eWAY Transforms Customer Experience with SQL Server 2012

Sydney, AUSTRALIA – 17, September, 2013 – Today, Microsoft announced that eWAY, a provider in online payments and e-commerce services in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, has deployed Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition to gain an extra edge over the competition. The company wanted to eclipse the industry benchmark of 99.5% availability, equal to approximately 20 minutes downtime per month, and by implementing SQL Server 2012, has allowed eWAY to operate two ‘hot’ data centres, reducing downtime to no more than 26 seconds per month.

To capitalise on the opportunity in the burgeoning e-commerce marketplace, eWAY has succeeded by putting the needs of its customers first and focussing on a drive for innovation, its services are utilised by over 12,000 customers, from small and medium enterprises through to non-profits, as well as partnering with global banking institutions.

Looking for both a unique point of difference and a better service for its customers, eWAY began to explore opportunities for maximising the availability of its database servers. “With our customers, even a small amount of unplanned downtime can have a significant flow-on effect, impacting revenue, productivity and even their relationship with their customers,” said Matt Bullock, CEO, eWAY.

Already familiar with the benefits of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition, eWAY were excited by some of the new features of SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition, which had the potential to help them achieve 99.999% availability for their customers.

eWAY looked to Microsoft Gold Data Platform partner, WARDY IT Solutions, to design and implement a high availability and disaster recovery solution. “Since cutting over to SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition, eWAY has been able to offer its customers almost zero unplanned downtime, significantly less than the industry average 20 minutes per month,” said Bullock.

SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition has enabled not just far less unplanned downtime, but much less planned downtime as well. eWAY’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael Nordling, explains. “We have three database servers – two synchronous and one in asynchronous mode. When we perform an update, we just take one of them down, so it’s not affecting business or customers.”

SQL Server 2012 delivers benefits for eWAY’s staff as well as its customers, simplifying the day-to-day management of IT. “Server 2012 features rich instrumentation, so we’ve got continuous insight into what’s happening on our servers,” Nordling said.

By allowing read-only activity to be performed on an active secondary machine, SQL Server 2012 is saving eWAY time, money and complications. “Our back-end system only talks to the read-only database, reducing risk for the write-only database. It also means we can perform back-ups and maintenance on the secondary server, removing that workload from the primary server,” Nordling said.

The most important outcome for all these benefits is the one benefit that really matters: customer satisfaction. “Customer happiness is paramount to eWAY, and together with Microsoft and WARDY IT’s expertise we are able to deliver a service that not only keeps our customers happy, but theirs’ as well,” said Bullock.

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