Article

Opening Windows for ATMs

Windows has set the stage for unforeseen problems.

June 13, 2007 by Martin Macmillan — Director, Level Four Software

*About the author: Martin Macmillan is the marketing director of United Kingdom-based Level Four Software Ltd. He is an industry expert who regularly touts the critical role ATM-application testing plays in today's ATM environment.

 

Until recently, ATM networks had changed very little since their inception. But IBM's withdrawal of support for OS/2 - the long-reigning operating system for ATMs - at the turn of the 21st century instigated a period of sustained change. 

 

According to London-based Retail Banking Research, OS/2 usage is decreasing by approximately 8 to 10 percent a year, and will likely be phased out over the next four to five years. Although global adoption rates vary according to analyst research, RBR estimates that 64 percent of Western Europe's ATM networks have already migrated, and Boston-based Dove Consulting, a division of Hitachi, projects that 63 percent of all U.S. financial institutions by 2008 will have followed Western Europe's lead.

 

Windows has become the ATM operating system of choice. 

 

European banks have largely completed their Windows migrations. Being early adopters of the new OS, many found the migration to be more trying than they anticipated.  In order to achieve maximum return on investment, FIs can't gloss over the fundamental changes Windows has brought to the ATM channel. They also must consider opportunities to enhance their current ATM offerings.

 

Opportunities and challenges

 

Through IBM's cessation of its support for OS/2, ATM deployers were forced to consider other options. To date, regional variations have resulted in migration being more widespread in some markets than others, with Europe leading the way and adoption in the United States being slower than expected.

 

Martin Macmillan

Banks in Europe are recognising that in an industry where service differentiation is becoming increasingly difficult, the greater graphics and personalization capabilities offered by Windows are very attractive. But in order to fully exploit that functionality, significant investment is required to upgrade to high-bandwidth TCP/IP network

 

So it's no surprise that many TCP/IP-migration projects are coinciding with Windows migrations, moving away from the likes of SNA and X.25 communications protocols to support software-distribution requirements.

 

Multivendor opportunities

 

For many FIs, the need to move to Windows also is being mandated by a need to move toward an open standard. XFS introduces a layer of separation between ATM software and hardware, allowing the two to be independently sourced. 

 

The ATM deployer now has an opportunity to run a single application across a multivendor estate, which is bringing greater competition into the ATM hardware market through effective commoditization. It also allows independent ATM-software providers to enter the market, often with much more innovative solutions than those provided by ATM manufacturers, whose primary revenues are driven by selling hardware.

 

But early adopters, predominantly in Europe, have reported non-compliance issues around the XFS standard, whereby some vendors are not fully embracing the level playing field that open standards supports. 

 

It is important to encourage hardware and software vendors to fully comply with the XFS standard to avoid interoperability problems. Software benchmarking that detects XFS-compliance problems will help FIs overcome non-compliance challenges, ensuring that interoperability problems are identified and rectified at an early stage. 

 

Testing crowded ATM terminals

 

While enhanced ATM services and XFS will create an improved and more consistent customer experience, the increased number of applications on ATM terminals threatens the fundamental provision of fast and efficient customer services. A modern Windows-based ATM may have as many as eight separate applications running concurrently - ATM software, software distribution, monitoring agent, anti-virus, etc. - which can cause stability problems. ATM deployers must undertake more frequent software updates and patches, causing unforeseen operational and testing issues that many were not prepared for. 

 

A large part of the Windows-migration initiative is consumed by the need to overcome that challenge, which can result in problems such as memory leaks that cause ATMs to reboot, leading to unplanned ATM downtime. The knock-on effect of this is a potential loss of interchange revenue, but also the immeasurable impact downtime has on customer perceptions.

 

In terms of updates, not only is the frequency of supplier releases much greater (sometimes up to one per month), but also the nature of the "ATM testing" problem has fundamentally changed.  

 

Instead of just testing host-messaging communications, FIs need to thoroughly regression-test their ATM-application software in conjunction with all the other pieces of software on the ATM, including every time a Windows update is applied. Many FIs did not foresee the increase in testing overhead, and subsequently have suffered downtime problems.  

 

According to Celent's Madhavi Mantha, in today's open-standards-based environment, the software running on the ATM is updated more frequently than ever before, "making testing a very significant effort for banks, and a potential bottleneck in their effort to fully leverage the flexibility of Windows-based ATMs. In response, best-practice financial institutions are investing in automated-testing solutions in order to shorten the test cycle and get new features and functionality into production more quickly and cost effectively."

