Bottomline Technologies Expands Its Business Payments Solutions with Nutanix

SOLUTION

The Nutanix cloud platform has been particularly transformative because the BACS-approved PTX service superseded on-site Bottomline payment processing applications that needed to be installed, maintained and upgraded at customer sites.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 cloud platform, PTX provides customers with a cloud-based alternative requiring no additional infrastructure or deployed software. 

“Instead of customers having to provide hardware, and manage that hardware, and manage our applications, we do it for them,” says Erik Dahlgren, Director of Cloud System Operations at Bottomline. “They just access the website. It's a much more streamlined approach. We deal with all the IT operations and take that off their plate.”

More than that, it can be easily scaled, centrally managed, and, thanks to Nutanix cloud software, is inherently secure. Bottomline processes payments in its datacentres, which helps mitigate concerns around security, governance and compliance issues associated with public cloud platforms. This is crucial for Bottomline’s customer base, which includes banks and financial institutions (more than 1,200), government departments, and other institutions that sometimes avoid the public cloud for these reasons.

RESULTS

The ability to quickly and easily scale the Nutanix cloud platform to meet business needs enabled Bottomline Technologies to rapidly migrate customers to the PTX solution. As a result, some 75 percent of the 15,000+ customers using its on-premise BACS payment software have opted to migrate to the cloud-based payment service, with more set to follow. 

Aside from eliminating the need for on-premise hardware and software at customer sites, the move to cloud-based payment processing has also helped Bottomline Technologies improve customer service, both in terms of performance and availability. Customers across the board are seeing faster transactions, with some reporting a 200 percent improvement in throughput rates since migrating to the platform. Moreover, the service provider can regularly fail over the entire PTX platform to the backup data centre (and back again), to prove viability and regulatory compliance, all without any impact to the customers.

The simplicity and reliability of the Nutanix cloud platform has significantly reduced management overhead. Bottomline now utilizes a much smaller team to look after the entire UK infrastructure. And Dahlgren reports that “our Tier-1 team in India has been able to manage the Nutanix platform very effectively for us. Other parts of the legacy SAN environment, they don't touch at all; it's too complicated. They manage Nutanix and do it very well. Many of them have become trained on Nutanix and certified.” More senior IT resources are now free to drive other high value projects. “The tier-1 team handles the vast majority of the work. We provide a little direction and they go out and do it.” 

The success of PTX became a springboard to offering a wide range of SaaS solutions, including accounts payable automation, digital banking, fraud and financial crime management, and legal spend management, among others. According to Dahlgren, nearly all of their SaaS offerings run on the Nutanix cloud platform: “In the UK, we run PTX and Global Payments on top of Nutanix. On the US side, we have Paymode-X, Legal-X and a lot of the banking solutions also running on top of Nutanix.” 

AHV delivers simplicity, dependability, and cost savings 

“Nutanix has really become our primary virtualization platform. There's very little outside of Nutanix at this point,” says Dahlgren. Bottomline switched away from another virtualization solution because “the Nutanix infrastructure we had was much easier to manage. It performed well, it checked all the boxes.” Dahlgren acknowledges that “the savings was a big part of it. Since we already had it, we had two hypervisors, and we don’t need to pay for the other solution. AHV has been really robust for us; it has worked very, very well. We are super happy with moving to it.” Dahlgren also noted that the migration to AHV was easy and wholly non-disruptive: “It’s seamless for the customers; they don’t even know.”

Bottomline adopts Nutanix Files and Objects for greater application reliability and ease of management

Many of Bottomline’s applications use NFS extensively, and so they needed an easy to use, and fully integrated file storage solution. Dahlgren explains that “a lot of our banking applications rely on file movement between clients. So we use Files for NFS file shares between the file transfer solution and the application side, just to get it processed. We also have a lot of NFS shares for logging and more temporary files.”

Bottomline found that Nutanix Files offers several important advantages over other solutions. Dahlgren recalls that “what made us move to Files was the HA nature of it. We looked at other file solutions and it just takes more time to manage them. We also have some apps that in the past relied on stand-alone NFS servers; they were all single points of failure. By moving to Files and having clusters, it increased the reliability of the applications.” 

“With the click of a few buttons you can provision a highly available Files cluster,” Dahlgren attests. “Prior to using Files we were looking at other software solutions. They required you to manage not just the VMs, but the software as well. It's more complicated. With Files, it's all sort of done under the hood. We just manage the cluster within the Prism UI and we know it's HA and fault tolerant.”

Dahlgren notes that “we also use it for situations where we need both SMB and NFS, something that Nutanix Files handles. Before we had to use Samba on a linux server, and create a share on different servers. It’s just more complicated--more software involved. More things that we have to manage and configure. With Files, you don't have to deal with all the individual components and pieces.”

Bottomline has begun deploying Nutanix Objects on their clusters as well. “We had some applications that needed S3-compatible storage in house,” Dahlgren explains. “We primarily run on-prem. We have very little in public cloud. Objects is just an easy way to do object storage. It's easy to manage; it's reliable; it just kind of works. We expect it to grow.” 

Nutanix is helping speed innovation for the Devops and development teams.

The Nutanix cloud platform removes silos, and friction, from the development process. Bottomline uses Terraform and leverages the Nutanix Terraform provider. “That’s how we do VM provisioning. That is done self-service by the Devops teams and by the Dev teams. They can manage their own infrastructure on top of Nutanix at this point. People build what they need, when they need it, and we can easily scale the infrastructure to accommodate.”

Another Nutanix feature that helps Bottomline’s developers is data-at-rest encryption. “We have it implemented on all the clusters,” Dahlgren says. “That has worked out well for the database side. We've made it easier for the Dev team--instead of having to handle encryption of applications on the database tier, we do it for them on the infrastructure side.” 

Nutanix helped maintain business continuity amid the Pandemic

When businesses around the world shut their office doors almost overnight due to Covid-19, Bottomline easily transitioned to remote work, thanks in part to a prior investment in Nutanix. Dahlgren recalls that “we were able to scale our VDI solution quickly, due to the scalability of the Nutanix platform. We have a fair amount of people relying on VMware Horizon to get their work done. We have grown the clusters and now have a dedicated VDI cluster.” 

Nutanix also helped Bottomline do their part to support businesses hurting from the Pandemic.

Dahlgren explained that “We did a project last year related to the relief bill passed in the US for the Small Business Administration. We spun up an application and gave it away for free to banks to help them process the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] applications. Luckily we had just ordered some Nutanix and had some new blocks. We were able to quickly set them up as a new cluster and had the capacity to set up a whole new environment for this application.” 

NEXT STEPS

Bottomline is already exploring Nutanix Era, which provides cloud-like services for databases.  

“We are working on implementing Era right now,” Dahlgren says, “partly because we already have the Nutanix platform. The team seems very happy with what they've seen so far with Era, I’m hoping it will work out well for us.”