With a corporate ad slogan extolling "It's everywhere you want to be" and a payments network that indeed serves nearly every country in the world, you can bet Visa IT executives feel the onus of availability and reliability.
Hiccups simply can't be tolerated when 14,000 financial institutions count on your payment-processing system for more than $1 trillion in annual transaction volume. That's 5,546 payment-transaction messages per second, or 100 million transactions a day, on average. (During the most recent December shopping frenzy, Visa's message gateway handled 9,200 transaction messages per second.)
Placing that volume in context can be difficult, says Sara Garrison, senior vice president of network and open systems development at Visa, in Foster City, California. But think about this, she says: "If you take all the transactions across all the stock markets and exchanges in the world, and you aggregated them over a 24-hour period, we do that volume over a coffee break."
Needless to say, Visa doesn't make infrastructure decisions lightly. But the company does push boundaries and rapidly adopts technologies that could benefit Visa member banks, the merchants they serve and, ultimately, consumers holding the 458 million Visa-branded cards in the U.S. This doesn't mean the company embraces technologies on the high-risk bleeding edge, Garrison says. But it usually finds itself on the leading edge -- which makes it well worth watching as it ventures into use of new data center technologies.
Take Visa's evolution toward a services-oriented architecture (SOA) and use of Web services. Like many companies, Visa has long recognized the inherent value of services-centric application development. But Visa leapt ahead of most companies by extending Web services to business partners.
