Bray-based network test and equipment player Data Edge has won a deal valued at €120,000 to deploy a network fault test system for a pan-European firm that processes €200bn-worth of transactions a year. Data Edge was contracted to deploy the CA Spectrum network fault manager, which links to every credit-card terminal on Elavon’s European transaction-processing network.
Every year, Elavon processes two billion transactions valued at €200bn. Elavon has its European headquarters in Dublin, and employs more than 350 people at Cherrywood and Arklow. Its transaction-processing network links tens of thousands of credit-card terminals in shops, hotels, restaurants and other outlets across Europe, and allows customers to charge purchases to their cards wherever they are. On a well-designed system such as Elavon’s, where extensive redundancy and diversity are built in, it can be difficult to spot faults and even more difficult to identify their root cause.
Within minutes of installation, CA Spectrum automatically started to map Elavon’s network across 15 countries, and immediately began analysing performance and highlighting anomalies. Every transaction on the Elavon system is time-critical. Card authorisations that are slow or fail to complete lead to queues in shops, frustrated consumers and, worst of all, lost sales.
“CA Spectrum acts like a smoke alarm – alerting engineers instantly to a problem before it can affect transactions,” explained Brian McBride, managing director, Data Edge.
“With our solution in place, consumers and businesses across Europe can make credit-card transactions without hassle. CA Spectrum is also being used on Elavon’s internal networks, and supports the convergence of their data, video and voice over IP (VoIP) functions across seven countries.
This is matched with its reach to every credit-card terminal on the network, encompassing links by a huge range of telecommunications protocols, including frame relay, ISDN, IP, MPLS, leased line and even traditional copper phone lines.
Data Edge provides ongoing support for the Europe-wide solution from its headquarters in Bray. “On a financial network like ours, we must be able to deal with problems before they impact on transactions,” explained Chris Garvey, European datacoms manager, Elavon.
“Data Edge’s solution allows us to do that, while also giving us much better visibility of our network. Within days of installation, a fault in the network in Germany that could have impacted processing was spotted.
“CA Spectrum identified the root cause immediately; the appropriate response and resources were directed to resolving it before it had an impact on customers,” Garvey added.
By John Kennedy
ComputerScope August 2003 – Page 39″
For Publicity related issues please contact:
Brian Mc Bride, MD
Email: bmcbride@dataedge.ie