“Maelstrom” is an apt description of today’s financial services market. The multiple realities of extreme volatility, accelerating industry consolidation, and burgeoning regulations stand forth starkly against the backdrop of global economic uncertainty. The financial services sector has always been a highly competitive arena, but now an enterprise has to be good—really good—in order to survive.
Equens is really good, and it makes really smart decisions. For one thing, this payments and card processing processor has embarked on a visionary strategy to expand its operations to serve a pan-European consumer base. The ink is still fresh on a joint venture agreement to create Equens Italy, and further mergers and acquisitions are on the horizon. Equens is also moving beyond traditional payment processing into high-volume payments via new channels and devices, as well as infrastructure services. And when it comes to the server technology that provides mission-critical support for the company’s bold ambitions, Equens has selected the best of the best: the HP Integrity NonStop platform.
| As a result, Equens anticipates an increase in processing capacity from 370 to 700 transactions per second, has the ability to reduce number of data centers from three to two, and has made significant progress in optimizing and virtualizing the storage environment, moving from direct attached storage to a storage area network (SAN) [the HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA)]. |
These IT improvements lead to better business outcomes, including mission-critical support for the customer’s volume growth strategy; Equens’ ability to provide services at competitive prices to ensure market competitiveness; a reliable, scalable environment to support compliance with SEPA, PCI DSS, SOX, and other regulatory requirements; lower data center costs due to increased efficiency; and greater virtualization to achieve flexibility, growth, lower cost, and fast time to market.
“The key is to provide services at competitive prices, and the Integrity NonStop system is a pivotal part of this strategy…What do I like personally about our Integrity NonStop system? That’s an easy one: reliability, because I like to sleep at night. Proven reliability, coupled with outstanding performance, makes the Integrity NonStop system a solid element in our business.”
—Marcel Goes, Manager of Systems & Connectivity, Equens
Read the customer case study
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| This news is published on NonStop Computing websites. January 2009.
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