The system can process up to 6 million transactions an hour. "We anticipated the explosion in automated payments and made sure the system has enough capacity," says Keith Theisen, senior VP of electronic payments products at Wells Fargo. The bank gets a fee for every transaction, so the more volume it brings in, the better its economic outlook.
It's not just megatransaction numbers that matter. Next year, IBM expects several of its Transaction Processing Facility customers, including Visa, to test a 64-bit version of the system that will replace a mainframe-programming environment with open-source tools. The release, due in late 2005, will be able to address practically unlimited amounts of memory, compared with the current version's 2-Gbyte capability. Customers will be able to program apps for TPF using Linux-based development tools and the GNU Compiler Collection. That could let companies write code more quickly. "And it's cheaper to port open-source code to a TPF system than write new code," says Stu Waldron, an IBM senior technical staff member.
That could be important to payments processors and banks as they race to keep up with rising transaction volumes. For Visa, MasterCard, and many banks, the end of the holiday season also means the beginning of planning for the next one. "Every year, we build capacity at 10% to 15% higher than the projected peak," Visa's Knight says, "then we try to break it."
--with Aaron Ricadela
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