What do we mean by “mission critical business communications”?

We state on our Website that Intercope provides solutions for mission critical business communications, but what do we actually mean by „mission critical business communications“? Let’s look at a few examples. When a large bank cannot transfer international payments for some hours this may easily generate costs of several hundred thousand Euros. When a large supermarket chain cannot process orders due to a failure of their communication system customers may not get the products they are looking for in thousands of shops in several countries. Or imagine the cost for lawyers, the loss of customer satisfaction and confidence when the processing of claims is significantly delayed in an insurance company due to technical constraints. All these are examples of mission critical systems where a failure may cause considerable damage to the business.

But how can we state that mission critical communications in the examples above simply do not fail when deploying Box for SWIFTNet or MessagePlus/Open? However well software is designed and tested we still have to face the fact that anything can fail: application software, operating system components, hardware and communication channels. Well, what you have to do if you have to guarantee the highest availability levels of 99.9% and above is to avoid any single point of failure in a trusted environment which you completely control.

This is why our products support a wide range of operating systems and their standard cluster solutions such as the Parallel Sysplex architecture of z/OS, AIX High Availability Cluster Multi-Processing (HACMP), SUN Solaris Cluster or Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) / Failover Clustering, and the high availability solutions for virtualized environments. All of the above high-availability support is provided as a standard component of the Intercope solutions and not as an expensive optional add-on.

With these options MessagePlus/Open and Box for SWIFTNet are quite unique in the marketplace: when you have to implement high availability architecture you are not bound to specific environments such as the Windows operating system, but you can build it on the hardware and software platform which is your strategic infrastructure of choice.