Mend Helps Temenos Serve 500 Million Customers’ Daily Banking Needs

About the Company

Temenos, headquartered in Geneva, is a market leading software provider for banks and other financial institutions. More than 3,000 firms across the globe, including 41 of the world’s top 50 banks, rely on Temenos to process the client interactions and daily transactions of more than 500 million banking customers. Temenos is a publicly traded company with more than 8,500 employees.

Temenos’ uses open source components to increase their productivity and accelerate their software development life cycles. Although open source offers many benefits, the company knew they needed tighter control over their open source usage because of strict security, reliability, and scalability requirements.

The company found manually managing all their open source components increasingly challenging. Temenos maintained a blacklist of unacceptable open source licenses and a whitelist of approved licenses. Whenever developers wanted to add a new component, they had to manually check each component’s license against these lists, which was extremely time consuming.

Security vulnerabilities also posed a challenge. Prior to Mend, Temenos had no way of knowing whether a new security vulnerability impacted their code base. This posed a huge problem as hundreds of new CVEs are published every month.

Keeping on top of open source license compliance and security vulnerabilities required a lot of developers’ time and resources. In addition to being a labor-intensive process, manually managing open source components was also error-prone.

Temenos quickly realized they needed an automated open source management solution.

Temenos evaluated several options, but only Mend gave them everything they needed. With Mend, Temenos gained an automated and accurate open source management solution that gave them full control over which open source components were safe for their developers to use.

“Only Mend was able to give us a comprehensive inventory of all our open source components. We can now be completely certain we have an accurate view into our open source usage,” says Martin Bailey, Product Director of Enterprise Software at Temenos.

In less than 90 minutes, Temenos was able to install Mend, integrating it seamlessly into their build process to provide real-time status and alerts. Mend generated an accurate report of Temenos’s inventory, which included all open source dependencies, component licenses, known security vulnerabilities, and alerts on new patches or available updates. Using Mend’s robust policies, Temenos was able to flag any problematic open source components and receive a report with clear action items.

Mend was also very easy to use. “Once we got Mend up and running, it was something we could forget about, because there’s no need to go back and do any maintenance on this process. Mend just worked and has been working ever since, and we are very happy with the solution,” says Bailey.

Temenos has been able to streamline development with Mend’s comprehensive policies. Whenever a new open source component is added, Mend automatically accepts or rejects the component in real time based on policies defined by Temenos, giving the company full control over what is used in their products. Temenos saves significant time by automating the previously manual process of checking open source components against blacklists and whitelists.

Mend also alerts Temenos immediately whenever a new security vulnerability is announced or a new patch is released. Given the volume of new CVEs published each month, automatically identifying which open source components or their dependencies contain vulnerabilities saves Temenos a significant amount of time and manpower. It also reduces the risk that their software contains a known vulnerability or outdated component.

Today Temenos harnesses the advantages of open source components without worrying about open source license compliance, updates, or vulnerabilities. With Mend’s automatic security and license compliance alerts, Temenos is able to quickly address and resolve security and quality issues with their open source components. This gives Temenos confidence that their proprietary software is as secure and reliable as possible.

“With Mend we have a comprehensive inventory of all the open source components and can ensure full compliance with our license policies. This also means we can rapidly answer any questions from prospects and be certain we are 100% accurate in the information we are providing, all without wasting any of our developers’ valuable time,” says Bailey.

Watch the webinar with Martin Bailey of Temenos and Rami Sass of Mend as they describe how this solution truly made a difference in international banking software development and management.