Success stories from EDB customers spanning key verticals and use cases

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<div style="padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; background-color: #EBECF0;">
Key Takeaways

<ul>
	<li>Ensured an always-on payment processing platform (using an automatic failover architecture) that maintains strict ACID-compliant, transactional consistency</li>
	<li>Achieved aggressive time-to-market timelines through an accelerated development cycle, despite the team's inexperience working with Postgres</li>
	<li>By employing EDB's enterprise tools for Postgres, areeba conserved capital to redeploy toward innovation and future needs</li>
	<li>By choosing Postgres and EDB, areeba achieved immediate results and simultaneously implemented critical building blocks for their future automation plans; their future automation is to be delivered through exciting Cloud Native technology that will further ensure easy deployment, scaling, and performance.</li>
</ul>

 
&nbsp;

Products

<ul>
	<li><a href="https://www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgres-enterprise-manager-best-gui-tools-database-management">Postgres Enterprise Manager (PEM)</a></li>
	<li><a href="https://content-www.enterprisedb.com/products/postgresql-automatic-failover-manager-cluster-high-availability">EDB Failover Manager (EFM)</a></li>
	<li>Planned: <a href="https://www.enterprisedb.com/products/cloud-native-postgresql-kubernetes-ha-clusters-k8s-containers-scalable">Cloud Native Postgres</a></li>
	<li>Planned: <a href="https://www.enterprisedb.com/products/bidirectional-replication-bdr-postgresql-database">EDB Postgres Distributed</a></li>
</ul>

 
&nbsp;

Industry

<ul>
	<li>Financial Services: Electronic Payments Processor</li>
</ul>
</div>

<h2>About areeba</h2>

<a href="https://www.areeba.com">areeba</a> is a regional e-payments technology company providing solutions in both the physical and digital spaces. The fintech is renowned for its modern, highly secure, and high-performance systems that customers can rely on for seamless payments, speed to market, easy integration, and advanced payment solutions. &nbsp;

areeba’s extraordinary experience, together with unrivaled infrastructure and operational excellence, enables them to offer Banks, Fintechs, Merchants and Governments a unique range of payment services, tailored to their every need: from issuer processing and merchant acquiring to digital payments. &nbsp;&nbsp;

Through its market-leading platform and partnerships with global leaders like Mastercard and Visa, areeba is helping to transform the Middle East’s relationship with digital payments.&nbsp;

<h2> 
Challenge</h2>

Launched in 2017, areeba seeks to simplify daily financial dealings with the ultimate purpose of reconciling people with fiscal issues by providing innovative solutions to shift payments to a digital and cashless ecosystem.

At the time, digital payments were relatively rare in the region, and global financial services organizations were paying little attention—or investment—to developing the infrastructure or supporting the nascent community interested in adopting digital payments.&nbsp;

However, globally, e-payment trends were rapidly evolving in the payment and transaction industry. Aiming to take advantage of this exciting shift, M1 Group, a regional investment holding, acquired Bank Audi’s Electronic Payment and Card Services Department (EPCS) and turned it into areeba, a fintech regulated by the Central Bank of Lebanon, as well as by Mastercard, Visa and American Express.&nbsp;

When areeba was launched as an independent entity, a lot of investment was made into &nbsp;technology platforms, especially given the fact that since its creation, areeba’s structure still relied on outsourced services for nearly everything—infrastructure, card management, point of sale, data and analytics, and more. Such reliance on outsourced services was both cost-prohibitive and limiting to developing new services and approaches to digital payments.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<blockquote>
<h3>“Since inception, our goal was to transform into a service-oriented company with a startup mindset,” remembers Elie Soukayem, chief technology officer at areeba. “Our operations costs were really high and our speed to market was limited. We had a huge transformation ahead of us—related to architecture, costs, and infrastructure - basically every aspect of the business needed to be reconceived to make areeba competitively viable.”</h3>

&nbsp;
</blockquote>

Today, the company provides a wide variety of solutions, including the ability for banks and fintechs to offer their customers a broad range of payment solutions that would meet the local and regional requirements, in addition to a variety of digital payment solutions for merchants and governments seeking to adapt to new customer engagement methods.

In a market that includes both conventional financial services institutions and global fintech companies, areeba faces fierce competition as it seeks to establish itself as the de facto solution for cashless payments in the Middle East. Focused on two critical solution areas (making payments and accepting payments), areeba sought a flexible database that could handle rapid innovation without sacrificing the strict ACID compliance and performance that real-time financial transactions require.

