The tests were carried out on the HP superdome and the HP rp8400 servers with HP StorageWorks XP and VA storage arrays. The Oracle database used contained in excess of 9 million accounts, with a mix of accounts types. The transaction load comprised a mix of different transactions, with all financial transactions consisting of two segments (one debit and one credit).

During the end of day processing, the system achieved a batch processing speed of over 95,000 deposit accounts per minute on the HP superdome with 32 CPUs, and over 40,000 deposit accounts per minute on the HP rp8400 with 12 CPUs. The database had over 150 million transaction history records. The average transaction response time was 0.23 seconds.

The tests were conducted at the Hewlett-Packard capacity planning centre at North Ryde in Sydney, Australia. The results confirm the TC/4© application architecture's scalability.

This benchmark significantly raises the performance bar for TC/4. CMC expects an even better performance with further tests. The HP superdome is the leading high-end server from HP's business-critical systems product. The systems were configured with the latest 750MHz PA8700 RISC processor chip set.

For effective customer-centric and centralised banking, robust systems with very high reliability and performance are required. CMC's TC/4© running on HP systems will be able to deliver, today as well as in future.

The Total Concept financial system, version 4.0 (TC/4©), is a state-of-the-art 'centralised core banking solution', providing a truly integrated enterprise-wide platform that fulfils the challenging and dynamic banking requirements of the e-age. TC/4 is a highly parameterised, multi-currency, multi-lingual system that provides rich functionality and supports a multitude of new-age delivery channels. It is a 'customer-centric system' that helps the bank in managing and building lasting relationships with its customers. TC/4 provides a bank with the flexible, robust information technology infrastructure that it needs to adapt to business requirements that are constantly changing.

It is developed using an Oracle 9i RDBMS and BEA middleware Tuxedo 8.0. The branch delivery system is available both in a Windows-based GUI and in a browser-based interface. It also supports multi-lingual data, using UniCode character sets.

TC/4 supports over 40 modules, mainly in the areas of retail banking. CMC also offers treasury management, internet and mobile banking, telephone banking and asset-liability management software solutions, to which TC/4 can be easily interfaced. It can also interface with third party ATM switch and trade-finance products.