the hardware, the operating system and middleware, or the application itself continue to produce the required result – in our case this typically means successfully processed transactions and happy consumers. For a long time, Paragon has recognized the complexity of Payment processing environments and the rate at which they evolve. This ever increasing pace of change to presents significant business risk to financial services organizations as they roll out new products and services with less than adequate testing tools in place. No company can afford to hire enough people to deliver the required level of manual testing in the typical product development release cycle. So any 21st century payments testing strategy must necessarily rely on automation. When you throw into this mix the need to test every aspect of a modern API, then the complexity just keeps on growing.

Here is a related quote from our CTO, Mark Medlin, that appeared in another post to the Paragon blog, Why old-school testing tools don’t measure up to today’s e-payment testing needs, “We’ve found that many institutions relying on old-school testing methods achieve only 20% coverage of potential scenarios (and) those are pretty frightening odds when account balances and financial institutions (FIs) reputations are at stake. Most modern enterprise systems expose services through an API. You don’t need to shop for a full replacement of your existing test management infrastructure. Through those APIs you can implement automation by complementing existing test management systems.”  This highlights the need to think about upgrading your test tools along with your hardware and operating system. There is no value in continuing to test in the “old way” if every environmental component of your mission critical application has changed.

As the NonStop story continues to evolve, virtualization has now taken center stage for many financial institutions. Running mission critical payments solutions on NonStop, but configuring it as just another virtualized workload, with functionality externalized as industry-standard APIs is very much at the fore of many technology migration plans. The message from Paragon is very clear – we have the automated payment testing tools to help our clients successfully test and manage this evolution. If you would like to know more about us and how our solutions support virtualization and APIs, please feel free to contact us directly. And don’t forget to check out the Paragon Edge blog (https://www.paragonedge.com/blog) to find the latest posts on this topic and other topics.
Written by the Paragon Team and we can be reached at:

World Headquarters:
326 Raleigh Street
Holly Springs, NC 27540

Phone: +1-919-567-9890
Email: info@paragonedge.com