 

Automated testing of these applications by using simulated ATM hardware enables a much greater depth and breadth of testing than would ever be possible manually. Automated testing also offers FIs the added benefit of being examining the performance of one XFS open-standards solution against another, allowing them to select the hardware and software that best matches their needs. 

 

Software benchmarking is attracting a lot of attention from ATM deployers that are considering the move to Windows and multivendor software. Crucially, software used to test benchmark ATM applications must be independent of the ATM manufacturers.

 

(Read ATM Marketplace's guide, ATM software: Awakening the ATM channel.) 

 

Enhancing ATM monitoring

 

Not only does Windows offer incentives to improve the ATM-testing model, it also provides an opportunity to enhance the scope of ATM-networkd monitoring. Typically, on the old OS/2 platform, there was a reliance on host-based monitoring to detect problems on the terminal. Log files would be passed from transaction-processing systems, and operators were able to second-guess what was happening at the ATM. 

 

The migration to Windows gives ATM deployers a new opportunity to deploy agent-based monitoring that can talk directly to a monitoring server and give a consolidated view of the entire ATM network at the XFS layer, allowing direct access into the WIN32 API to control Windows' processes remotely. 

 

All of that allows for much closer terminal monitoring and provides greater intelligence about the health of the network. That information helps FIs reduce downtime. And independent monitoring is more often recognized as a best solution, because it presents a true, accurate and, most importantly, unbiased view across a multivendor ATM estate.

 

Advanced ATM monitoring will also allow banks and processors to evaluate their agreements with third-party service agents. By having better intelligence about the exact nature of ATM faults, the number of service calls can be reduced, and the manual repair of individual terminals will become more efficient. Software errors can be remotely diagnosed and rectified without having to reboot the machine, which increases ATM uptime.

 

Are banks exploiting Windows opportunities?

 

Despite the clear opportunities the Windows environment offers ATM software vendors, the initial response from the main-terminal manufacturers was to simply develop Windows-based offerings of their existing OS/2 software, typically based on protocols such as NDC+ or 912. By merely complying with the basic needs of a Windows operating system, they did not exploit the rich functionality the new platform presented.

 

IT departments, keen to ensure that their systems operated on Windows, implemented basic Windows-compliant software, presenting more headaches than they anticipated. The limited additional functionality that resulted threw open the debate about the business-case justification of the move. After such great investment in Windows, new application software, TCP/IP networking and modern ATMs to support all of that, deployers questions how much better Windows really was.

  

Arguably, there has been a false dawn of ATM software - where FIs moved to Windows but did not change their software architecture to one that reflects the technology their networks now supports. Many FIs are now waking up to the fact that they have the infrastructure in place to support a richer customer experience.

 

At the moment, many FIs in Europe are seeking to maximize the personalization and enhanced customer-service opportunities that Windows presents, leading to the desire to implement Windows-based software that has advanced functionality at the heart of their operations.  

 

The most successful projects are those that have not just involved the technology implementers but have collaborated and pulled differing business units together to drive the project. It is the business operations that best recognize the fundamental need to not only migrate to a Windows operating system, but also to exploit its opportunities via new software and services that succeed. Increasingly, FIs are recognising modern application software as the key to unlocking the value of their ATM investments.

 

Conclusion

 

There are many advantages to be gained from migrating to Windows. While U.S. FIs are a little behind in the migration, there is a good opportunity to learn from the efforts made in Europe and implement projects that make use of the Windows environment to its fullest potential.

 

In order to justify the business case for migrating systems to Windows and XFS, FIs must consider multivendor strategies to enable better ATM monitoring as well as employing a modern software architecture that enables them to deliver the services that the business desires.

 

The investment that is required to migrate to Windows, including the need for new hardware and an upgraded communications infrastructure, is forcing FIs to question the business case for migration where they cannot offer customers more than what was previously available on OS/2.

 

The most intelligent organizations are now reviewing the software architectures they have in place and are devising a strategy to take greatest advantage of their investment in infrastructure and maximize their customer service offerings on their modern Windows ATMs. 

 

The migration to Windows is truly unlocking the potential of the ATM and paving the way for the introduction of more revenue-generating services, cost effectively.