THE CUSTOMER
The customer, headquartered in Texas, is among the largest banking institutions in the US with over 130 branches and 1,300 automated teller machines (ATMs), offering a large portfolio of services including banking, financing, investment and insurance services to consumers and businesses.
The customer is at the forefront of electronic financial and banking services, offering its customers a complete online banking experience by deploying best-of-breed information technologies and design & implementation practices. Being at the forefront, a key advantage is to provide the most client friendly applications.
THE PROBLEM
The customer wanted to migrate from its GlobalPay third party application to an in-house developed application. The GlobalPay application had been implanted with yesterday’s technology and no longer met the client friendly requirements given the latest available technology.
Given the rapid pace at which enterprise software tools, development environments and technologies evolve, the customer wanted to bring development and maintenance in-house, so that its own IT department could easily maintain and extend the applications as needed, and thereby keep offering the most client friendly applications and keep adding increasingly more sophisticated financial services to its services offerings.
Core to its roadmap was the ability to exchange data between NACHA (National Automated Clearing House Association) and EDI-X12-4010 820 data formats. The IT department had selected the Informatica B2B Data Exchange product stack for the migration of the application, but ran into database connectivity issues with the Informatica B2B Data Exchange 10.2HF2 installer and consequently the risk of derailment of the roadmap became a big concern.
THE CHALLENGE
Possibly facing a host of other negative consequences next to roadmap derailment, the challenge was to debug and resolve the connectivity issues promptly. The customer’s IT department lacked the necessary expertise in debugging the database connection issues as well as experience in using the Informatica B2B Data Exchange product stack, since it had only recently started to use the stack.
THE SOLUTION
The customer brought in PartnerBO (Informatica Silver partner) because of its expertise in developing complex on-premise and cloud hybrid B2B data exchange solutions with Informatica products. We were able to quickly establish the cause of the problem to be a bug in the Informatica B2B Data Exchange DX 10.2HF2 installer and narrowed this further down with the Informatica technical support engineering team to failure when SSL encryption is enabled for Microsoft SQL Server 2016 databases running on Microsoft Windows Server 2016 platforms.
It was going to take a while for Informatica to resolve the bug, given that it occurred on an older version of Microsoft products. Since the IT department had a fixed timeline to accomplish their mission, we proposed to implement a workaround that would allow them to continue their development unimpeded, while at the same time keeping SSL encryption in place. This workaround involved deep knowledge of the files and settings involved with the DX 10.2HF2 installer.
Taking advantage of PartnerBO’s deep expertise with Informatica’s Data Integration product family including Cloud B2B Gateway, B2B Managed File Transfer, B2B Data Exchange, B2B Data Transformation (Data Processor), and PowerCenter, the IT department engaged our Informatica consultants to assist with the implementation of the NACHA/EDI-X12 data exchange module. This involved orchestration between Informatica PowerCenter, Data Transformation, and Managed File Transfer in the Informatica B2B Data Exchange product stack.