Streamlining business payment solutions and data center efficiency with Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure
Business Need/Overview
Organizations worldwide rely on Bottomline to help them transform the way they pay and get paid. Facilitating the movement of money and aimed at driving impactful results, Bottomline’s clientele includes some of the world’s largest banks and private and publicly traded companies.
Bottomline has over 35 years of experience and manages over $10 trillion in payments annually. The company is part of the Thoma Bravo portfolio, one of the world’s largest software private equity firms, with over $142 billion in assets under management, underlining their strong market position and commitment to innovation in business payments.
With a global workforce of approximately 2,600 employees, the company operates in a highly distributed and remote-friendly environment to support clients worldwide. Moreover, Bottomline supports the efficiency and compliance needs of over half a billion payment transactions for banks and businesses across numerous countries, including over 3,000 financial institutions and over 800,000 corporates. They provide solutions in 92 countries across six continents, operating a global network of data centers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Singapore, ensuring robust, reliable and secure service delivery.
Key Results
Ease of scalability
Ability to manage over 1,200 systems across ten different data centers globally.
Enhanced performance
Bottomline's customers experience a significant increase in throughput rates since migrating to the platform.
Improved operational efficiency
The cloud-based model drastically reduces the complexity and cost of infrastructure management.
Substantial cost savings
By reducing the reliance on other 3rd parties, Nutanix offers a predictable pricing model that eliminates additional costs.
The clustering that Nutanix provides, that hyperconverged offering, has just been rock solid. Just several weeks ago, I had a request from our executive team asking: When was the last time we looked at other vendors? At the end of reviewing it, we were certain about choosing Nutanix; the software license provides tremendous value.
Challenge
The challenges at Bottomline were multifaceted and centered around the need to modernize a sprawling, globally dispersed infrastructure that was becoming increasingly complex and costly to maintain. Jon Dustin serves as the Director of Infrastructure at Bottomline, overseeing all physical equipment within the data centers and playing a crucial role in managing the relationships within these centers. His responsibilities extend to the operational management of approximately 1,200 systems that power Bottomline’s services globally.
A critical turning point occurred in 2019 after a particularly challenging experience with their existing solutions. It necessitated frequent maintenance and upgrades and limited the company’s agility in responding to rapidly changing market demands and technological advancements. This prompted Bottomline to re-evaluate its infrastructure strategy and accelerate its transition to Nutanix solutions.
"2019 ended up being a tipping point. We’d had a bad experience with other technology and said, 'Well, that's it. We're just not going to spend any more money on that.' And suddenly, it was off to the races with Nutanix. Since then, we've bought a substantial amount more, including going to AHV as the hypervisor. I am happy we made that choice in 2019," Dustin shares.
Managing an IT infrastructure that aligns with regulatory standards, while supporting global operations, adds complexity. Because Bottomline deals directly with banks, integrating new technologies must not only improve efficiency and cost but also adhere strictly to legal and security standards, which can limit the choice of solutions and the pace of technological adoption. With Nutanix, Bottomline can ensure all technological implementations meet or exceed the rigorous standards set by regulators and expected by their clients.
"Because of stringent regulations, we decided to build our own datacenter infrastructure with leading providers. Given that many of our customers are large financial institutions, they are much happier to learn that we have taken this posture with the infrastructure. We pay close attention to security, and many customers prefer that we are not in a public cloud."
Solution
In 2013, Bottomline partnered with Nutanix to modernize its IT infrastructure, significantly enhancing its cloud-based payment solutions. Today, 97% of Bottomline’s operations run on Nutanix technology. Bottomline chose Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure to consolidate and simplify its IT operations. The solution provided a unified platform that enhanced data center operations through automation and centralized management, making it easier to deploy, manage, and scale resources as needed.
Since the partnership began, Bottomline has transformed its storage and database management with Nutanix, from upgrading basic IT infrastructure to adopting a cloud-based storage and database management system. This evolution has streamlined operations, improved security, and offered scalable solutions for a global financial services provider. “One of the real benefits I have with the Nutanix technology is consistent management experiences,” highlights Dustin.
Dustin elaborates on the diverse range of applications and services that the Nutanix solution supports at Bottomline, emphasizing its versatility and impact on their IT infrastructure: "These clusters are running very different workloads. We have disparate and varied workloads, meaning we have Oracle databases, WebLogic application servers, custom application servers, Apache web servers, and firewalls in some locations running on Nutanix. And we have been almost all AHV now for about a year and a half."
The transition to Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) from other third-party software has also been a significant shift, indicating their choice to move towards a more integrated and cost-effective hypervisor solution. Dustin noted that this change aligns with a more streamlined, unified management experience provided by Nutanix.
With Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure, Bottomline has achieved a streamlined operational framework that enhances data processing speeds by keeping data close to computational resources. This local data handling is critical for financial services, where even minor delays can impact transaction outcomes. The effectiveness of this performance rate is highlighted by the substantial improvements reported by Bottomline's customers.
Bottomline's partnership with Nutanix powers critical solutions like PTX in the UK and Paymode in the US, streamlining financial transactions worldwide. Their solutions suite also includes digital banking and risk, treasury, and legal management tools, simplifying complex financial tasks into secure, efficient operations worldwide.
"We have a good amount of Nutanix, which is very distributed. This distribution allows us to ensure that data processes locally, reducing latency and significantly improving our applications' response times,” Dustin explains.
Robust data protection
Robust data protection is crucial for compliance and customer trust in the financial services industry. Bottomline has integrated data protection features within its Nutanix solutions, eliminating the need for additional purchases or managing multiple vendors. This integration ensures consistent security measures across all operations and reduces the costs associated with external data protection services.
"We're using Nutanix data protection. It automatically takes a snapshot of the virtual machine and replicates any of the changes to another data center. With that flexibility and the fact that it's included with our license, we don't have to buy additional features, pay for this replication, or even deal with another vendor. It's all included. It's all in the same management plan that we have," Dustin details.
Reduced costs
The shift to Nutanix’s hyperconverged platform has resulted in significant cost savings in licensing, maintenance, and management. “This consolidation simplifies IT operations, reducing the need for specialized external support and lowering operational expenses," confirms Dustin.
Streamlined management
Nutanix has enabled Bottomline to deploy new services and applications faster while enhancing the company’s ability to adapt to market changes and new business opportunities. The integration of Nutanix Files and Objects simplifies the management of both NFS and SMB file shares and S3-compatible storage, significantly streamlining operations previously complicated by traditional file systems and object storage solutions.
"Our Nutanix environment in the US with 37 clusters has the same management experience as our Singapore environment with 2 clusters,” highlights Dustin. This uniform management experience is further bolstered by Nutanix Files, which enables high availability and fault tolerance with just a few clicks, and Nutanix Objects, which provides reliable, easy-to-manage storage solutions.
The uniform management experience across all data centers allows Bottomline's IT staff to handle operations efficiently without retraining for different environments, thereby reducing the complexity and increasing the reliability of their global IT infrastructure.
Next Steps
Bottomline plans to continue its partnership with Nutanix by further assessing, integrating and optimizing Nutanix solutions to maintain operational efficiency and scalability.
Date: 8/24