BlueFinity International Provides Turnkey Replacement of IBM RedBack at PayEx Finance

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
Email sales@bluefinity.com for specific information on BlueFinity’s RedBack replacement program.