Case Study Customer Profile: Cognotec The Internet has rapidly transformed the financial markets by revolutionising the way financial services are created, managed and delivered to clients. Nowhere are these changing conditions more apparent than in the highly lucrative Foreign Exchange market, where transactions worth thousands of billions of dollars are carried out every working day. Founded in Dublin in the early 1990's to provide financial institutions with foreign exchange and money market related services, Cognotec is taking measures to ensure that it remains at the leading edge of the technology driving this highly specialized branch of finance. Leaders in Automated Trading Having led the field in electronic trading solutions for over a decade, Cognotec is today the world's leading supplier of Internet-based automated foreign exchange and money market trading solutions for banks. Focused exclusively on the provision of dealing solutions to the financial community, the company currently employs over 260 staff members across its 18 offices around the world. As the growth of the Internet forces banks to review how they trade, Cognotec's services provide powerful and cost-effective solutions for linking treasury departments with their internal and external customers. The company's award-winning Cognotec AutoDeal LITE electronic trading service has now established itself as the standard for the industry. With a blue chip client base and thousands of users around the globe, the brand is widely recognized as the trading model of the future for the global Foreign Exchange market. In the latest versions of the product, the efficiencies of electronic trading have been married to the cost advantages and low implementation requirements of cutting-edge Internet technologies. Application Service Provider Model Using the Application Service Provider (ASP) model, Cognotec runs and maintains the Cognotec AutoDeal range of trading solutions from a highly secure data centre operated by Cap Gemini in Bristol. This enables each of its financial services clients to operate its own secure branded website, accessible to its designated clients and branches. Maintenance and upgrades to the service are carried out on-line. With minimal implementation costs and no high up-front licence fees, clients can be up and running very quickly, offering their customers a cost-effective transaction-based on-line trading service. "Historically, we were a 'big ticket' software company customizing and selling licensed products to the banking world," says Maurice Curran, Head of Systems Architecture at Cognotec. "The advent of the World Wide Web presented us with the opportunity to change to a more Internet-focused model. Whereas, in the past, the integration of our products with a bank's back office systems could have taken anything up to three years, now, using the ASP model, we can fully integrate our software within as little as 12 weeks," he adds. He says that, since introducing the new services based on the ASP model, more than 80 banks have already selected the Cognotec AutoDeal LITE service to enhance their e-commerce trading abilities. Clients now include Royal Bank of Canada, National Australia Bank, Brown Brothers Harriman, Societe Generale NY, First Union Bank, Swedbank and Scotia Capital. High Availability is Essential "To win so many customers in such a short space of time, we have had to make our Data Centre 100 per cent bullet-proof from a security perspective," says Maurice Curran. "High availability is fundamental to the success of our service. The cost of downtime is potentially huge, not only in terms of revenue, but also goodwill and customer confidence. We cannot therefore afford outages of any kind". Availability, resilience and performance are the key issues when pitching for a bank's business, according to Maurice Curran. Their own operational IT infrastructure invariably comprises the very best of breed products and the services they offer their customers are generally of the highest standard. It is not surprising, therefore, that they, in turn, expect from Cognotec equally high levels of service. "At all costs, we must avoid any outage which might embarrass the senior manager who has championed the Cognotec AutoDeal solution to manage one of his bank's most profitable services, its foreign exchange operation". "We are relatively new to the e-commerce world, and we are eager to win as many banks as possible as clients with our market-leading product. Downtime of any description would undoubtedly threaten that objective," he adds. "It's a lot to ask a bank to hand over to a third-party the processing of its foreign exchange business, the heart and lungs of its organization, so to speak. Banks are traditionally very strong operationally and understandably intolerant of outages. As a supplier, we have to be just as strong in our operations and provide our banking clients with those bullet-proof services," says Maurice Curran. "This is where Dataway, our established network security consultants, was able to help by ensuring that our clients' customer-facing systems are always highly available. They introduced us to Stonesoft, whom they represent and whose StoneBeat family is widely recognized as the leader in bringing high availability and scalability to Check Point's Firewall-1 and other popular firewall technologies." Industry-Standard Products Stonesoft Corporation is an international Finnish software company focusing on Network Security and eSolutions. Its StoneBeat product line has already won considerable acclaim as the only software product which can combine high availability and dynamic load balancing for firewalls and other applications, such as web, cache, content scanning and DNS servers. The company's StoneBeat HA product is the most widely installed software-based hot-standby/load sharing solution for Check Point Firewall-1. It enables automatic switchover of the traffic to another firewall if the active firewall fails. Stonesoft was recently awarded Check Point's Open Platform for Security (OPSEC) certification which certifies that StoneBeat products integrate fully with Check Point's technology. The product has been extremely successful around the world and is being used by thousands of customers in virtually every major business, industry and public service environment. Established customers include Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, NASA and UBS. Maurice Curran says Cognotec prefers to use industry-standard products when it comes to security. He says he immediately liked the offering from Stonesoft and their StoneBeat HA product became an integral part of Cognotec's ASP offering from day one. "Our banking customers' corporate clients come in over the Internet and when they connect, the firewall is the first thing they hit," says Maurice Curran. "If one of our firewalls fails, then they can't connect into our web server, so we can't afford any single point of failure. Most dealers will only stay on a website for a few seconds, so you're only a mouse click away from losing them if your service is slow. That's why StoneBeat is so important to us. Using the Stonesoft product means that if one of our firewalls were to die, the software would switch the service over to another firewall instantaneously." Avoiding Potential Losses Maurice Curran says another major requirement for high availability is that the banks are feeding the Cognotec AutoDeal LITE service with real time foreign exchange and money market rates on a second by second basis. In the event of an outage, the potential loss to a bank could be enormous. Dealer traffic and real-time rates traffic are constantly streaming in from one direction and web traffic from the other direction, each shielded by a firewall. If a firewall were to fail, then their could be a potential significant dealing loss to the bank because of that single firewall failure. Maurice Curran is confident that StoneBeat's ability to anticipate such an event and switch the system transparently to another firewall will help to ensure this never happens. Security Specialists Cognotec uses the established Internet security consultancy, Dataway who specialise in VPN and firewall implementation, Internet-based networking and managed security services. Headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Dublin, Ireland, the company combines best of breed solutions from vendors such as Check Point, Sun, Stonesoft, Microsoft, ISS, Cisco and RSA Security with its own engineering expertise to provide customers with scaleable and extensible security solutions. Dataway's Sales Director, Anne Kirwan, claims that Check Point now has in excess of 50 per cent of the Virtual Private Network market. She says: "We've noticed over the past year that we no longer have to justify Check Point VPN-1 as a solution in the way we had to in the past. It has become a product people trust and depend upon to secure their e-commerce business. When complemented by StoneBeat's high availability and scalability software, we have a winning combination that is becoming extremely popular with customers." Reliance on the '-ilities' Maurice Curran bears this out when he underlines the importance of high availability to his customers' Internet-based dealing systems. He says: "I give a lot of presentations to banks and other financial institutions and I usually get a very warm response from most of them when I mention Firewall-1 and StoneBeat in the same breath. I think that speaks volumes about the close association between the two products. "Our data centre is fundamental to the service we offer. Without it, we don't have a business," concludes Maurice Curran. "The StoneBeat product, combined with the security expertise from Dataway, guarantees that we have at all times the '-ilities' on which we rely so heavily for our continuing success - availability, reliability, and scalability."

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