Strategic Payments Services (SPS) is a successful and modern payments processing company providing a full range of solutions and services for issuers, merchants, acquirers and payment gateways.
These solutions give niche players, financial institutions, retailers and merchants access to the efficiencies and benefits of scale usually only available to major banks. As they only pay for the services and functions they need, they can access new and evolving technologies without significant up-front costs.
And with SPS processing more than 650 million transactions annually, speed, accuracy, robust availability and system uptime are critical.
Fast Time to Value
SPS relies on Prognosis proactive performance management to ensure operational excellence and high availability around the globe and around the clock. Henry Wright, Senior Manager, Infrastructure & Capacity Services explains:
SPS has a considerable demand for monitoring all transaction processing systems with a possible impact of up to 200,000 transactions being lost should our transactional systems not be processing for an hour.
With this in mind, SPS uses Prognosis to ensure that transactional monitoring, not just system and/or network monitoring, is at the forefront of our operational activities.
HENRY WRIGHT, SENIOR MANAGER
Infrastructure & Capacity Services, Strategic Payments Services
Effective Collaboration
Web-based collaboration enables performance management across the challenges of distance and time. Prognosis is now Cloud-enabled providing fast and secure mobile and tablet-friendly access across teams and locations. Manager of Production Applications Support, Kevin Loggenberg explains the benefits of this for the payments services team of developers, applications, network and infrastructure support staff.
“The role Prognosis plays in ensuring our system uptime and performance is vital. I’ll see a link is having issues and I’ll ask the team to investigate. I don’t even need to be at my desk. Prognosis gives us that vital ‘heads up’ and we find it extremely easy to pick up where the issue is.”
Insightful and effective
Prognosis also delivers visibility into issues that might otherwise go undetected. Loggenberg adds “although automatically restarting processes is good for business continuity, it can mask the real cause of problems. By providing insight to both causes and symptoms, interim solutions can be put in place while the root cause is further investigated and resolved.
“Recently this insight enabled us to identify a specific memory-related problem in one of our applications. We put immediate measures in place which gave us business continuity. This enabled our developers to work in a strategic rather than a tactical way to resolve the problem. And because Prognosis automatically discovers and groups devices, they’re aggregated for when I’m ready to take action, making change management a lot quicker and more efficient.”
Prognosis gives SPS support staff the ability to respond to out-of-pattern situations by displaying selected system resources and their metrics on operational monitors. This enables them to remediate system issues, prevent system impacts and ensure that transactional patterns return to normal within a very short space of time.
The end-to-end insights into the performance and uptime of both traditional platforms and evolving technologies that Prognosis provides means SPS can serve its customers with unsurpassed speed, accuracy, and system uptime – and availability it can count on.
Today SPS employees operate globally so the flexibility and mobility to access Prognosis easily without having to use desktop services is invaluable.
Kevin Loggenburg,
Manager Production Applications Support
