Potential Technologies rewrites OFACSearch.com

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 11, 2003 -- Potential Technologies has teamed with The Oasis Group to rewrite the OFACSearch.com website.

Potential Technologies rewrites OFACSearch.com

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 11, 2003 -- Potential Technologies has teamed with The Oasis Group to rewrite the OFACSearch.com website.

The Treasury Department's Office Of Foriegn Assets Control (OFAC) requires many companies to keep an eye on their customers. Originally required of only banks and financial institutions, the passage of the Patriot Act extended these regulations to many other industries including travel companies, car dealerships, non-profits, and insurance companies. OFAC regulations require many companies to monitor the lists it publishes to ensure they aren't doing business with individuals, corporations, charities, and vessels that have been proscribed by various government agencies such as the FBI, CIA, DEA, Department of State, etc. This is a compliance nightmare for many companies because the lists are updated irregularly and there are so many lists to check. Many companies still do their checking by hand.

OFACSearch.com has provided an easy way for companies to comply with OFAC requirements, but the current OFACSearch.com model was straining under the increased load caused by the expansion of OFAC regulations.

"Additionally," said James Ralston of Oasis Group, "we wanted to provide OFACSearch.com in a variety of different configurations and pricing models to serve all the new types of business that are now subject to OFAC compliance. These different configurations run the gamut from low volume pay-per-search users to high volume per-search system integrators to integration as a network appliance for clients who are uncomfortable uploading their customer lists to the Internet. These options were simply cost-prohibitive with the infrastructure used to run OFACSearch V1. We decided to rewrite the system using open source components so that we would no longer be encumbered by the licensing costs that that had previously made these markets inaccessible to us. Using open source software also gives us the benefit of being able to pledge complete and uncompromising support and customization for our clients because every single line of code in the system is under our control."

Oasis decided to use FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, and the gSOAP library to develop the high performance, standards complaint OFACSearch web services. This brought the total cost of a single OFACSearch system within a range that would allow companies to purchase their own unit at an extremely competitive price. Using open source software also enabled Oasis to approach the per-search pricing models because the cost of scaling the system to handle the new high volume was now manageable. Additionally, OFACSearch v2 turned out to perform considerably better than the orignal version.

"We can process as many as forty million requests per hour," said James, "In addition to the ease of integration using standards compliant web services, and maintenance-free operation that this new version provides, we can't see why anyone should have difficulty with OFAC compliance."

"Using open source components for the foundation of the product gave us the flexibility we needed to meet very high requirements at a challenging price limit," said Bill Moran, lead programmer for the project, "We're working with a stable platform that gave us a lot of room to optimize."

Bill claims the OFACSearch.com rewrite provides another example of how open source software can help business. "The open nature of FreeBSD allowed us to trim the fat off the operating system, thus giving us a system that outperformed our original expectations. With FreeBSD's track record, we can feel confident that each installation is secure and reliable."

"We're looking forward to helping clients integrate OFACSearch into their existing systems," Bill said, "The product is designed to allow any client program to tap into it to check for OFAC compliance, and we're poised to help clients make that integration happen quickly and seamlessly."

Potential Technologies is a software development and technical services company located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Potential Technologies is available for contract system administration in the Pittsburgh area, and for programming services nationwide.

The Oasis Group is a technical services company located in Summit, New Jersey that specializes in public finance and government regulation.