Author Archives: ft-admin

DataBridge on the Microfinance market in Africa

The necessity for BI-Systems has already arrived on the micro-finance market. The amount of banks and financial institutions in Africa that want to put a BI-System of their choice in place is increasing considerably. FRAMETEXX supports Opportunity International in Uganda to do so. By installing the DataBridge Module, the bank is now able to extract and to convert data from TEMENOS T24™ to a relational database. Due to the possibility to access the core data from the landing zone with SQL queries, the data can now easily be aggregated to provide it for the management dashboards. For Opportunity International, the DataBridge is a big step in-between. It is easy to implement and to run and it offers highest flexibility, even for smaller banks in the market.

FLink Teamserver now on RDBMS systems

FRAMETEXX offers an improvement of the Teamserver functionality of FLink Integration Platform. The Teamserver can now be operated on relational databases and provides the customer more performance and flexibility during design time. Using this improvement means that there is no need for other 3rd party sofware (e.g CVS) any more and customers benefit from optimizing the entire installation process of the FLink software.

The FLink Teamserver is basically used for concurrent access to workflows during design time with the FLink Designer, release management and deployment of FLink Service runtime environment. Supported databases are Oracle, MSSQL Server, DB2 and mySQL.

The feature is available in FLink Release 2.14.

DataBridge now available for Temenos T24 R15

FRAMETEXX successfully upgraded the DataBridge Module for the TEMENOS T24™ release R15. The DataBridge upgrade is available with FLink Release 2.14.

Beehive 3 – What’s new?

Beehive 3 released

Logo Beehive 3Beehive 3 offers various improvements for managing the Operational Data Store (ODS) in terms of performance, stability, maintenance and administration.

Fast Load cycle

The key to improved performance is an optimized and less restrictive load strategy. Therefor the way changed data takes into the final ODS stage has been redesigned. Outdated data can now be linked more efficiently to the valid time frame. The optimized load processing between the staging area (STG) and the final ODS stage (GDP) leads to an extensive improvement of performance within the linking of outdated records, particularly in case of high data volume that needs to be changed.
All processing areas influencing performance (keys, indexes, etc.) have been reduced to a minimum without negative impact on performance when querying the data. For stability and performance reasons, key tables, used to enable constraint checks, have been dropped from the load cycle and are not supported any more. Therefor detailed logging mechanisms describe the completeness of the current Beehive load cycle, giving information whether a load has finished successfully or not. If necessary, data constraint checks can be implemented manually by user exits after the load cycle has finished.

Maintenance

The Oracle partitioning option becomes now available in the ODS stage, making the ODS more flexible than before. The embedded use of partitioning assures high performance when processing large data volumes, high maintainability of the ODS stage and gives even faster access to actual and historized data. By range-partitioning of the ODS (by valid-to date), the GDP-tables become easy to maintain, independent from their volume. Admins become able to archive legacy data and separate it from the active ODS by splitting off partitions until a defined date.

Monitoring

The FLink Monitoring view offers new functionalities for maintenance and administration. Beehive 3 jobs can be started, stopped, aborted or restarted. Logs can be archived in order to clean up operational log tables from old load cycle entries. Failed tasks can be skipped in order to complete a Beehive 3 cycle, if tasks failed and are not necessarily to be loaded.

Querying data

An important factor when building the new Beehive Release 3 has been the preservation of the existing ODS structure to maintain the migration effort as low as possible. Certainly, minor changes do appear on optimal data request.
The partitioning of the ODS area demands a modification of indexing, so that existing requests have to be slightly changed to allow for the new subscription. Though, the reorganization of the requests also means a simplification of the queries on the ODS during request for validity periods, as well as a higher performance at data access.

FLink Designer User Guide released

A new release of our FLink Designer User Guide is ready to download. In more than 550 pages it documents all aspects of using FLink plus all the changes implemented in current version 2.12.

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How to download FLink User Guide

Feel free to download a printable PDF version of the User Guide via your FLink Designer installation:

  • Choose Menu “Help”
  • Choose Menu Item “User Guide” to download the current PDF file.

Beehive 3 – Impressive performance boost for load processing

National Bank of Malawi decided to upgrade its Beehive License to the new Beehive 3 release.

