Stratus gives InterSwitch uptime to take solutions outside of services realm

Stratus Technologies and Nigerian-based payments company, InterSwitch, have announced the conclusion of a N400m (2.7m US$) outsource deal with the country’s leading quick service restaurant (QSR), Mama Cass.

The deal sees Mama Cass drawing on InterSwitch’s expertise for the provision of the infrastructure, services and software required for it to run InterSwitch's ‘RetailPAY’ retail management system in an off-site datacenter for the next five years.

Speaking of the value of RetailPAY to the Mama Cass Business, its regional manager South, Mr Jeffrey Williams said, the system has provided us with real-time information on business activities across our outlets pan-Nigeria, enabling us to centrally manage and monitor the activities of managers and cashiers whilst deliverying 24/7 access to sales data.

This is a landmark deal for both Stratus and InterSwitch since it takes InterSwitch from a consumer of Stratus solutions, to one that uses it as a vital part of its go to market strategy.

“Before the conclusion of this deal, InterSwitch played the role of a switching service provider to the major banking institutions in Nigeria,” explains Dick Sharod, Stratus African regional director.

“Because of the superior reliability, guaranteed uptime and versatility of its solutions, Stratus has been a vital part of every solution InterSwitch has built and provided to the market as a service for the seven years,” says Mitchell Elegbe, CEO at InterSwitch.

“It was logical for us then to use Stratus Technologies as our hardware platform of choice when taking our offerings to market in a hosted fashion. So now, instead of renting access to an application, our customers are buying a top-to-bottom solution from us albeit in a hosted fashion,” he explains.

“And Stratus hardware is the linchpin in our ability to guarantee our customers the kind of uptime we’ve become accustomed to over the years.”

Because InterSwitch is in the payments services industry, any downtime results in massive losses to it and its customers’ bottom-lines. Stratus’ ftServers running Vmware vSphere give InterSwitch the reliability it needs to avert those losses, while simultaneously allowing it to virtualise each physical server into appropriately sized virtual machines that fit its customers’ requirements.

“It’s a win on the reliability, performance and economies of scale fronts,” he adds.

And Elegbe says InterSwitch is literally only scraping the surface of what’s possible in Nigeria and the rest of Africa when it comes to similar environments.

“We really couldn’t hope for a better fit now, and into the future,” he concludes.