Success Stories
FEXCO
FEXCO, a privately-owned company based in Ireland, is a global provider of merchant, business, consumer and international services. The company was recently acquired by Western Union. FEXCO needed to build out a secure, business-critical financial transaction processing system for deployment across Europe and North America in 2009/2010.
- Built out a mission-critical financial transaction processing system for its underlying business services using complex Oracle technology to guarantee system availability.
- Turned to Pythian to install, test and manage the entire database layer for the application, from project inception through to ongoing system support.
The Challenge
As a service-oriented business, FEXCO could not afford to see its new application go live and let customer service suffer due to performance or availability issues. Since the application architecture needed to rely on several advanced Oracle database features, including advance queuing and replication, FEXCO recognized they needed specialized skills to manage the entire database layer for the entire project and beyond.
The Solution
Pythian was retained to manage the database layer, from project inception to the ongoing sustained rollout of the application. The project started with the build-out of the production environment from bare iron. Since Pythian was responsible for performance and data availability, we also conducted extensive load testing and disaster recovery scenarios. As an integral part of the development process, Pythian provided developer support and carried out a range of testing scenarios through the build and QA cycle. Today, the company continues to provide database administration services and is responsible for all back-end transaction processing, security, availability and disaster recovery. To keep the environment healthy and sustainable, it conducts system monitoring, 24/7 support, performance tuning, security reviews, periodic maintenance and ongoing capacity planning.
The Results
FEXCO started the project without any Oracle DBA experts on staff. By outsourcing the entire database layer, FEXCO has been able to focus on its core business of securely delivering financial transactions for its clients. By engaging Pythian from the outset, it brought on the right set of skills that could ensure application performance and uptime for its customers. Outsourcing both technology and administration services allowed FEXCO to utilize expert Oracle skills, control costs and stay focused on their core business.
