HPE commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying HPE Nonstop Compute.¹ This abstract will focus on organizations with significant transaction processing volumes, their use of HPE Nonstop, and its value to their organizations.

The interviewees were in the financial services industry and included:

• A technology leader at a North America-based organization with $25 billion to $49 billion in annual revenue.

• A security leader at an EMEA-based organization with $50 billion to $99 billion in annual revenue.

• An IT operations leader at an APAC-based organization with $5 billion to $9 billion in annual revenue.

HPE Nonstop Systems provided their organizations with a fully integrated, fault‑tolerant systems platform designed to keep mission‑critical workloads running continuously without service interruption, and takeover at the millisecond level. It combines fault tolerance via a shared-nothing, full-system clustered architecture; built‑in high availability; and modern system interfaces. The platform also delivers high scalability, which is the capacity to ensure consistent, always‑on operations with high uptime SLAs, even as the solution grows in volume and use cases.

Interviewees noted that prior to using HPE Nonstop Systems, their organizations faced challenges primarily from increasing digital payment volume, low latency requirements, and real-time settlement windows. In these high-volume transaction processing settings, interviewees shared how transaction-per-second (TPS) ceilings restricted the ability to scale services, while legacy platforms had imposed high resource costs and limited flexibility for growth. The interviewees’ organizations adopted HPE Nonstop Systems to mitigate the high costs of downtime for mission-critical workloads.‑payment volume, low‑latency requirements, and real‑time settlement windows.

Their Nonstop Systems supported tightly concentrated workloads such as switching, reconciliation, and continuous payment processing with high-speed, low-latency financial transactions and stable, data center-bound connectivity. They configured their environments to maintain consistent transactions per section (TPS) ranges and to support regulatory timing requirements, as well as requirements around speed, low‑latency financial transactions and stable, data center‑bound connectivity. Workloads focused on transaction integrity, payment switching, reconciliation steps, and parallel processing for core banking functions.

Investment Drivers For Transaction Processing Organizations

Prior to deploying HPE Nonstop Systems, interviewees described how their technology ecosystems lacked the resilience, security, and scalability demanded by high‑volume operations. Increasing transactional and data‑processing demands overwhelmed their legacy architectures’ capacity to sustain the continuous, real‑time requirements of mission‑critical workloads. At the same time, core systems showed signs of structural fatigue, creating exposure across performance, risk management, operational continuity, and other common challenges, including:

• Steep customer, compliance, and operational impacts of downtime. The interviewees shared how their organizations’ prior environments had experienced recurring performance degradation driven by growing transaction volumes. Transactional systems frequently hit throughput limits and bottlenecks, and even short outages disrupted services and created ripple effects across service delivery. Failover-driven designs paused real‑time flows during switching events, which prolonged maintenance and reduced predictability.
  The technology leader in the financial services industry shared: “[The cost of downtime for us] is around $2 million to $2.7 million for every hour, and it’s a bit of an exponential-losses situation. As you go from 4 hours and beyond, that could go up to tens of millions of dollars because the queue is building up [and] we can’t shut that pipe down. We have to give customers access to [their] money.”

• Security gaps. Interviewees shared how cyber incidents in their organizations’ prior environments exposed deep weaknesses in older system layers. Insufficient segmentation allowed cyberactors to penetrate deep operational layers, revealing weaknesses in legacy systems as security gaps complicated recovery efforts and increased reliance on manual governance, reporting, and forensics.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared how their organization would need to consider purchasing additional security tools to stay ahead of sophisticated cyberattacks: “Considering the latest modernized attack, I might have to introduce different security providers. … [With HPE Nonstop], I do not require multiple vendors … and [that’s] without impacting performance.”

• Constraints to operational and revenue scalability. The interviewees reported that rapid growth in transactional demand outpaced the capabilities of earlier architecture, which had reached the upper limits of their transaction‑handling capabilities. Transaction‑per‑second ceilings restricted the ability to scale services, limiting flexibility for growth and modernization efforts.
  Capital and operational costs also magnified scalability constraints. Aging legacy hardware required costly resource optimization and expensive capacity cycles.

HPE Nonstop Features

The interviewees shared how their organizations searched for a solution that could support uninterrupted, continuous operations of critical workloads, align with modernization goals, and enable scalable, data‑driven capabilities across complex environments. In particular, the solution needed to ensure:

• High‑performance uptime across critical workflows. Interviewees discussed how their organizations selected HPE Nonstop Systems because of its abilities to operate continuously without downtime, sustain workload‑intensive processing cycles, deliver predictable throughput, and manage failures without impacting live services.

• Enterprise modernization and platform security. Interviewees described how their organizations sought a more unified operational model with HPE to replace fragmented legacy environments. The platform needed to manage increasing transaction volumes, enable parallel workloads, and maintain predictable performance. The interviewees’ organizations also required centralized administration, diagnostic visibility, and predictable cost structures that aligned resource use with workload demand.

• Insight‑driven architecture for advanced analytics. The interviewees emphasized the importance of HPE Nonstop Systems’ capabilities to support real‑time and near‑real‑time data access, with robust data‑collection pathways and monitoring tools to improve visibility and decision confidence. In particular, they noted the need for an advanced data layer to enable and scale AI and big data and integration across multiple operational tiers.
   

Key Results Transaction Processing Organizations

The results of the investment for the interviewees’ organizations include:

A 90% increase in uptime for 24/7 mission-critical systems. HPE Nonstop Systems consistently delivered higher operational stability and improved performance predictability by stabilizing throughput under high transaction volumes and lowering latency in routine and peak conditions. This sustains near‑continuous availability and sharply reduces unplanned disruptions that previously could cost millions annually. Additional interviewee-reported benefits included:

• Broad-based improvements in uptime and availability. Interviewees reported that the HPE Nonstop platform increased total processing efficiency by improving transaction throughput, reducing latency, and strengthening system responsiveness, even at peak load. The data environment also became more consistent, as parallel processing and fault‑tolerant database structures reduced corruption risk and supported reliable real‑time analytics.

