By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM has rebranded its Net.Commerce Payment Server, a product that allows merchants to process secure credit card transactions from their Web storefronts, as WebSphere Payment Manager 2.1. The new name comes with lots of new functions, most of them aimed at making IBM’s payment server more attractive to ISPs, ASPs, banks and other financial institutions who need to process credit and debit transactions in multiple languages in multiple currencies for multiple merchant customers. WebSphere Payment Server does just that. IBM says that 40 of the top 100 retailers use its Net.Commerce software and that 50 of the top 100 banks are using one of its various payment servers. IDC predicts that web hosting will grow to a $12bn annual business by 2002 and that ASPs will rake in $2bn a year by 2003. And with the new payment server, IBM is hoping to hitch its WebSphere Payment Manager sales to those fast-growing markets.
The new payment server is the first Version 2 release, even though it is called 2.1. It is a follow-on to a set of less sophisticated payment servers that have been announced by IBM for its Net.Commerce suite in the last year for Unix, NT, AS/400 and S/390 servers. The Version 1 payment servers were designed primarily to be used by a single merchant in a single language. The new WebSphere Payment Manager 2.1 can support multiple languages and is appropriate for use by a single organization with multiple web presences or multiple subsidiaries as well as for ISPs and ASPs who by the very nature of their businesses are supporting web transactions for many other companies. WebSphere Payment Manager 2.1 runs on AIX, Solaris and Windows NT 4.0. IBM says that in early 2000 it will add similar multicurrency, multicompany, multilanguage support to the existing Payment Server for OS/400 V4. The program can hook into Oracle, DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server databases. The standard English edition of the program is available now, with national language support coming on December 14. Support for CyberCash also comes on December 14. IBM says that Payment Manager, which is being offered as a standalone product, will be bundled with future releases of the Net.Commerce and Net.Commerce Hosting suites. The latter is still only available on NT, AIX and Solaris, the former supports these plus OS/390 and OS/400. WebSphere Payment Manager costs $15,000 per processor (not per server), with upgrades from prior payment servers costing $9,000 per processor. Each additional merchant costs $175 each, and the CyberCash support costs $300 per processor.