&nbsp;

<h2>Solution</h2>

<blockquote>
<h3>&nbsp;</h3>

<h3>“Back in 2017, when areeba was first spun out, the region wasn’t completely digitally mature, but we knew we had to prepare ourselves for a highly competitive environment,” explains Soukayem. “That assumption has become a reality. Today, we’re seeing an attack on the region by global companies and big payment vendors. In order to compete and provide competitive services, we need to move really fast.”</h3>
</blockquote>

&nbsp;

In its previous, partner-reliant model, areeba was dependent on its partners to provide the services it needed to enable any new feature or innovation it conceived. As the team sought to transform the company into a highly agile technology innovator, they knew that the database foundation would be a lynchpin to a successful transformation.&nbsp;

Georges Abou Zeidan, areeba’s infrastructure manager, says:

&nbsp;

<blockquote>
<h3>“The core business is dependent on the card management system. But in order to implement our full vision, we needed that critical foundation.”</h3>

&nbsp;
</blockquote>

<h3>A scalable database to meet areeba’s high workload demands&nbsp;</h3>

Given the financial nature of the transactions captured by areeba, it was imperative to identify a highly available, redundant database with automatic failover and ACID compliance. The team had more familiarity with other major offerings, but had particular concerns about whether they would get the support and attention from a commercial database vendor that they expected to need as they innovated rapidly. In addition, the high licensing costs that many of those alternatives presented proved a big barrier to overcome.

&nbsp;

<blockquote>
<h3>“It wasn’t just about cost and functionality,” Abou Zeidan continues. “We wanted our technology foundation to be based on an open architecture that was platform agnostic so we wouldn’t be tied to the restrictions a single vendor could impose. With our aggressive development plans, we knew that a community-based database would give us access to a huge wealth of experience and guidance that we can’t get with your typical commercial database. Postgres was the only database that could meet all our needs.”</h3>
</blockquote>

&nbsp;

Abou Zeidan and his team started first with the Community Edition, testing out its viability and fitness for areeba’s use case, as well as its technical compatibility with the rest of areeba’s current and future platform architecture and the rest of the components in areeba’s stack.&nbsp;

&nbsp;

<blockquote>
<h3>“Our team found it very easy to operate Postgres,” described Abou Zeidan. “We didn’t have to make any compromises to our preferred architecture or functionality, and we were able to migrate smoothly onto Postgres. We were frankly surprised at how easy it was.”</h3>
</blockquote>

&nbsp;

<h3>Turning to a trusted partner to satisfy enterprise requirements and mitigate risk</h3>

Howev

areeba is a financial technology leader disrupting the payment industry in the Middle East with a comprehensive suite of innovative payment services and loyalty programs.

areeba Accelerates Time-to-Market and Innovation with Postgres and EDB

<a href="http://www.abic.co.jp/">NTT DATA ABIC</a> switched their underlying database from Oracle to EDB Postgres Advanced Server. As a result, NTT DATA ABIC provides users with high-value solutions that stand out in terms of cost, reliability, functionality, and convenience. 
&nbsp;

The Challenge:

<ul>
	<li>As they looked to convert their packaged products to cloud services, NTT DATA ABIC felt a problem with the cost of Oracle Database licenses in their new virtualized environment. On top of this, the company realized that, to effectively migrate their complex applications and sensitive data, they would need a solution that was both reliable and highly efficient.</li>
</ul>

The Solution: &nbsp;

<ul>
	<li>With the help of Japanese Ashisuto, NTT DATA ABIC adopted EDB Postgres Advanced Server, which boasted high compatibility with Oracle databases. NTT DATA ABIC was able to leverage the standard replication features of EPAS and the cluster function of its virtualization technology and evaded high license costs.</li>
</ul>

The Results:

<ul>
	<li>NTT DATA ABIC now able to provide cloud services to users at a reasonable cost</li>
	<li>Technical issues that arose during the replacement process were quickly resolved, and the project was completed on schedule</li>
	<li>The company now has the reliability and availability they need</li>
</ul>

 
<a href="http://www.abic.co.jp/">NTT DATA ABIC</a> had a challenge: how could they build a database infrastructure in the cloud without succumbing to high license costs? In addition, their Oracle database created further issues as the company looked to turn their own packaged products to cloud services, and the process of migrating all their existing applications would be very expensive.&nbsp;

<h2>&nbsp;</h2>

<h2>NTT DATA ABIC leverages EDB Postgres Advanced Server to tackle database issues while moving to the cloud</h2>

These myriad issues were necessary to ensure the company’s continued growth and is why they opted to migrate from their Oracle database to <a href="https://www.enterprisedb.com/products/edb-postgres-advanced-server-secure-ha-oracle-compatible">EDB Postgres Advanced Server (EPAS)</a>. After speaking with the EDB team, NTT DATA ABIC realized that not only would EDB and PostgreSQL save them time and money, it could help them guarantee the reliability and availability that their valuable services and sensitive data required.

