Smart Technology Solutions Limited (STS) recently played host to a number of senior representatives from some of its most valued partners during a day of sun, food, drink and cricket.
Guests were invited to watch Surrey CCC take on Glamorgan CCC on the 3rd exciting day of the annual Cricket Festival held at Guildford, as part of STS’ 2015 Partner Day event. The idea behind the day was to thank STS partners for their continued support of STS as a company, and the products and services that it delivers.
Bing Dai, Senior Channel Manager at STS says, “We wanted the opportunity to bring together our partners in a relaxed environment where we could celebrate our successes and share our plans for the future, as well as provide a great networking opportunity. It was a chance to say thank you to our partners and to publically recognise how important they are to us. We wouldn’t be where we are today if it wasn’t for them.”
One of the main topics of conversations during the day, besides cricket, was that of Point to Point Encryption (P2PE) and how to simplify compliance for merchants and reduce PCI DSS scope. The day started play with a presentation from our very own Howard Buck, Development Leader at STS. He described our two different architectural approaches to P2PE together with the features and benefits of each. He also presented the development plan for the coming months. This was followed by presentations from two of our partner organisations, Toshiba Global Commerce Solutions (TGCS) and Vodat International, both of whom use STS’ G8 software but each has taken a different architectural approach to delivering its P2PE solution.
TGCS, a leading provider of payment solutions designed to help retailers manage and process card and other forms of electronic payments, has worked with STS to deliver a fully certified P2PE solution that incorporates the Ingenico On-Guard technology. As always, STS has adopted an agnostic approach and further fully certified P2PE solutions will become available with other PED suppliers.
Vodat International, a supplier of telecom solutions and private managed networks, has taken an alternative approach to P2PE which uses segmented networks and a cloud implementation of G8 with centrally managed routers and firewalls. In this architecture no card details ever appear within the store environment and so by definition it is out of PCI scope.
TGCS and Vodat have been partners of STS for many years and continue to bring in new opportunities. Both of their presentations were very well received by the attendees and further discussions followed throughout the day; many between partners that wouldn’t necessarily talk on a day to day basis.
Another hot topic was that of Apple Pay and its launch within the UK in July. We were delighted to tell people that we are ready to fully support Apple Pay today as a result of the extensive development and certification work completed earlier this year for high value contactless transactions.
We can proudly say that the day was a huge success and we have since received fantastic feedback from those that attended and so will soon start planning for an ever better partner day next year.