Otto-Carl Marte from ACI will present the Department of Computer Science seminar with a talk entitled "The performance and availability of mission critical transaction processing systems"

Every day millions of people use their debit and credit cards to pay for their goods in retail stores or online. Payments systems are responsible for switching these messages containing payments information to the banks for authorization in a secure fashion. This talk will focus on the performance and availability chacteristics of these payments systems. How do we ensure that the required low latency and high throughput requirements are met? How do we ensure that these systems are available 24/7/365?

Otto is the chief software architect for ACI Worldwide's Merchant Retail and eCommerce solutions. Otto overseas the architecture of a number of products and also contributes to the overall enterprise architecture of ACI. He is based in Cape Town.  Otto holds a B.Bus.Sc and M.Sc in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town. After dabbling in a start-up he joined a small company creating payments software (Mosaic Software) as a software engineer. During the last 13 years he has helped code, design and build a leading mission critical payments transaction processing platform - Postilion. He has a deep interest in the non functional requirements of payments systems.