NEWSLETTERS
 

CIO.com updates, insights and advice on technology, management and your career.

 
 
 
LEADERSHIP
 
CIO Executive Programs
The Leader in Face-to-Face Education for Senior Executives

Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »

 
CIO Executive Council
A Peer-Advisory Service and Professional Association for CIOs

Social Responsibility's Strategic Benefits

December 15, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)

Join Ed Granger-Happ, CIO of Save the Children, for a discussion of how creating an organization that is socially responsible improves staffing, retention, leadership development and overall corporate health.

Working With and Communicating to Your Board of Directors

January 13, 2009, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM US/Eastern (GMT-5)

CIO panelists who will share tips and experiences working with their boards: Twila Day of SYSCO; Jeff O'Hare, West Corp.; Marc West, formerly with H&R Block.

IT's Role in Growing Mid-Market Companies

January 14, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET (GMT-5)

Mid-market Council members will share their companies' stories and challenges in driving or coping with growth. Panelists represent Veterinary Pet Insurance, Medicis Pharmaceutical, and Intrax Cultural Exchange.

More / Register »

Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »



 
 
RESOURCE CENTER
 
 
 
SUBSCRIBE TO CIO
 
Are you involved in setting the direction for your company's IT budget or strategy?

Apply today for a FREE subscription to CIO Magazine!

 
 
 

How Virgin Entertainment Group Keeps Customer-Facing Transactions Humming at its Virgin Megastores

Credit card transactions comprise between 60 and 70 percent of sales at Virgin Megastores in the U.S. So when the company can't process credit and debit card transactions, it risks angering customers and losing sales.

 

PAGE 3

Retail Systems' Baird says retailers have historically thrown hardware at the problem—they've looked at increasing processor speeds when they've seen point of sale and credit card transactions slowing down. That's a waste of time and money when the problem doesn't have anything to do with the point of sale system but everything to do with the credit card provider.

The Opening Act

Fort deployed Inetco's Insight product in April to monitor credit card transactions and to make sure customers weren't being held up by slow ones. He says the implementation was fairly straightforward. Installing the software on a server took a few hours.

Next, Fort and his staff spent another couple of hours verifying that transaction data was flowing into the Inetco Insight software as the transaction data was moving from the point of sale servers to the credit card processor.

They also had to create standard data records for each transaction. These data records indicate the path the transaction is travelling—for instance, whether they're inbound or outbound, the IP addresses where they're going and coming from, and the return code from the credit card authorizer. Fort and his IT staff worked with Inetco to create these records based on templates Inetco had created for standard credit card processing transactions. The templates essentially tell the software what to do, what exceptions to look for and when to send an alert. They interpret every transaction and break down each transaction into the appropriate data field on the record. The Insight software identifies failed authorizations based on the return codes.

Within days of deploying the software, Inetco Insight began identifying slow transactions.

"As we were first running this, we noticed a serious, continual blip of transactions running close to three seconds," says Fort. Most credit card transactions take anywhere from four-tenths of a second to one-and-a-half seconds to process, he says, adding that the optimum time is between one half and one second.

The software pinpointed that these long processing times were coming from one particular cash register—information they never would have had before deploying Insight. Knowing a single cash register was the source of these slow transactions, Fort's team began trouble-shooting. They made sure the point-of-sale system software was loaded properly on the machine. They double checked communication lines. Though they haven't yet determined why certain transactions on this particular cash register take as long as three seconds, they continue to monitor the situation, which fortunately, Fort says, is not a problem at the moment.

Since discovering this first anomaly, Fort and his team have set up another alert within the Insight software so that if transactions on any register exceed 1.5 seconds, the network administrator gets an e-mail notification and the alert shows up on the Inetco Insight dashboard on the network admin's computer.

Fort says he's also going to use the Insight software to do a trend analysis by credit card type and by store. "We want to make sure we're not having performance problems with any one vendor," he says. "We also want to understand if one store has better performance than another and why that is."

Loading...
 
 
IT Jobs
 
 
 
ABCs
 

Just the basics, please. Sometimes we all need a refresher or we need to make sure our team and our colleagues are all on the same page.

Over 25 tutorials on everything from business intelligence to virtualization.

 
 
FEATURED SPONSORS
 
 
 
SPONSORED LINKS
 

Virtualization Benchmark and TCO Analysis-Read Now

White Paper: Scaling Down HPC for Smaller Organizations

White Paper: Never Enough Compute Power?

Microsoft Windows Vista Cost and Benefit Estimator

White Paper: Efficient Desktop Application Management

White Paper: Take your Call Center to the Next Level

Is Your WLAN Helping You Comply with Security Guidelines of the PCI Standard?

White Paper: Improve Employee Efficiency and Reduce Telecom Costs

White Paper: Green Issues for Networking

New IDG Survey Results on Data Center Automation

Operational Excellence Is Key to Maximizing IT Investments

The Right and Wrong Master Data Management Strategies to Start Small and Grow Big

Find out how to manage virtualization's risks and reap the rewards.

Conquer the realities of managing virtualization

Remote Infrastructure Management - What Your Peers are Thinking

Complementary BI: The New Approach to Business Intelligence

Unified Communications & Collaboration: Game-Changing Business Results

The ECM Paradox: Extending Local Flexibility to Strengthen Central Control

Customer Insight Yields Sales, Marketing Gains

Efficient by design: Watch this flash demo of the Quad-Core AMD Opteron Processor

HP and Oracle deploy unbreakable computing infrastructure at Replacements, Ltd.

File Integrity Monitoring: Prove compliance and secure your IT environments

Affordable technology-no compromise. HP server solutions

SOA Educational Library at the TIBCO SOA Resource Center

CIO Viewpoints: Migrating to Exchange 2007

Server Virtualization Benchmark Results

Learn to Leverage Maximum Computing Power

Windows Vista: Essential Benefits and Deployment Strategies

Best Practices: Safe and Secure Hardware Asset Recovery

White Paper: Migrating to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 Together

White Paper: Enabling Next Generation IP Communications

White Paper: A Cohesive Network Security Approach

Why Your Firewall, VPN, and IEEE Aren't Enough to Protect Your Network

Dramatically boost network capacity and speed-up to 600 Mbps

White Paper: The Roadmap to Data Center Automation

Learn how companies are changing how they reach out to their most profitable customers.

Get help navigating the management challenges of virtualization.

Narrow the gap between virtualization's benefits and the management risks.

Cash in on the promise of virtualization

Webcast - "Into the Wild: Managing Laptops Outside the Office"

Mobility is Growing: Survey Shows Why CIOs are Concerned

Learn what it takes to build a holistic digital collaboration platform

Make Hidden Trends, Inter-Relationships and Influences Visible.

Improve delivery of product information to customers.

Renowned Engineering Institution Chooses AMD Processor-Based Servers

Corral, configure and control all your mischievous machinery with a Lantronix device server

Spend less. Get hosted UC. Get cash back. It's easy under a Cypress

Predict the future with HP Insight Power Manager

Log onto Hitachi True Stories, films inspired by the next great achievement

Earn PROFESSIONAL DOCTORATE Part-Time, Online at Syracuse University's iSchool