PayEx Finance
is an authorized credit market company under the supervision
of the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. The company,
established in 1972, is today one of the leading companies in
Europe providing payment processes with offices in Visby,
Stockholm, Oslo and Copenhagen.
When PayEx
discovered limitations with transaction throughput rates on
their PayEx Online application, they looked to the power of BlueFinity's mv.NET
to integrate and access data in real-time. Now, PayEx is
gaining significant growth and improved customer satisfaction
from the mv.NET implementation.
The Need for Speed
At the heart of the PayEx organization is a powerful web
application: PayEx Online. PayEx Online is an efficient,
user-friendly Internet-based application, designed to simplify
companies' ledger monitoring and customer management. It
utilizes an IBM UniData database on Sun Solaris and was largely
developed using IBM RedBack (now renamed U2 Web Development
Environment) in Visual Basic 6 and VB.NET.
Early in 2006 PayEx was starting to suffer from throughput and
performance limitations imposed by RedBack
technology. Using a common data access layer for all
database data access, PayEx Online utilized over 150 back-end
UniBasic routines incorporating RedBack Objects, RBO-related
code.
One major issue was the compatibility between the Unidata and
RedBack applications. "Reading records while Unidata
DBPause was active didn't work via RedBack," explains Bjorn
Eklund, Head of Development at Payex. "Each night we had to pause
the database to run backups or to perform other administrative
tasks which meant stopping PayEx Online. This imposed a
sever restriction on our customers."
In an attempt to improve transaction throughput rates, reduce
application downtime during database backup periods and solve the
DBPause restriction, PayEx undertook an extensive examination of
mv.NET as an alternative to RedBack.
The mv.NET Advantage
mv.NET provides a 100% native .NET interface to all MultiValue
database platforms, allowing .NET developers to access all
aspects of MultiValue systems – both data and program code - from
within their .NET application. Its seamless
integration with Microsoft Visual Studio provides a potent rapid
application development environment enabling MultiValue
developers to harness the full power of both their MultiValue
system and the Microsoft .NET framework.
mv.NET's Core Objects provides a wealth of end-user
capabilities allowing the developer to rapidly create
feature-rich, high performance applications using the powerful
tools provided by Microsoft's .NET environment. Core Objects also
has strong integration with Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET
product, allowing the MultiValue developer to carry out virtually
all aspects of application creation from within the VS.NET
environment.
A key aspect of all .NET implementations is managing the
connections between the user interface and the database. mv.NET's
Session Manager makes certain that those connections are handled
in the most efficient and cost-effective way, ensuring that users
get outstanding response from their MultiValue
applications.
Proof Positive
Benchmarking test results clearly demonstrated that the
average throughput with mv.NET was orders of magnitude faster
than RedBack. In fact, the performance overhead per call
was reduced from 60 ms to 6 ms!
Throughout the testing period, PayEx also discovered there
were other significant overheads to running RedBack. "Using
RedBack, we had to develop and build specific RBO-related code in
order to access Unidata subroutines," Eklund explains. "But
mv.NET removes that requirement and we can now use the same
routines in Payex Online as in our standard Unibasic batch
programs. There is no need for additional time and effort
to develop and support RBO-related code. This, of course,
offers us significant cost and time savings. Last but not
least, mv.NET solved the DBPause issue opening up the PayEx
Online service and therefore improving customer satisfaction."
Making the Move to mv.NET
It was immediately clear that mv.NET offered the solution
PayEx were looking for to take their application forward in the
global marketplace, and a full migration to mv.NET was identified
as being straightforward and well within acceptable timeframes
and budget.
The conversion project took less than three months and
included some very intensive application testing to go live right
on schedule at the end of August 2006. "The go live of
PayEx Online went exactly to plan and without any last minute
panics," comments David Cooper, Lead Developer at
BlueFinity. After the migration, data access times were
consistently reduced by over 50% during periods of both light and
heavy load.
Today, PayEx Online operates smoothly using mv.NET
technology. Eklund comments, "BlueFinity were able to
provide a complete turnkey solution giving us peace of mind from
initial conception through the conversion and then to final, live
implementation. We are extremely pleased that we've met our
goals to offer performance and efficiency improvement solutions
to our customers' existing investments."
For more information, visit www.bluefinity.com
for specific information on BlueFinity's RedBack replacement
program.