The Russians Are Coming with New i5/OS-Based Payment Processor

Updated: April 29, 2007

by Alex Woodie

A Russian software company called the BPC Group has successfully ported a credit card processing application to i5/OS, it was announced last week. The availability of SmartVista on the System i server will be a boon to the numerous banks currently using the platform for core processing, the company says. What's more, the validation on Lakeview Technology's MIMIX high availability and clustering software will provide a high degree of reliability for SmartVista users.

BPC Group was formed in 1995 by an international group of banking specialists as a system integrator and consultancy force with focus on the electronic payments industry. The company, which initially went by the name Banking Production Centre, first introduced its flagship product suite, SmartVista, in 2001 as a multi-channel, multi-currency merchant management systems designed to process payments electronically from credit cards and other payment tools.

The SmartVista suite handles all aspects of issuing credit and debit cards, setting up merchant accounts, processing card transactions, clearing and settling card transactions, and dispute and exception resolution. In addition to the core SmartVista Processing component, the company sells SmartVista Retail, a distributed branch solution for retail banking; SmartVista Settlement, a clearing and settlement system for large member service providers (MSPs) and third-party processors; SmartVista e-Commerce, a series of solutions for B2B and B2C e-commerce projects; and SmartVista Contact Centre, a customer care and call center solution.

Over the years, BPC has sold SmartVista into more than 50 financial institutions located in Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and in the Asia-Pacific region. All told, the ISO-9001 company's product is used to process 3 million transactions per day across more than 15 million cards and 10,000 ATMs, and now it's coming to the competitive U.S. and European markets as an i5/OS application. (Editor's note: Please see comments at the bottom of the article.)

BPC got the i5/OS ball rolling in February, when it announced plans to work with IBM to port the SmartVista transaction switching system, which it calls SmartVista Front-End, to i5/OS and DB2/400. Previously, the heart of the application was typically deployed on large, fault-tolerant Unix or Linux servers from Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu-Siemens, or Stratus, and the Oracle database, although some components, such as the call center solution, were designed for Windows.

The porting process moved forward in March, when the company visited IBM's Innovation Centre for Business Partners in its hometown of Moscow, where it learned how to adapt and tune SmartVista for the IBM midrange operating system and its integrated DB2 database. Then in August, company officials had the i5/OS version of the product, called SmartVista i, stress-tested and benchmarked at IBM's System i headquarters in Rochester, Minnesota, which bears a striking similarity in climate to the Russian capital.

At the same time, BPC worked with Chicago-based Lakeview to adapt SmartVista i for MIMIX, Lakeview's high availability offering for i5/OS. As a result of the cooperation, the two companies have figured out how to deploy very reliable, fault-tolerant implementations of SmartVista i on IBM's midrange hardware. "We are very excited about SmartVista i because it is the first truly non-stop System i application in the marketplace," says Ken Zaiken, who is vice president of System i solutions for Lakeview.

BPC's president and CEO, Anatoly Loginov, also sounds excited about the prospect of selling an i5/OS-based solution. "The development of the SmartVista i high-performance processing solution, adapted to take full advantage of IBM System i's power and scalability, represents a big step for our company," Loginov says. "We believe that our work with IBM will help the SmartVista solution reach new markets where IBM System i is the platform of choice for the majority of financial institutions."

The number of banks using the System i (or its predecessors, the i5, iSeries, and AS/400) to run core operations may surprise you. According to Christian Keller, vice president of System i for IBM's northeast Europe business, more than 16,000 banks call the platform home, which he calls "a tribute to the platform's reliability and security." Working with an experienced and successful company like BPC will further broaden IBM's reach to the financial services sector, he says.

SmartVista i is being marketed and distributed worldwide through BPC's direct sales and reseller channels, as well as by IBM's sales force. For more information, visit www.smartvista.biz.

The following letter was submitted to IT Jungle by Carrie Reuben, CEO of SmartVista Technologies.

"The Russians Are Coming" article dated December 12, 2006 referred to a product named SmartVista coming to the U.S. software marketplace. I want to clarify two points. First, the SmartVista trademark in the U.S. market belongs to SmartVista Technologies, Inc. located in Morrisville, North Carolina. SmartVista Technologies is an IBM business partner and VAR, focused on providing informational kiosk solutions for banking, retail, manufacturing, and government.

Second, BPC executive, Vadim Kravchenkov, has responded in writing that not only does BPC respect the SmartVista Technology trademark rights in the U.S., but also that BPC has not and is not selling their product in the U.S.

Carrie Reuben

CEO

SmartVista Technologies, Inc.

www.smartvista.com