ATM Testing - February 8, 2024
Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2019 proved to be quite interesting. In it, Gartner states:
"The future will be characterized by smart devices delivering increasingly insightful digital services everywhere. We call this the “intelligent digital mesh.”
There are three core themes to the intelligent digital mesh:
- Intelligent: How AI is in virtually every existing technology and creating entirely new categories.
- Digital: Blending the digital and physical worlds to create an immersive world.
- Mesh: Exploiting connections between expanding sets of people, businesses, devices, content and services.
At a high level, this sounds a lot like what Paragon has been saying about payment testing, i.e. you need to:
- Be smarter about how you test (intelligent)
- Virtualize your testing environment (digital)
- Integrate your testing tools within the enterprise (mesh)
And while the Gartner report includes some very futuristic predictions and prognostications (like “Transient Quantum Supremacy”), parts of their “Intelligent digital mesh” are already here. For example, trend number 4 on their top 10 list is “Digital Twins.”
The Need for Digital Transformation
Gartner describes a digital twin as “a digital representation of a real-world entity or system” with the following attributes:
Model:
The digital twin is a functional, system model of the real-world object.
Data:
The digital twin’s data elements relating to the real-world object include identity, time series, current data, contextual data, and events.
Uniqueness:
The digital twin corresponds to a unique physical thing.
Ability to monitor:
You can use the digital twin to query the state of the real-world object or receive notifications (for example, based on an API) in coarse or granular detail.
Funny enough, we basically use the same terms to describe our VirtualATM product:
Model:
VirtualATM provides a functional model of your physical ATMs.
Data:
VirtualATM uses exact virtual copies of your own ATM software components.
Uniqueness:
VirtualATM images correspond to your unique ATMs.
Ability to monitor:
Virtual ATM provides detailed insight into how your ATM software interacts with its physical hardware components, as well as how it communicates with external entities via an API.
We also talk about how VirtualATM can help your organization improve both control and collaboration, automate redundant tasks, increase your testing efficiency and improve test coverage.
In addition, Gartner says that digital twins can drive significant business opportunities in the following ways:
- Improved maintenance and reliability.
- Organizations can use digital twins to...increase operational efficiency.
- Organizations can use data gleaned from digital twins to suggest new products.
- Digital twins can aid innovation by providing insights into how products and services are used and how they can be improved.
- Digital twins offer the possibility of business models centered on guaranteed outcomes.
Finally, Gartner says that organizations that utilize the digital twin model will see “a 10% improvement in effectiveness.”
Will deploying VirtualATM in your ATM testing environment give your organization the same result? We certainly believe that VirtualATM can and will deliver significant benefits. Depending on your current situation (Do you already have all of your Windows 10 migration plans and tools in place?) and how far you want to automate and integrate, you may actually see improvement well beyond what Gartner is projecting.
So whether you subscribe to Gartner or not, they are certainly recognized across the financial services industry for the insight and guidance that they provide. I think most of us would consider them to be experts in the field, so it is nice to see the correlation and validation for what Paragon has been saying about our solutions.
And, while Paragon can’t help you with complex topics such as applying AI to your development processes or Quantum Computing like Gartner can, we can certainly help improve your testing capabilities by building “digital twins” of your ATMs.
Take the first step and let us show you what VirtualATM is all about. I am confident that you will want to take a second look.