• Faster and more seamless failover capabilities. Nonstop’s fault‑tolerant architecture enabled instantaneous failover between system components, which reduced and removed transaction bottlenecks and operational delays. The technology leader at the financial services company noted faster switching time with HPE. They said, “From one failure server to another server, HPE Nonstop Systems was 8% better compared to [our prior environment, and] for a bank, that makes a huge, huge difference.”

• Improved system performance. These gains in uptime and failover also contributed to better performance, lower variability during high‑demand periods, and a more predictable user experience. The technology leader at a financial services company noted that system performance improved by 7%. They shared, “When it comes to the TPS (total transaction per second), HPE Nonstop was 7% better as compared to [our prior environment].”

A 75% decrease in exposure to breach costs. HPE Nonstop Systems strengthens overall security by reducing alert volume, lowering unauthorized access attempts, and decreasing severe attack exposure, even as transaction volumes increase rapidly. Transaction processing environments benefited from:

• Proactive and reactive security optimizations. Interviewees described how the Nonstop platform reduced exposure to threats, improved incident stability, and supported more efficient oversight of large‑scale environments. Security patching and update cycles became faster, reducing downtime windows by 18% to 20% and minimizing operational vulnerability during maintenance. The consolidated security stack reduced the need for multiple third-party security tools, lowering operational overhead while maintaining protection.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared how HPE Nonstop reduced downtime related to security patching and strengthening by up to 20%, from 120 to 100 minutes on average: “[With HPE Nonstop], time for updating, upgrading, and patching in terms of security has come down drastically, [and] that 18% to 20% time savings is crucial. It’s very important because whenever you are applying the patches and updates, your main system gets down. You cannot run the business; you have your system down for some time because at the back end, you are running the patches, you are running the update, so that is another significant improvement.”

• Fewer external attacks. The platform reduced platform level security alerts by 40% to 60%, which lowered operational noise and improved the signal-to-risk ratio for security teams. Unauthorized access attempts declined by 30% to 40%, as stronger process isolation and integrated access controls reduced exposure at system boundaries. The rate of severe attacks decreased significantly, with overall attack volume dropping even as transactional workloads increased, which demonstrated better defense at scale.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared that their organization effectively blocked 75% of potential attacks by extrapolating the security impact of Nonstop compared to the prior environment, even while increasing transaction volume by 40%: “Previously, I was witness to 250 severe attacks in a year. … When we upgraded to HPE Nonstop, that 250 has come down to 180. … Now, my transactions have gone up by 40%, but still, attacks have gone down by 80. [Had] we gone with the same [legacy] system and [increased] the number of transactions, those 250 [attacks] could have increased to up to 400, [for an effective] 75% improvement. This is not assumption. This is a well-documented figure.”

Improved operational and revenue scalability worth $23.3 million for the composite. Interviewees shared how HPE Nonstop Systems provided their organizations with stable data foundations and centralized control. Repeatable, software-defined infrastructure enabled rapid expansion without proportionate cost growth for a 0.2% increase in operating margin. Interviewees further highlighted how HPE Nonstop Systems:

• Augmented operational agility. Interviewees noted that Nonstop’s elastic clustering scaled capacity on demand, allowing their teams to direct resources to hot spots without long procurement cycles. Provisioning, regression testing, and post‑scale normalization completed in less time, which reduced the window between scale‑up and revenue realization. Pay‑as‑you‑go models aligned cost with utilization, eliminating the barriers of large capital expenditure, reducing operational friction, and accelerating monetization for new product lines.
  The technology leader at the financial services company highlighted how, when compared to their prior systems or to a competitive solution, the HPE Nonstop platform was able to support their organization’s 40% increase in transaction volume at a 4.5% reduction in cost per transaction, all while maintaining the same performance for the same latency. The interview shared how HPE Nonstop Systems helps their organization provision and test 50% faster than in their prior environment and helps to normalize their system far faster and with one-third of the staffing requirement: “HPE Nonstop supports very [fast] integration testing or regression testing. I can do it probably in an hour’s time or less, [while] the competitors are now taking 2 hours.”

• Improved profit margin with scaled transaction volumes. Interviewees described how HPE Nonstop Systems helped expand throughput and materially increased transaction counts, which supported revenue growth under higher transaction loads. Stable, real‑time data across production and transactional flows reduced cancellations, rework, and leakage, which reinforced both top‑line and margin outcomes.
  The technology leader at the financial services company shared that, with the 40% increase in transaction volumes that HPE Nonstop enabled and with the added capabilities for product innovation with AI, their organization saw significant improvement in revenue and profitability. They said: “We actually increased the number of transactions [by 40%], which definitely will have impact, not only on revenue but [also on] your profitability. … My revenue has increased by 22% in last three years.”

• Increased revenue from new products developed with Nonstop-enabled AI insights. Interviewees noted how the Nonstop environment sustained real-time data quality, which expanded AI use cases across process, quality, engineering, and maintenance functions.
  The technology leader at the financial services company reported that the new data foundation improved increased profit by over 20%, with 0.23% of growth from initiatives related to HPE. The Nonstop platform enabled business objectives around AI/ML capabilities, as well as real-time insights on increased productivity, energy efficiency, and sustainability: “My profitability actually has shot up by 26%. … I would say around 0.23% of the complete growth is coming from these Nonstop-enabled initiatives: the data foundation, AI/ML capabilities, the governance of data, and how actually we are utilizing it [for] good, real-time insights.”