Keeping up with the Joneses is tough when you don't know what the heck the Joneses are up to. While ATM deployers might like to brag about their ATM uptime, for instance, they generally don't know how their performance stacks up against the rest of the industry.

That's about to change with the introduction of the Gasper Index, a new service offered by the Dayton, Ohio-based Gasper Corporation, a provider of ATM monitoring and management software.

The idea, said Gasper President and Chief Executive Officer Dave Gasper, is to collect the reports of participating Gasper users, crunch the numbers and create a monthly metric that will show participants the average ATM network availability and identify best-in-class performance.

"We're using the standard Gasper reports, but this is the first time they will be combined," Gasper said.

The reports will track some of the most common reasons for downtime, including hardware problems, cash or supply outages and host or switch failures.

Gasper expects to launch the Index in the next month or so, as soon as he has signs a minimum of 10 customers with at least 20,000 ATMs. "We're getting very close," said Gasper at last week's BAI Retail Delivery Show in Anaheim, Calif.

The number of users is a must to ensure confidentiality, Gasper said. "We want to be a hundred percent certain to protect the anonymity of the users. We're very protective of the data," he said.

Several users have expressed interest in including more detailed information such as makes and models of ATMs. Phil Spofford, a vice president at FleetBoston Financial and member of the Gasper board of directors, said, "It would be desirable to make comparisons between an NCR Personas 75 and a like Diebold machine, for example."

But Gasper said that won't happen – at least at first – because of concerns it would make it easier for participants to identify each other. However, he believes the amount of data included in the Index may eventually expand.

"I think we'll end up with a real treasure trove of data," he said.

In addition to helping users assess their performance, the Index could be a valuable resource in negotiations with vendors, Spofford said. "If you had an industry average for large banks and small banks, at least as it relates to Gasper users, you could build that into your service agreements," he said.

The Index was created at the behest of several Gasper users, who were frustrated by the lack of common availability standards. After conversations at the 2001 Gasper users' conference in San Diego, Gasper worked with the 12-member users' board of directors to create a template.

The Index program is open to all licensees of Gasper Manager or Gasper Vantage who have a current maintenance and support agreement for Gasper products.

Participants will be provided with software which, when installed, will configure the data into the appropriate format. "We've made it painless," Gasper said. "The user doesn't have to do anything."

Participants will pay a small fee to cover the costs of producing and distributing the additional reports.