TaxiEpay fares well with managed systems

Live TaxiEpay, a mobile EFTPOS solution provider for taxis, has adopted a managed systems environment to help it process POS transactions.

The company offers mobile and fitted EFTPOS terminals, accompanied by back-end and value added services, to drivers and operators across the country. Managing and processing payments for taxi drivers and operators across Australia, the company requires a reliable IT system.

Ed Kazic, Head of IT, Live TaxiEpay, has the responsibility of ensuring that the hardware used by Live TaxiEpay, and the crucial data it processes on a daily basis, is secure at all times.

“I was looking for a more robust managed services solution, and more importantly, 24/7 support, which we had not had in the past. Our IT systems are absolutely critical during business hours, with key payment processes occurring throughout the day that ultimately result in the whole taxi industry being paid on a daily basis,” Kazic says.

“If our systems go down or we lose our data, not only are we at risk of breaching our contracts, but the small companies and owner operators who rely on these payments do not get paid,” he explains.

Live TaxiEpay signed up with Interactive for a managed services solution. According to Kazic, this decision was in part due to the 24/7 support, high-level facilities and reporting functionality offered by the solution.

“It wasn’t about the cost saving for us, it was more about receiving a well-rounded service,” he said.

The managed services solution provides both development and production environments for Live TaxiEpay. The development environment has two virtual servers running, forming a mini version of the production environment. This allows Live TaxiEpay to not only develop new features, but also allows the company to test the functionality of changes and run strict verification processes. Once the changes are verified, they can then easily transfer them to the production environment.

A fully managed firewall and Internet service is also provided by Interactive, dedicated entirely to Live TaxiEpay’s environments. The solution protects Live TaxiEpay data in three different ways, ensuring that there are several ways to recover or restore data should a major failure occur. The solution provides a level of redundancy surpassing that of Live TaxiEpay’s previous supplier, with a two hour response time to each of their Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth offices.

“What made it easy to work with Interactive is that they were quick to understand our business. I had a good idea of what I wanted and Interactive got involved in helping me support my IT strategy. They were able to provide a really supportive and flexible approach in building a service level agreement to suit exactly what I needed,” said Kazic.