Company: Bottomline Technology
Application: Account provisioning for financial services.
Server configuration: ScaleOut StateServer runs over 4 hosts and 12 remote clients.
Reason for deployment: Needed to build out existing ColdFusion applications using .NET. distributed caching was a requirement.
Results: Functional requirements were met with acceptable performance and stability characteristics.
Background
Bottomline Technology provides online account opening and funding solutions for hundreds of U.S. financial institution clients in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. The platform must be highly scalable and available 24×7. Bottomline Technology adopted ScaleOut StateServer® at the onset of a project to build out its existing services using the .NET Framework.
Challenges
The question of scalability cropped up immediately when Bottomline Technology began to build its .NET platform. Clients redirect their customers to Bottomline Technology’s web applications to open a bank account online, placing intermittent and heavy demand upon its servers. Volume is highly variable; clients range in size from “top 20” financial institutions to local credit unions.
Bottomline Technology’s SaaS platform must interoperate with third party services to qualify customers for bank services. That information is processed and run against applicable business rules to qualify customers for each bank’s products and services.
Results
ScaleOut StateServer was preferred because of its widespread market adoption in the financial services industry and attractive pricing structure, said Alex Abramov, engineering director at Bottomline Technology. “The product works for companies similar to ours; people there trust it.”
“We’ve never had downtime issues with ScaleOut…”
–Alex Abramov, Engineering Director
ScaleOut StateServer met Bottomline Technology’s rigorous requirements for scalability and uptime. It has also delivered robust performance. “We are getting distributed caching at almost no [performance] cost compared to single server caching,” Abramov noted.
Deployment Details
Bottomline Technology’s development and QA teams used a two-node test environment to white-box test and stress test ScaleOut StateServer. After successfully completing testing, Bottomline Technology rolled out ScaleOut StateServer in conjunction with its regular software release over a 3-4 month period. Bottomline Technology initially developed a single service using ScaleOut StateServer and soon began entrusting it to more of its mission-critical services, as it proved to be highly dependable.
ScaleOut StateServer is used for Bottomline Technology’s backend services as a logical cache, as well as in its applications services stack. Bottomline Technology has employed the product for two primary uses: caching the configuration information for each bank and caching session information for applicants. Multiple versions of business rules may be active in the cache, providing versioning control.
About Bottomline Technology
Bottomline Technologies (NASDAQ: EPAY) provides cloud-based payment, invoice and banking solutions to corporations, financial institutions and banks around the world. The company’s solutions are used to streamline, automate and manage processes involving payments, invoicing, global cash management, supply chain finance and transactional documents. Organizations trust Bottomline to meet their needs for cost reduction, competitive differentiation and optimization of working capital. Headquartered in the United States, Bottomline also maintains offices in Europe and Asia-Pacific.
For further information visit: www.bottomline.com