With Pivotal GemFire’s rich feature-set running the distributed data grid, GIRE’s Rapipago has a platform that will allow them to meet future business needs, operate a real-time business operation within unreliable networks, and scale with growth. According to Valdez, “Pivotal GemFire is not only a backbone to the Rapipago application, it is a backbone to our business. It has helped us save time and money while reducing risk and improving our application performance. We can better manage business because of GemFire. Looking back, I can’t imagine us developing significant pieces of our data tier from scratch when such a proven, well-supported data grid like GemFire is available to us.”
To learn more, visit pivotal.io/big-data/pivotal-gemfire.
1. GIRE is a leading financial services company based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They provide billing, collection, payment, and transaction processing services via the web, call center, retail service centers, kiosks, and an agent network that includes supermarkets, subways, and other locations. Their key brand is Rapipago, one of the most well-known and popular services across all of Argentina. With over 2,600 branches in their collection network and 4,000 points of sale, Rapipago supports payments between 1,200+ companies and their consumers – around 19 million transactions per month. Rapipago’s card, check, and cash-based transactions ultimately collect money on behalf of mobile phone, automotive, banking, energy, gas, water, insurance, credit card and cable companies, as well as schools, municipalities, tourism operators, and more.
CHALLENGE
Nightly Batches and Unreliable Networks Limit
Business Operations
Rapipago kiosks and branches collect money during the day, and an earlier version of their system would deliver a batch file to be processed each night. Because of the delay with batch processing, their management team could see only transactions after a day’s time passed. The company wanted to move to an online architecture to support real-time processing and analysis. Additional challenges stemmed from the fact that the kiosk locations had unreliable Internet and telecommunications connectivity, but still needed to be able to collect money when network connections were down.
No Single, Real-Time View of Cash Poses Risks
As a collector of cash, part of the operations of Rapipago includes managing the cash on-hand at branches. Without a real-time system, the company didn’t have an accurate, current view of key metrics – like cash – and the information delay posed a risk to the business. For example, it wasn’t clear when to send an armed vehicle to take cash off the street at any given location. The GIRE leadership agreed that a real-time view would help them run the business better.
AT-A-GLANCE
Challenges
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Unreliable networks limit data analysis
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Nightly batches unable to provide real-time analysis
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Business operations carry unnecessary inefficiency and risk
Solution
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Pivotal GemFire
Key Benefits
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Real-time transactions and analysis over
unreliable networks
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Guaranteed data synchronization
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Reliable persistence, advanced replication, and
high availability
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Distribution and support of local business rules
CASE STUDY
GIRE
ENABLING REAL-TIME TRANSACTIONS AND ANALYSIS
OVERVIEW
“ Pivotal GemFire is not only a backbone to the Rapipago application, it is a backbone to our business. It has helped us save time and money while reducing risk and improving our application performance. We can better manage our business because of GemFire. Looking back, I can’t imagine us developing significant pieces of our data tier from scratch when such a proven, well-supported data grid like GemFire is available to us.”
— Gustavo Valdez, Chief of Architecture and Development, GIRE
pivotal.io