COMPANY
Businesses around the world depend on Bottomline Technologies solutions to help them make complex business payments simple, smart and secure, including some of the world’s largest banks, and private and publicly traded companies.
INDUSTRY
Financial Technology
PARTNER
BUSINESS NEEDS
Offer customers a cloud-based alternative to on-premise payment software.
SOLUTION
- Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform
- Weblogic servers
- Oracle databases
- Bottomline PT-X Payments and Business Solution Suite
BENEFITS
- Delivery of cloud-based service from within secure data centre environment
- Eliminates need for on-premise customer infrastructure increasing customer adoption and satisfaction
- Increased performance with lower cost
- Significant reduction in support and maintenance, freeing resources for other projects
- Linear scalability to quickly and easily handle expected service growth
- Hypervisor-neutrality reduces silos and provides greater flexibility
CHALLENGE
It didn’t take long for payment services provider, Bottomline Technologies, to discover additional uses for the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud beyond the initial infrastructure project for which it was purchased. In particular, the Nutanix solution has provided the company with a scalable and secure platform on which to launch an innovative cloud-based payments and business solution.
“The initial aim was to simply replace our legacy servers and SAN storage as part of a project to upgrade our in-house Microsoft Exchange email system,” explains head of infrastructure, Peter Marshall. “That project went extremely well enabling us to, ultimately, build a 3000+ user Exchange Server environment in the US, with automatic replication and failover to our UK datacentre, all hosted and supported by the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.”
In fact, the project went so well that Marshall soon began considering Nutanix for other projects across the organisation. Most notably, the deployment of Bottomline PT-X, a cloud-based solution that allows customers to securely handle millions of electronic payment transactions every day.
SOLUTION
The use of the Nutanix platform has been particularly transformative because the Bacs-approved PT-X service supersedes on-site Bottomline payment processing applications that needed to be installed, maintained and upgraded at customer sites. Developed from scratch to run on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, PT-X provides customers with a cloud-based alternative requiring no additional infrastructure or deployed software. More than that, it can be easily scaled, centrally managed and, thanks to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software, is inherently secure.
“As far as the customer is concerned, payment processing is all done in the cloud,” outlines Marshall, “but, because that cloud is locked away in Bottomline datacentres, it has none of the security, governance and compliance issues associated with public cloud platforms. That’s crucial, given our customer base, which includes banks, government departments and other institutions that will actively avoid the public cloud for precisely those reasons.”
RESULTS
The ability to quickly and easily scale the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud to meet business needs, has enabled Bottomline Technologies to migrate customers to the new PT-X solution significantly faster than expected. As a result, some 60 percent of the 10,000+ customers using its on-premise BACS payment software have already opted to migrate to the cloud-based payment service, with yet more set to follow. Moreover, Bottomline Technologies is confident of its ability to win new customers going forward thanks to the Nutanix software which has provided the company with a secure platform on which to compete with other cloud-based offerings.
“With the help of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, we’ve been able to transform the way we handle payments in the UK,” commented Marshall, “and, given the rate at which they’re switching, our customers clearly appreciate what we’ve achieved.”
As well as eliminating the need for on-premise hardware and software at customer sites, the move to cloud-based payment processing has also enabled Bottomline Technologies to improve customer service, both in terms of performance and availability. Customers across the board are seeing faster transactions, with some reporting a 200% improvement in throughput rates since migrating to the new platform. Added to which the service provider can regularly fail over the entire PT-X platform to the backup data centre (and back again), to prove viability and regulatory compliance, and do so without any ill effects or customers being impacted.
Management overheads have been considerably reduced, especially when it comes to a dedicated team solely focused on maintaining and supporting the company’s on-premise products. Thanks to the Nutanix Prism single pane of management, Marshall now has a smaller team looking after the entire UK infrastructure, with a clear focus on finding new ways of using the company’s IT resources rather than, as before, just keeping the lights on.
NEXT STEPS
In the short-term Marshall expects a large number of Bottomline’s on-premises customers to choose migration to the cloud-based PT-X solution and is confident in the ability of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform to cope with that growth.
Beyond that, he is keen to evaluate his use of VMware for virtualisation, especially because licensing is proving increasingly costly as the number of hosted applications and users rises.
“We have successfully tested our applications using the Nutanix AHV hypervisor and are pleased with the results, however, our customers are extremely cautious and tend to take a guarded view of newer providers,” he said. “Hopefully we can soon change that and achieve our aim of switching to Nutanix AHV in the next year to 18 months.”
“More than that,” says Marshall, “I am continually impressed with what the Nutanix Enterprise Platform can do – both the speed at which it can be deployed and the way it just works. The support is similarly impressive and, as a result I’m actively championing Nutanix across the organisation and look forward to finding other uses for the Enterprise Cloud Solution wherever my feet take me.”
I’m continually impressed with what the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform can do – both the speed at which it can be deployed and the way it just works.
Peter Marshall, Head of Infrastructure, Bottomline Technologies Inc