The story of Transzap and its adoption of a System z9 Business Class processing solution isn’t about re-architecting systems for the purpose of leveraging business applications and preserving the business intelligence of legacy code. Rather, Transzap made a strategic decision to move from an open and distributed computing environment to an open computing environment constructed around System z. In so doing, Transzap believed it had found a robust computing solution that would differentiate it in the highly competitive Software as a Service (SaaS) marketplace.
Tranzap’s Business Environment
Located in Denver, Transzap got its start nine years ago as a SaaS company that provided e-payable solutions, data exchange, and analytical reporting to companies in the oil and gas industry. Through its Oildex services, Transzap provides its more than 4,200 customers with information about how and where they spend their money. The Transzap Oildex service is a mission-critical system that oil and gas industry companies depend on for their business workflow and decision-making.
“Offering software as a service is a highly competitive business and an entirely different world from that of traditional software in corporate IT shops,” says Peter Flanagan, Transzap’s CEO. “We have a relatively compact IT staff, but the number of companies and users we serve is the equivalent of that of a very large company. In addition, when you’re a SaaS provider, you’re held to high standards of service and reliability. Our business was growing rapidly, and when we began to look at our projections and consider the impact of a tenfold increase in our business, we started to think about the ramifications of this on everything in our IT infrastructure, starting with CPUs and storage.”
Meeting the Challenges of Three 9’s Uptime
As a SaaS provider, Transzap competes against the internal IT resources of its customers, and also against other industry SaaS providers. Consistently, Transzap must prove it offers a more economical, reliable and powerful solution than any other market or internal company alternative, and is held to strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
“What we offer is a mission-critical service to our customers, and to the oil and gas industry,” says Flanagan. “One of the things we must consistently do is to meet all of our SLA commitments.”
A major challenge for many SaaS companies, according to Flanagan, is guaranteeing uptime and availability. “The normal SaaS uptime standard for those providers such as Transzap that are willing to commit to an SLA has been 99.5 percent uptime, but the industry is changing,” says Flanagan. “The new standard that customers are asking for, and which we set for ourselves, is three 9’s uptime of 99.9 percent.”
Three 9’s uptime, or less than 45 minutes per month of downtime, is the standard that Transzap targets for its software services.
“We’ve chosen to include downtime penalties in our SLAs, and the new three 9‘s uptime standard that the SaaS industry will eventually be moving toward is something that we’re already moving toward as an internal metric,” says Flanagan. “As a software services supplier, we also have to meet Sarbanes- Oxley [SOX] control requirements in our customers’ business processes.”
