Cis 205 - Information Systems Essay - Elavon Integrated Payment Processing

Information Systems Essay

Eric Gomez

CIS/205

11 June 2011

Dr. Tony Lopez

Abstract

Elavon is a world leader in merchant acquiring services providing integrated payment processing to more than one million merchants through established relationships with financial institutions, associations, and other sales channels. This article covers the information systems used to carry out the operations of Elavon's daily activities. The second half of the article consists of the process analysts undergo to determine the best information systems available for Elavon to reach optimal success. From all the information systems available, Transaction Processing Systems have proven to work the best considering the significant number of customers who patronize Elavon.

Information Systems Essay

Elavon's Transaction Processing Systems are the core of Elavon's success. Elavon uses Transaction Processing Systems as the lifeline of the company to perform all the major functions necessary to carry out the operations. Elavon also uses virtualization to enhance cost effectiveness and performance. Through the systems development life cycle, systems analysts could determine that Transaction Processing Systems are what Elavon needs to provide customer service to millions of people in a given day. This article covers the exploitation of Transaction Processing Systems, systems virtualization, and the systems development life cycle.

According to Elavon (2011), Elavon is a global leader and provider of merchant acquiring services. Elavon recruits merchants who will accept bank-generated credit cards and insures those merchants (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011). The type of information system that Elavon uses is a Transaction Processing System (TPS) that collects, stores, and processes data generated from all business transactions (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011). Elavon generates hundreds of millions of dollars a year with a clientele that reaches a volume so high that Transaction Processing Systems are automated (data automatically processed through the system) as much as possible to facilitate the business processes (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011). Elavon could not succeed as a business without the reliability, resiliency, and availability of the Transaction Processing System that ensures little to no downtime in service (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011).

According to Rainer and Cegielski (2011), Elavon uses systems virtualization to minimize the percentage of the computer capacity by creating multiple virtual servers on a physical server. Virtualization is cost effective because it minimizes the number of physical servers, energy, space, cooling, personnel, and maintenance and it also increases performance (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011). Virtualization also allows Elavon to adapt quickly to changing demands in the marketing world (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011). Another benefit that virtualization has is the capability to provide redundancy--the automated response to a failed server by replacing it with another (Rainer & Cegielski, 2011).

Rainer and Cegielski (2011) stated that the Transaction Processing System helps Elavon Company in other ways besides online transactions and customer services. Transaction Processing Systems help Elavon to adhere to industry and international rules by requiring staff members to comply with procedural operations