Performance expectations of 'BankWorld' have been successfully revalidated and improved throughout the trials.

"Since the announcement of Release 2.2 of BankWorld, CR2 wanted to measure the performance improvements that could reasonably be expected by our customers should they wish to upgrade to this new release. CR2 also needed to validate our multi-channel platform on Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 which was claiming to provide improved efficiency and productivity" said Padraig O'Neill CR2, Product Development Manager.

Maurice Martin, Developer & Platform Lead, Microsoft Ireland, said: "This is excellent news for Microsoft and CR2 as it confirms our belief in the scalability and capability of our solutions, which when combined, can deliver improved IT efficiency and reduced operational costs, thereby providing real business benefits to financial institutions. Furthermore CR2 has validated the investment that Microsoft has made in Windows Server 2003 in the performance and reliability of the solution."

For these benchmark trials, CR2 evaluated BankWorld 's performance against existing validation results that were carried out last year at the Hewlett Packard (HP) - Intel solution centre, in France. During these stress tests in 2002, 'BankWorld Channel Manager' successfully processed 250 simultaneous active Internet sessions as well as 100,000 card transactions per hour; driving a database of 1 million users, 1.5 million accounts and 150 million transactions.

Under equivalent hardware test conditions CR2 tested Release 2.2 of BankWorld so that the application improvements could be measured in isolation. The new results demonstrate an increase to a factor of 7 in the throughput of Real Financial transactions on the internet channel when first measured using Microsoft Windows Server 2000 and Microsoft's Internet Information Server Version 4. In addition to this impressive increase in the transaction volumes, the CPU usage on these gateways was reduced by more than half.

CR2 then embarked on further comparison tests of its BankWorld Release 2.2 solution, this time using Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, which was launched globally to the market place earlier this year. Testing on Windows Server 2003 demonstrated a further improvement in the throughput of transactions to a value of 80%, along with a small decrease in the required CPU usage.

Padraig O'Neill CR2, Product Development Manager added: "This gives BankWorld Release 2.2 a combined increase in transaction volume to a factor of 12, due to the performance and technical enhancements that have been applied by both CR2 and Microsoft to their respective platform applications. While these figures are impressive the application infrastructure was not significantly under stress and the testing infrastructure did not fully leverage the true scalability of BankWorld."

Commenting on the results, Cian Kinsella, CEO of CR2 says, "While these results are very positive, we anticipate that given further trials additional performance improvements would become evident due to the developments in both hardware and processor speeds that have advanced significantly through Intel's and Hewlett Packard's investments in technologies such as Itanium II. CR2 is working closely with these technology partners to arrange additional benchmark trials in 2004 that will fully illustrate the scalability of the BankWorld solution."