Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Patrick Townsend & Associates wants to become your one-stop shop for credit card authorization software, no matter the size of your company or your computer platforms. Last week the Olympia, Washington, company announced Alliance AuthExpress, a scalable line of OS/400-based authorization and settlement packages. While the core AuthExpress application remains the same across the line, providing a smooth upgrade path, each offering is tuned and packaged differently to meet the volume, security, and connectivity requirements of small, midsized, and large businesses.

With Alliance AuthExpress, OS/400 shops can authorize payments on customers' credit, debit, gift, and stored-value cards, as well as checks, across a variety of payment networks. The software offers several different ways to integrate with point-of-sale systems or other applications--like customer service or even e-commerce Web sites--including TCP sockets, WebSphere MQ (MQSeries), data queues, HTTP, HTTPS (with SSL), and secure FTP. In addition to offering authorization of card payments, AuthExpress supports the settlement of card transactions, via direct electronic connections to their bank.

Pat Townsend is offering three different Alliance AuthExpress packages: the Entry Edition, the SMB Edition, and the Enterprise Edition. Here's a rundown on the differences among the products.

The AuthExpress Entry Edition is designed for small businesses that need to process no more than 250 transactions per day (computed by taking the average over a month of use). In addition to the core AuthExpress product, it includes a license for BankLink/400, for dial-up payment settlement. A license for the Entry Edition costs $3,500 per AS/400 or iSeries CPU and includes standard-business-hour support by telephone, e-mail, Web, and fax.

The AuthExpress SMB Edition is for customers who process up to 2,500 card transactions per day. This edition includes everything offered in the Entry Edition and has licenses for Pat Townsend's Application Monitor utility, for system monitoring, and Alliance FTP Manager, for secure FTP-based transmission of settlements to banks. A license for the SMB Edition costs $8,500 per CPU and includes extended business hour support, as well as remote dial services.

The AuthExpress Enterprise Edition supports an unlimited number of daily transactions and is designed for large companies and commercial enterprises. It includes everything offered in the SMB Edition, and adds a license for the company's Pretty Good Privacy Option, for strong encryption of transactions. A license for the Enterprise Edition costs $20,000 per CPU and includes 24/7 support via pager, telephone, e-mail, Web, and fax, in addition to remote dial services.

Pat Townsend developed the three-part Alliance AuthExpress line to meet its customers' need for an affordable entry point for software that could authorize credit card payments and grow with them to very high volumes, according to Patrick Townsend, the company's president. "The ability of the software to grow with the company means fewer upgrade costs and no reinstallation of software," Townsend said. "We've paid attention to the needs for settlement with a rich set of technologies, so you can deploy one solution for both authorization and settlement."

AuthExpress supports authorization of purchases made using Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express cards, among others, over several different authorization networks, including VisaNet Access Point, Visa Direct Exchange, First Data (FDMS), MPS/Fifth Third, Alliance Data Systems, and ValueLink networks. The software supports a wide variety of communications interfaces (mentioned above) and even offers special interfaces for point-of-sale systems from Triversity, which offers a Java-based system, and Infogenesis, which offers a Windows NT-based system.

AuthExpress requires OS/400 V4R5 or higher. For connecting to back-end, OS/400-based applications--either batch or interactive--AuthExpress uses a data queue interface to authorize credit card transactions. The software supports full duplex mode, which allows authorization requests and replies to be sent simultaneously, even when more than one OS/400 application is involved.

Other AuthExpress features include load balancing and support for failover IP addresses for high availability and redundancy; error notification and SNMP trap message generation for systems management; a history log for audits; integrated diagnostic logging for checking transactions; and a Web browser-based interface for set-up and configuration. For a complete description of AuthExpress, go to www.patownsend.com.