Blantyre, Malawi / Hamburg, Germany, July 2012 – FRAMETEXX GmbH, the provider of IT-Solutions in the TEMENOS T24™ environment, announced that National Bank of Malawi has successfully implemented the new release of the FLink Beehive Module.

Beehive 3 offers the bank various improvements for managing the operational data store (ODS) in terms of performance, stability, maintenance and administration. The key to improved performance is an optimized strategy how historical data is calculated in the final ODS stage. The bank also benefits from enhancement of data management of GDP tables, as well as considerable improvement of the monitoring process for operating the Beehive process.

National Bank of Malawi achieves with Beehive 3 a significant decrease of loading time in the staging areas:

Staging areas No. of Records Duration Beehive 2 Duration Beehive 3
IMP ~ 22 Mill 18 minutes 12 minutes
STG ~ 13 Mill 25 minutes 10 minutes
GDP ~ 13 Mill 110 minutes 15 minutes

During a two-weeks onsite visit at the bank’s premises in Blantyre, FRAMETEXX GmbH supported the project team of National Bank of Malawi in setting up the Beehive 3 environment for test and productive system as well as in testing the reporting system. FRAMETEXX also introduced the bank’s IT members into the enhanced monitoring functionalities, Beehive 3 provides, and gave some further recommendation how to optimize the loading times of data.

National Bank of Malawi is a financial services company, based in Malawi. It was listed on the Malawi Stock Exchange in August 2000 with a total of 450,000,000 ordinary shares.

FLink integration platform goes live at Aizkraukles Banka Latvia

Successful system integration: FLink orchestrates the data flow between Temenos T24™ and the bank’s payment system using its excellent ISO8583:1993 connectivity.

Riga, Latvia / Hamburg, Germany, April 2008 – FRAMETEXX GmbH, the provider of IT-Solutions in the T24  environment, announced that Aizkraukles Banka (AB.LV), a modern european bank for private business in Latvia, had a successful „GoLive“ with FLink on 31st March. FLink, FRAMETEXX`s integration platform for connecting T24 to external systems, guarantees the AB.LV an online and offline connection between their T24 system and their payment card system Cortex based on ISO 8583:1993. This T24-Cortex Interface receives a large number of various Payment Card transactions for the AB.LV via online connection, encodes them, produces T24 transactions and sendsback the result  to the Cortex system.

Established in 1993 as a bank that offers its clients high-class service of banking practice in Latvia, the AB.LV is now a bank for private business. Rolands Citajevs, CIO and Member of the Board, says: „We met representatives of FRAMETEXX at a fair in Bangkok in June last year. At that time we were looking for a reliable integration platform to connect our Cortex system, DWH and another systems in an efficient way to our T24 core banking system. Referring to this, the products of FRAMETEXX exceeded all our expectations.“

In a „proof of concept“, FRAMETEXX succeeded against all its competitors. After  installation and successful tests the AB.LV even signed a contract to be „Strategic Partner“ of FRAMETEXX, meaning that the bank enables FRAMETEXX to invite their potential customers to Riga and let them have an impression about how FLink works in practice.

Rolands Citajevs adds: “Because of the fact that we are convinced of the product we want to give other banks the opportunity to experience it in real. We are interested in development of FLink technology which really has great potential and will be happy to share our success with other banks“.

This successful „GoLive“ in Riga – configuring 6 complex interfaces  (Cortex, DWH etc.) took just 4 months, including analysis and user acceptance test. Rolands Citajevs lauded the whole process and the work of the company:

„FRAMETEXX delivered a firm and reliable product. Furthermore, it was a professional way of cooperation. The communication between our bank and FRAMETEXX has always been constructive and goal-oriented so that the project took place faster than we thought. I expect to reduce our costs of maintenance, because with FLink we are in a position not only to reduce the number of interfaces but also to simplify them and to make them more transparent. We are glad that we have choosen FRAMETEXX as a partner and FLink with all its components. I am a happy customer!“

The AB.LV builds several interfaces with FLink and plans to increase the number of interfaces, handled by FLink, in the near future. FLink is designed to suite the needs of any financial institution.