James Barrese, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Payment Services, PayPal
It’s an exciting time to be in the
At PayPal, the technology underneath our hood is what sets us apart from the rest of the industry. With an incredibility talented team around the world, we’re using emerging technologies to constantly innovate while continuing to deliver the secure, reliable global payments network our customers rely on, 24x7. And as the pace of tech innovation rapidly increases, we know how important it is that we build a payments platform for the future --- which is just what we’re doing.
Here’s a snapshot of just some of the amazing accomplishments in our technology transformation:
Largest Private Cloud: PayPal was one of the first – and largest – companies in Silicon Valley to adopt the cloud, and now has one of the largest private clouds in the world. We’ve converted nearly 100 percent of our traffic serving Web/API applications and mid-tier services at PayPal to run on our internal private cloud, based on OpenStack. Our private cloud infrastructure has enabled us to deploy new Java applications and provision infrastructure capacity within minutes instead of days, so we can scale quickly without compromising availability. Combined Speed and Efficiency: As a result of completely re-architecting our back-end infrastructure, PayPal sped up payment processing by 50 percent in just the past year and reduced the time to push code live to site by more than half. Robust PaaS: We have fundamentally changed our approach to software development by decoupling the front-end customer experience development from the underlying business capabilities, and built these capabilities into robust service-based platforms. This allows us to quickly iterate on new experiences, customizing our products to individual markets. Agile Development: We also fundamentally changed our approach to the process of creating new products and experiences by adopting 100 percent Agile. This means our talented team of developers, designers and engineers work side-by-side and push code every few weeks, which enables us to deliver the right products faster, in a rapidly changing environment. Cutting-edge Technologies: PayPal re-architected a number of our strategic back-end systems and began leveraging open source technology. We piloted Node.js, a platform that lends itself to building fast and highly-scalable network applications. Using this platform, our engineers use 60% fewer lines of code in 80% less time – freeing up resources to focus on more strategic and meaningful initiatives. Our team took that and created Kraken.js, PayPal’s home-grown Node.js framework, which is a secure and scalable layer that extendsExpress.js by providing clean structure and convention.
Because of these changes, PayPal has unlocked the power of our technology platform and accelerated innovation so we can deliver better, more dynamic experiences to our customers. The industry has even started to take notice, as PayPal was recently named one of eight Elite 100 Business Innovation award winners by InformationWeek.
Looking ahead, we’re focused on innovation and delivering the ultimate customer experiences. Our technology will have a huge impact on how people pay and get paid in the future. And personally, I can’t wait to see all the possibilities unfold!