Temenos, the banking software company which has long been a proponent of APIs, has launched its a new version of its core platform T24 Transact along with a digital front end, Temenos Infinity, which can be deployed separately or together with Transact either on popular clouds or on-premise. The company calls the applications cloud-native, cloud-agnostic and said they have been certified on Microsoft Azure, AWS, Oracle Cloud or Temenos’s Software as a Service (SaaS).

Mark Gunning, director of the Temenos business solutions group, said the company is able to make this move because it had made its business logic independent of the underlying platform.

“Five years ago we saw that we had to invest in a major re-platforming to a cloud native solution. We started the journey by moving to Java deployment and we are completing it in April with the fully cloud native solutions.”

A few years ago it moved toward cloud-ready software and realized there was more potential benefit from the cloud platform. In April it will release the cloud matrix — a complete move to containers plus some other changes which make better use of cloud for scalability.

“We have done a lot of testing and everything has met our hopes in terms of scalability.”

For that it needed a database that could scale and it chose NuoDB which, Gunning said, fuses internet, cloud and provides horizontal scalability and great resilience. Temenos now has a minority stake in the database company.

“Through a strategic partnership and participation in NuoDB an enterprise-class distributed SQL database provider, banks will benefit from unlimited processing capacity, auto-elastic scalability and the highest levels of active/active resilience across data centers, geographies and cloud platforms,” Temenos said in its announcement.

Temenos customers will be able to deploy on two clouds and move from one to the other immediately if one cloud provider falters due to active-active failover across cloud providers.

That has become a popular feature, according to WANdisco CEO and co-founder David Richards. Gil Press quoted him at Forbes “CTOs and CIOs want to move their organizations to multi-cloud architectures to protect themselves from over-reliance on a single cloud vendor and to avoid lock-in. A multi-cloud strategy avoids this, and also enables companies to take advantage of each cloud’s unique or best-performing capabilities.”

“Because the business logic moves smoothly to the new platform, we can continue support for the existing platforms our clients run on,” Gunning said. “Those running on-premise can migrate to the new products and then opt to use the cloud native capabilities in the future if they wish to take advantage of the many benefits these offer.”

After first offering T24 in the public cloud in 2011, Temenos has been surprised and pleased at the recent rapid increased acceptance of core banking in the cloud. “We always knew there would be a hockey stick graph of acceptance of core banking in the cloud and it has now arrived”.

“Eighteen months ago questions about cloud were strategic, about cloud for someday, and the detailed questions were about on-premise deployment. That has changed and now we are in front of very serious banks and all they want to talk about is cloud deployment.”

One long-standing client will move to full cloud matrix and another will launch a completely new business in the cloud.

The conversion from Temenos’ existing Digital Front Office and T24 Core Banking products are automatic. Upgrades for existing clients to the new cloud-native, cloud-agnostic Temenos products are available from April 2019. All Temenos SaaS products run on the new Temenos platform.

Temenos Infinity is the name for the omni-channel digital front end product which currently how more than 300 banking clients who can use it to transform multiple banking channels into a a fast, consistent customer journey, the company said in its announcement. It integrates with Avoka, the digital customer acquisition and onboarding platform that Temenos recently acquired. Temenos Infinity can be implemented through APIs as an independent front end platform to legacy third-party core banking systems.

Gunning said Infinity has already been sold to two banks as a front end to their legacy core banking systems.

It could provide a path for banks running in older systems to start their move to digital with the Infinity front end and then deploy a digital back office systems, preferable Temenos Transact, said Gunning.

David Arnott, chief executive officer at Temenos, said the company has been investing 20% of revenues in R&D.

“We were the first to launch a core banking system in the cloud in 2011. This marks another key milestone as we revolutionize our banking software to accelerate cloud adoption. We see the market opportunity for packaged software expand significantly as banks look for a faster time to value.”

Moving to the cloud can provide up to 10x in infrastructure savings, the company said. It offers continuous deployment of software upgrades.

“We used to release software on monthly cycles, but that was not fast enough for us,” said Gunning. “We changed the way we developed, bought some technology and increased the speed cycle of development. Now all releases are done daily into our internal systems and each night we run 250,000 tests automatically.

“If anything fails the change is backed out. This has greatly improved both speed of development and quality. We have now adapted the approach and made the same technology available to our clients and called it Temenos Cloud Assemble. It greatly increases the control the clients have over their environments whilst reducing time to market for change. You can spin up a complete Temenos environment in seconds. It clones the environment, clones images and speeds up the systems so clients can develop in the morning and consume in the afternoon. It is attracting a lot of interest from our clients who are dealing with continuous change and has been licensed and delivered to its first bank.”