Introduction

The advent of Internet technologies has probably had the most radical change in the banking and finance sector. Consumers and businesses alike can now perform transactions with banks on-line. Real-time payment and credit processing are now the norm.

Corillian, Inc.'s Voyager platform offers a secure, flexible, scalable set of Internet banking solutions for financial institutions. Voyager is a single platform that supports multiple lines of business - Consumer banking, Small Business Banking, Wealth Management, Credit Card Management, and Corporate Cash Management. Besides supporting all of Corillian's Line of Business Solutions and Enterprise Applications, Voyager also offers a quick and easy way to integrate the Corillian applications with third party and legacy applications.

To provide scalability, improved security, and enhanced performance, most Internet platforms are designed to include a number of tiers of applications. Corillian Voyager is no different. A web server front-end handles all user requests, while a Voyager Load Balancer (VLB) software on the web front-end serves to balance the load across all the servers in the farm. Along with the Transaction Processor (TP), the VLB handles session creation and management. Microsoft COM serves as the transport medium between the VLB and the TP. The Voyager TP processes customer requests received from the web server. Authentication and authorization of users is handled by the Authentication server (ATC) which is an integral part of the TP. Another component of the TP, the Voyager Response Engine interacts with the repositories to retrieve customer-specific data and providing responses back in XML format to the web front-end. The TP also includes a VLOG service which generates a comprehensive log of all customer operations. All log information as well as customer-specific data repositories are maintained in Microsoft SQL database. Some of the operations performed by Voyager involve interaction with third party hosts of the financial institution. The Host Servers handle these operations. The host servers are mainly responsible for communicating with the client systems and converting data from these systems into the Voyager format.

Figure 1 depicts the topology of the Voyager application.

Figure 1 : The topology of Voyager

The eG Enterprise system treats the Transaction Processor (TP) as a separate server and extracts critical performance statistics from it.