&nbsp;

<h2>The challenge and opportunity of empowering financial institutions with the cloud</h2>

NTT DATA ABIC provides services related to "assets in custody." In 1998, when the Japanese government lifted the ban on over-the-counter sales of investment trusts by banks, the company began developing and providing investment trust information services and over-the-counter sales support systems for sales of investment trusts and insurance to regional banks and other financial institutions. As a result, NTT DATA ABIC has an industry-leading track record and a reputation for unparalleled expertise.

In the past, the company's packaged products were installed on customers' own physical server environments. However, according to Mr. Mitsuru Fujita, company Director, this business model has reached its limits.

When we spoke with Mr. Fujita about NTT DATA ABIC's decision to introduce cloud services, he explained: "Recently, all financial institutions have been under great pressure to reduce IT costs. We have received many requests to reduce the time and cost of system operations, which is why, since 2019, we have been gradually migrating our services to and offering them in the cloud.”

To shift their services to the cloud, NTT DATA ABIC planned to build their system in a virtual environment; but they first needed to resolve some issues. According to Mr. Kouki Okamura, General Manager of Infrastructure Promotion, one of these was selecting a database.

Per Mr. Okamura, “We had issues with the Oracle Database we were using at the time, including support and cost structure in a virtual environment. We had to carefully consider the higher licensing costs, which would affect the price of services we provide to our customers."

<h2>&nbsp;</h2>

<h2>NTT DATA ABIC's EPAS migration achieves lower license costs and higher compatibility</h2>

When NTT DATA ABIC first discovered PostgreSQL, they were worried that, despite reducing license costs, they might incur other costs, related to migrating their applications.

Mr. Okamura explained "Our system implements most of the batch processing using Oracle Database’s stored procedures, and we thought it would take a long time to modify the programs because PostgreSQL is not compatible with Oracle Database from a programming perspective."

Consulting with group company experienced in PostgreSQL development, Mr. Okamura discovered EDB Postgres Advanced Server (EPAS), a commercial database product built on PostgreSQL. Not only is EPAS known for its high compatibility with Oracle Database, it boasts a reputation for reducing the cost of batch program modification.

NTT DATA ABIC purchased an EDB license from Ashisuto, a seller and supporter of EDB products in Japan with whom the company had an existing relationship: According to Mr. Shun Mugishima, Manager of System Development, “We originally had a relationship with Ashisuto through other products, and we trusted the quality of their support services."

"To prepare for problems that might arise during the verification process, we utilized the QA Support Service, which provides technical support by Ashisuto's dedicated engineers,” Mr. Mugishima explained. “As a result of picking up typical batch programs and verifying the compatibility between Oracle Database and EDB, we found that more than half of our programs could be migrated to EDB with almost no modification."

Based on these results, the company launched a full-scale migration to EDB. According to Mr. Naoki Miyaguchi, Manager of System Development, who is leading the project, the migration process went smoothly, although the volume of program modifications increased slightly compared to the original plan.

"During the actual migration, we encountered some compatibility issues, but Ashisuto's QA Support Service carefully investigated and answered our questions. As such we were able to quickly resolve the issues each time. Thanks to this, the project proceeded very close to schedule."

&nbsp;

<h2>Future plans</h2>

Because of the smooth and continuous migration of all NTT DATA ABIC's existing applications to EDB Postgres Advanced Server, the service launched in Fall of 2019.&nbsp;

EDB took into account the specific demands of NTT DATA ABIC's target service, which requires extremely high reliability because it handles the products of regional banks and other financial institutions. For this reason, the EDB team combined the replication function (streaming replication) -implemented as standard in EPAS- with the cluster function of virtualization technology to ensure sufficient reliability and availability.

Looking to the future, NTT DATA ABIC plans to use EDB to expand its cloud services and value proposition, including additional functions and convenience, as well as service price and reliability.

Mr. Fujita sums it up best: "Our customers will be able to easily integrate our multiple services by using our cloud services and gain even more value. We look forward to further enhancing the Oracle Database compatibility and usability of EPAS in order to realize these future plans more efficiently."

To learn more about EDB's customer successes, <a href="https://www.enterprisedb.com/case-studies">check out our customer stories here</a>. 
&nbsp;

NTT DATA ABIC switched their underlying database from Oracle to EDB Postgres Advanced Server. As a result, NTT DATA ABIC provides users with high-value solutions that stand out in terms of cost, reliability, functionality, and convenience.


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areeba Accelerates Time-to-Market and Innovation with Postgres and EDB

NTT DATA ABIC Provides Low-Cost, High-Reliability Cloud Services to Japanese Financial Institutions with the Help of EDB

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