(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Web hosting provider Macquarie Hosting (www.macquarietelecom.com/hosting) has signed a three-year, million dollar deal with Australian electronic payment gateway provider eWAY (www.eway.com.au) to provide eWAY secure, fully-managed hosting to underpin the payments of many online merchants.
According to the deal, announced Tuesday by Macquarie Hosting, a division of Australian telco Macquarie Telecom (www.macquarietelecom.com), Macquarie Hosting will host eWAY's online payment system, mission critical transaction applications and encrypted customer data on a mix of dedicated Sun Microsystems and HP servers.
The eWAY payment gateway will be hosted in Macquarie Hosting's ISO and DSD Gateway-certified data centre, the Intellicentre, equipped with high-availability firewalls, dual-redundant server load balancing and secure, high-throughput Internet connectivity.
eWAY offers a range of methods to link merchant sites to the payment gateway, including integration with more than 100 shopping carts and billing systems. eWAY is also the only payment gateway provider in Australia with direct wholesale agreements with American Express and CBA.
"Merchants and consumers quite rightly demand that an online payment system be hosted in the most secure environment and keep pace with the latest trends in payment preferences and e-commerce transactions," said eWAY founder and chief executive officer Matt Bullock said in a statement.
eWAY has grown its customer base by more than 65 per cent in the last year alone, and Macquarie's hosting will support the further expansion of eWAY both locally and globally, increasing customer confidence at the same time.
eWAY's partners include major Australian banks such as the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, National Australia Bank and St George, as well as international businesses including Barclays in the UK and ANZ in New Zealand.
"Customer expectations around ease of use, guaranteed security and 100 percent availability of applications continue to rise, increasing pressure on the provision of online payment services," Bullock said. "In turn, we are looking to partner with professionals like Macquarie Hosting to meet these standards and expectations without being distracted from our primary focus -- growing the business."
In September 2008, Macquarie signed a three year, $1 million deal with Australian marketing agency Global Red (www.globalred.com.au) to provide a fully-managed dedicated virtualized hosting solution to host Global Red's mission-critical CRM, campaign management and analytical applications used by key clients such as NRMA, Priceline and Toyota.