IOTP & OLTP

Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP) is a set of standards that makes all electronic purchase transactions consistent for customers, merchants, and other involved parties, regardless of payment system. IOTP accommodates a wide range of payment systems such as Secure Electronic Transaction, digital cash, e-checks, and debit cards. Payment system data is encapsulated within IOTP messages. IOTP is designed to handle a transaction that involves a number of different parties: the customer, merchant, credit checker and certifier, bank, and delivery handler. IOTP uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to define data that encompasses everything that may be needed in a transaction.

Companies contributing to the development of IOTP include Hewlett Packard, IBM, JCP, MasterCard International, Smart Card Integrations, Sun Microsystems, and Wells Fargo Bank.


OLTP (online transaction processing) is a class of software programs capable of supporting transaction-oriented applications on the Internet.

Typically, OLTP systems are used for order entry, financial transactions, customer relationship management (CRM) and retail sales. Such systems have a large number of users who conduct short transactions. Database queries are usually simple, require sub-second response times and return relatively few records.
An important attribute of an OLTP system is its ability to maintain concurrency. To avoid single points of failure, OLTP systems are often decentralized.


IBM's CICS (Customer Information Control System) is a well-known OLTP product.