These are some notes I put together to help pitch a jPOS-based application solution vs. an incumbent Tandem-based solution. These might be helpful to you if you're in a position to do a similar pitch. This is really a "starter kit." Feel free to take these and expand and modify as you see fit.
Business Benefits
- Reduce total cost of ownership (‘TCO’) of payment systems solutions:
a. Take advantage of pricing which doesn’t reflect the ‘baggage’ of needing to support proprietary operating platforms.
b. Operate on inexpensive Intel-based PCs
c. Choose from a wider (and more cost-effective) labor pool (vs. specialty architectures). - Assure yourself of a reduced maintenance and support cost base, as well as a cost-effective, viable upgrade path.
- Receive a rapid ‘mean-time to payback’ on your investment.
- Capitalize on profit opportunities by conceiving, developing and implementing new marketing initiatives more rapidly.
- Share development and marketing ideas with a worldwide community of fellow users.
Technical Benefits
- Align payment systems direction with overall corporate IT direction.
- Allow payment systems to be integrated into corporate IT support services (at many installations, proprietary OLTP architectures are walled-off from corporate IT and treated as an island; sometimes, this engenders bad feelings towards the payment systems group).
- Leverage the contributions of the ‘open source’ community.
- Allow customers to operate payment systems solution as less of a ‘black box.’ Increased knowledge and control means that everyone can focus more on activities directly related to the business vs. concern over intricacies of the ‘black art’ of maintaining a traditional OLTP operation.
- Achieve ‘fault-tolerant’-like up-time goals at ‘standard enterprise computing’ prices.
- Minimize the frequency and duration of scheduled downtime windows.
Trend and Opportunities
- Tap into the ‘dual revolutions’ of Linux-based computing and ‘open source’ development communities.
- There’s an inexorable drive towards standardization of enterprise-class IT on low-cost Intel-based servers. Using jPOS as your payment framework will put you right in the middle of this movement and by using it, you’re not sacrificing your commitment to fault-tolerant operations.
- Respond to the fact that more and more technology decisions are being made by the CFO, not the CIO. That means there needs to an ROI-type justification for everything. We believe there is a very short payback for a jPOS-based implementation.
- Capitalize on any future consolidation in the market. Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are a fact of life. When they happen, “system rationalization” (i.e., choosing a survivor from the two payment systems) occurs. Having a 'new generation' solution in place will give your customers the upper hand in any of these discussions.
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