2. Blackhawk Network - Who are we?
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• Blackhawk Network is
– A prepaid and payments network.
– A market leader in card-based financial solutions.
– The largest provider of third-party gift cards.
– Exclusive network of leading grocery, mass, drug, convenience, and
specialty retailers globally.
– Over 80,000 stores and reaches more than 165 million consumers each
week.
3. Blackhawk Network - Who are we?
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4. Blackhawk Network - Who are we?
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The Opportunity
• Extremely high TCO of Blackhawk’s legacy switching
platform
– Tandem Nonstop Base-24 platform (highly fault-tolerant with 5 9’s
availability)
– Mission-critical system
– System with high (and rapidly growing) transaction-processing volumes
– High support and operational cost
– Prohibitive on-boarding costs
– Inflexible architecture and limited scalability
– Lack of agility in adapting to business needs and market trends.
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The Solution – BLAST
• Runs on open technologies and commodity hardware
• Built on top of the JPOS open source framework and uses
GigaSpaces for data caching and message routing
• Highly available and predictable linear horizontal scalability
• Extremely low latency
– Platform overhead is only 10-20 ms
• Rapid host-to-host integrations on any wire format (ISO 8583, web
services, custom interfaces)
• High throughput
– 2700 tps sustained across a 3 node cluster
• Highly configurable transaction processing framework based on the
Java stack
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BLAST Architecture
FEP
GigaSpaces
Config
Space
Txn
Space
Msg
Cach
e
Issuer
Processor
BLAST
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Summary
• GigaSpaces is a strategic partner to Blackhawk Network
• Tried and proven recipe for building highly scalable
platforms.
• Growing our use of GigaSpaces across the enterprise
– Blackhawk Settlement and Reconciliation Platform
– Message Mediation Service
9. Q & A
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