Ingenico Explores Oracle on HP with Cnetics Test tRACk

Objective: Ingenico is a multinational company and worldwide leader in transaction technology. With a 24% market share, Ingenico is the world's largest provider of payment and transactions systems used by banking, retail, petroleum, transportation and government agencies to accelerate and secure the flow of electronic commerce. In addition to payment terminals, check readers, printers and imagers, Ingenico provides a comprehensive suite of applications for optimum transaction management, terminal downloading and image archive. Ingenico facilitates electronic payment acceptance for mega retailers such as Wal-mart, The Home Depot, Toys-R-Us, PetSmart, and Safeway. For many customers, Ingenico offers end-to-end software solutions to accompany the payment terminal and provide electronic transaction routing for the entire retailer’s enterprise.

Ingenico Senior DBA and Unix Engineer, Carl Berner, has extensive experience with Informix on Sun systems. Customers of their Enterprise product typically run Ingenico payment software on Sun systems with Informix databases. Some of Carl’s customers and prospects are interested in processing electronic payments through other databases such as Oracle. Carl was especially interested in the Oracle 10g with the Real Application Cluster option. "Our payment engine must be available, it is the life blood of electronic payments for our retailers, " states Berner, "otherwise, our customers lose money." So he explored Oracle 10g RAC by attending a recent Georgia Oracle User Group meeting where RAC features where explained and demonstrated. Carl wanted to test Oracle RAC in his shop with his software, yet his workload made setting up RAC himself unfeasible. Aside from the fact that he had no system hardware on which to test it, once he got the right hardware, he’d need to carve out time to configure the hardware and software with Oracle’s clusterware and RAC database.

Solution: Then Carl learned about the Test tRACk offering from Cnetics. He contacted Cnetics engineers to schedule a time for a Test tRACk delivery. Cnetics delivered a fully operational Oracle 10g Real Application Cluster system to his lab, plugged it into the network and had the system operational in less than 30 minutes! Working with Cnetics engineers, Carl uploaded one of the two applications he planned to test. Within hours, he was running load on the portable system using Ingenico software on the Cnetics Test tRACk. "I was amazed at how fast we were able to dive right in!" remarked Carl.

Over three days, Carl and his team pushed his software to the limit. They loaded data, generated transactions, measured throughput and explored clustered database features. Using Oracle’s Enterprise Manager Database control, Cnetics engineers guided Carl through a number of system tests. The three day engagement provided Ingenico with a quick and easy look at their software running on HP equipment in a Linux environment. David Janes, Director of Enterprise Development, noted the impressive level of commitment of the Cnetics team to help Ingenico staff to work with the Oracle 10g RAC system. "I thought they would just drop the system off and pick it up three days later. Instead, they spent time with us to show us the system features and help us with our testing. Their commitment to quality and mentoring was really outstanding," adds Janes.

Results: When the application testing was complete, Cnetics staff packed up the Test tRACk, rolled it out to the van and took it away in fifteen minutes. This engagement provided Ingenico a "no hassle" easy way to test out Oracle 10g RAC on Linux/HP/Itanium machines. Ingenico's Enterprise Team is now confident that when their customers are ready to accept electronic payments on Oracle 10g, they can provide the same high level of support for their customers which they have come to expect.