Riposte®: Rock Solid Messaging

Riposte® is software that sits between the network and the applications that are distributed across the network.

At the heart of Riposte is the Message Server. This core messaging infrastructure has made Riposte successful in some of the most demanding transaction-based environments worldwide.

Since going live in 1993 at An Post, the Irish Post Office, Riposte has successfully supported the unique and often harsh conditions of a postal retail network – including high volume offices like the General Post Office in Dublin and single position, remote locations in rural Ireland. Riposte’s unique, active replication model supports both online and asynchronous transactions allowing for high-volume, fault-tolerant, distributed transaction processing. 

Proven and Resilient

Riposte has never lost a transaction in over a decade of operations. The network has never been compromised. And, implementations have passed the stringent audit requirements of governments throughout the world. That’s because Riposte expects and tolerates communication failures, and eliminates, where possible, single points of failure that cause system outages in traditional client/server solutions. As transactions occur, they are stored locally and then replicated to other workstations in the post office and then across the wide area network to a central site. This makes it unnecessary for physical backups and allows for automatic recovery after failure. 

Less Complex. More Business Benefits

In addition to addressing the technical difficulties often associated with implementing a distributed system, Riposte focuses on delivering business benefits to the organization. The Riposte development environment provides built-in security, integrity, and auditing for every transaction. Application developers can create complex applications that interface with central systems without having to understand the underlying network or the complexity of connecting to diverse systems. New applications can be quickly developed giving the post office a significant competitive advantage over traditional rivals. 

End-to-End Integration

Data and information sources both within and outside of the enterprise can be shared with the Riposte retail network which provides everything necessary to access real-time, near real-time, and/or batch integration quickly and easily. Riposte provides a "clean" interface from the transaction environment of Essential to any enterprise system. Easier integration to legacy and third-party systems means less programming, faster implementations, and lower cost of maintenance.

Support for Web services allows for greater interoperability between software and hardware platforms.

Supremely Flexible

And above all, Riposte knows no boundaries across platforms, transaction types, users, and locations. Its unique messaging system supports Web client applications, mobile devices, as well as commodity PCs.