Deutsche Bundesbank

The Challenge

Part of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB), the Deutsche Bundesbank is the central bank of the Federal Republic of Germany. It has nine Regional Offices (formerly known as Land Central Banks), each of which is responsible for operations in one or more of Germany’s federal states, and 66 branches located in larger German towns. With the growth of this distributed organisation, the importance of messaging has increased.

Electronic communication between employees of the Bank and its subsidiaries is based on Lotus Notes. To ensure that external communications are secure, the existing system needed to be extended to provide:

• Communication with internal systems
• Connection to numerous external service providers
• Conversion between standard messaging protocols
• Administration of user authorisation for external communication.

The Nexor Solution

Nexor’s solution was based on two products:

1. Nexor Mailer is a multi-protocol message switch that is used to provide message transfer facilities within organisations and to connect disparate systems. It facilitates the seamless exchange of information between systems using Internet standards (such as SMTP/MIME), X.400 and other protocols. It supports Notary (the IETF specification for notifications and acknowledgements requirements) and MIXER (MIME Internet X.400 Enhanced Relay), a proposed Internet standard that ensures smooth message transitions between Internet and X.400 environments. It provides assured notifications of delivery, non-delivery, receipt and non-receipt, even when messages are passing between different systems.
2. Nexor Management Console manages messaging networks, enabling an organisation’s administrators to monitor, track and troubleshoot across its messaging network. It uses a range of authority levels that can be set individually for each user on each server in the network.

Working closely with a local company, Connector GmbH of Heidelberg, Nexor enabled the Bank to implement the new system and performed all necessary administration, backup, security, virus protection and user administration.

The Result

As well as addressing all the requirements identified by the Bank, the new messaging system provides configurable protection against unsolicited email (spam), which is highly effective and based on criteria such as message source, length and content. By rewriting email addresses, Nexor Mailer can make all addresses appear to external parties in a standard format. It can also generate its own distribution lists from contact details held in a suitable directory.

Nexor Mailer’s design excels in several key non-functional areas:

• Performance – Simultaneous processing of multiple messages enhances system performance.
• Resilience – Individual treatment of messages, rather than using groups, prevents healthy messages being delayed along with corrupt messages.
• Availability – Automatic switching to alternative message transfer agents makes the system more robust.

The enhanced administration facilities provided by the console have made the Bank’s communications more efficient and more reliable. Early warnings enable administrators to resolve many problems before they affect the users.

The Bank has a system that can be scaled to accommodate future growth and one that, through its conformance to standards, will be able to communicate with any messaging systems introduced by the ESCB in the future.