Cisco and Distra Partner on Payments Solution

Payments software provider Distra recently announced that it has released a new payments platform that runs on the Cisco Unified Computing System. The solution, targeted at Tier 1 banks and large payment processors, aims to help update and eventually replace legacy payment systems.

The new Comprehensive Payments solution, part of Distra's flagship Universal Payments Platform, runs on Cisco's Unified Computing System as part of a Vblock Infrastructure package. The technology increases virtualization effectiveness of a payments system to allow institutions to quickly transition across different IT environments and cloud-based models.

Beyond its flexibility, the solution offers performance of more than 3,000 payment transactions per second with a latency of less than 150 milliseconds. (The solution's speed was recently tested by Distra.)

"This is a cost-effective, scalable, reliable platform to build any low-latency payments transactions on," says David Luther, Distra's General Manager for North America. "Financial services firms have trouble keeping up and innovating on 25-year-old legacy systems. We're offering a path to a more cost-effective and flexible solution where financial institutions can innovate and react to regulatory compliance quickly."

"The kinds of payments that are occurring have changed a lot over the past 10 years," adds Lenni Selvaggio, global industry solutions manager at Cisco. "Traditional payment systems weren't built for real-time transactions. This solution is a way to bridge where they are today to where the market is going."