SaaS / IaaS; Clouds (private and public); Edge and Core! OmniPayments has you covered …

When discussions turn to how the data center will look very soon, it’s hard to separate what is real and highly likely from what would otherwise be best described as a wish list. CIOs that attend analysts meetings as they return to their offices, without fully understanding all the implications, ask their own IT about progress being made to embrace the cloud. As technology keeps pushing designers to create even more compact packaging of compute power, CIOs are also looking at data center consolidation even as developers and those testing changes to applications really would like access to their own systems. All the while, transaction volumes grow even as do the needs of groups within society.

“Millennials may be the Internet generation but Gen Z is the smart phone generation,” according to the Javelin Strategy and Research report published in May, Technology Influencing Generation Z Payments Adoption.” As for Baby Boomers, the personal connection is more important than anything else and a trip to the local branch office becoming much of an outing to catch up with a good friend, the situation many in IT haven’t as yet realized. Furthermore, while “37% of Gen Z consumers prefer using a major credit card usable anywhere,” wrote Javelin, “Only 18% of Gen Z chooses cash compared with 33% of Millennials in 2012.” Technology is driving change just as generations are driving change and all the while, systems are getting smaller even as transactions are getting bigger. For those vendors in the payments solutions marketplace, the challenges are as varied as the choices faced where people and technology intersect!

For CIOs of Financial Institutions (FIs), the ageing payments solutions deployed for decades on legacy mainframes, remain a cornerstone for much of their processing but for how much longer? FinTechs for instance are ahead of the technology curve when it comes to meeting the ever-changing demands of smartphone users even as traditional Banks dally in creative ways to continue the dialogue with those of different generation who prefer to call in or go online for all their banking needs. Drive through tellers may have been state-of-the-art in the 1970s, but today they remain a banking anachronism seldom used by customers. Payments solutions vendors have done a good job to date transforming parts of IT to where there are emerging hybrid implementations that are inclusive of traditional computing together with server farms and emerging cloud solutions. When it comes to OmniPayments today, you may very well be surprised by how well it is addressing the issues of Hybrid IT even as it builds-out its network to better support cloud capabilities.

It was only a short time ago that OmniPayments began building its own converged systems where standard HPE chassis were used to house a combination of NonStop systems together with Unix processors in support of browser interfaces for operations and systems management along with Atalla security processor – a package referenced by OmniPayments own staff as the Y-Box, a reference to CEO Yash Kapadia. However, more recently, OmniPayments has been rolling out OmniPayments-as- a Service combining aspects of SaaS, IaaS and even PaaS. The end result was that if you wanted to check out any of the OmniPayments features as part of a PoC, or run a Pilot in parallel with current deployments or even for much longer periods of time, while system upgrades and replacements were under consideration, then OmniPayments could provide a payments solution at an unbeatable price point. And it ran NonStop, too!

This is just one more baby step OmniPayments is taking on a journey to where OmniPayments can be run out of a cloud – either a cloud built and maintained by OmniPayments or on-premise, as a private cloud, built by OmniPayments as well. “From Y Box, to SaaS, to virtualization and clouds,” acknowledged Yash, “it’s simply OmniPayments being responsive to the needs of CIOs and the IT staff responsible for payments processing.” When this journey began, “it was about reducing the costs of acquiring the best payments solution obtainable running on the most available system and with NonStop we were able to do just that. But today, we are taking the virtualized NonStop on offer from HPE to build out a completely virtualized system spanning the globe that will be capable of provisioning all the resources necessary in support of any size FI,” said Yash. “With OmniCloudX, we have really only scratched the surface when it comes to the flexibility of our product – we will support you any which way you would like!”

Whether FinTechs and Banks converge at some point or whether there is further diversity in the marketplace, when it comes to accessing our cash and managing our accounts there will always be transactions. Buying goods online or from stores, visiting bars and restaurants, reserving hotel rooms and picking up airline tickets, it’s all about transactions and increasingly, the pressure on CIOs to look at new and innovative ways to support the payments these transactions manage only gets more intense. Having the option to deploy OmniPayments should alieve many CIOs concerns about the choices they have, OmniCloudX will likely become a serious contender for any future payments solutions upgrade, no matter how these CIOs elect to address their changing technology landscape together with the changing needs of the many generations of customers they serve.