Now, you’re the switch

Occasionally, along the OLS.Switch lifecycle – either at sales time, or during the initial installation, or somewhere down the road – we hear things like this from our customers and prospects:

“Hand us the transaction because we can make a better decision on it.”

“We have a rules engine that is our ‘special sauce.’”

“We know more about the cardholder than you ever can.”

“Your proposed price is too high, so give us the transaction and we’ll implement the meat of it.”

“We just want you to act as a ‘pass-through’; we’ll do the real work.”

“The decision-making is where our IP is, so we want to do that.”

These are all very legitimate comments (well, expect the ‘pass-through’ comment – that grates on me…trust me, it’s never as easy as ‘just a pass-through’…grrrr).  We certainly don’t want or need to control all aspects of a transaction.  Nor do we want to stand in the way of the ability to make a better decision about a transaction request. 

But here’s the thing: once we send the transaction to you, now you’re the switch.  What I mean by that is:  your application is now beholden to the same throughput, speed, efficiency, extensibility and 24x7x365 availability concerns that define our lives.  And while there have been many that have been up to the task, there have been countless other instances where that’s not been the case.  We’ve seen applications…

• …toppling once past 1 TPS
• …needing to be recycled every Friday afternoon
• …not letting go of transactions threads
• …getting hopelessly confused and giving up responding to us
• …responding with crap system error messages
• …running out of resources
• …timing out 50% (or more) of all our requests

If you go this route, just be careful what you ask for.  It’s about more than your application rules or that special thing you do: now, you’re the switch.

Comments

[Víctor salaman]

This is just funny

[Larry]

but we are the special sauce

[Eshwar]

Hi andy
I have another question for you..............
To be emv compliant what Cryptogram versions we need to support ?(CVN For visa and Master card).
Eshwar

[Ticl]

Haha! We get these type of requests all the time around here! We implement/resell end-to-end solutions in a developing country. Fortunately, ours is an emerging market and it's easy to scare the customers away from these bright ideas. However, there are implementers (coming from all over the world), who themselves would make these types of suggestions for various reasons (cost cutting, meeting deadlines, etc.)

BTW, this is an amazing blog. It is a really nice read for someone like me who would be considered a newbie in the industry. I might write up something about my own experience, just waiting for a few more juicy incidents :))