Reduced Costs By Migrating Its Web Application Platform and Building a Customer Information Portal on JBoss Enterprise Middleware

FAST FACTS

Customer: Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg)

Industry: Printing & Publishing, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering

Geography: U.S., EMEA

Business Challenge: Establish a new customer specific portal to enhance its customer relationship and provide internal business units with valuable customer insight; Evaluate and deploy an application server platform for its Java-based environment

Solution: With the help of Red Hat Consulting, Heidelberg built an interactive customer portal using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Software: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle 10g database, SAP R/3, Autonomy search engine, Interwoven TeamSite 6.5 (CMS), Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-Bit

Hardware: Virtualized servers and F5 Load balancer

Migration path: Proprietary portal platform and application server to JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Benefits: Improved customer web presence with a central portal that increased services and information available, provided ability to use applications based on open standards in order to interact better with customers, suppliers and partners, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

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BACKGROUND
Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg), the world’s leading solution provider for the print media industry, built an interactive customer portal, www.MyHeidelberg.com, using JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to create an interactive site to enhance its customer relationships and provide a unified global brand presence. With the successful portal project, Heidelberg has since migrated its proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, in order to reduce costs, and increase the performance of its web applications.

Based in Heidelberg, Germany, with development and production sites in seven countries and around 250 sales offices across the globe, the company supports around 200,000 customers worldwide. Heidelberg’s printing products and software enable its customers to print high volumes, quickly, at high quality and in color at an affordable price and convert the printed material into the desired format.

Heidelberg, with a global market share for sheetfed offset printing machines of more than 40 percent, develops and produces precision printing presses, units for imaging printing-plates, postpress equipment, and software for integrating all the print shop processes that produce everyday items such as brochures, magazines, folding carton boxes and product labels. It also provides general and consulting services ranging from spare parts and consumables to the sale of re-marketed equipment, in addition to education and training at the Heidelberg Print Media Academy.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Heidelberg launched a corporate-wide web initiative to develop a strategic architecture and customer-centric web portal, to strengthen customer relationships, consolidate information and services, provide easier access to information, and increase revenues through improved communications with customers.

“Previously, we had a solid web presence for our customers, but it was more of an online brochure and lacked interactivity,” said Mathias Berg, Director, Global Web Systems at Heidelberg.”

Heidelberg also anticipates the ability to lower its costs by offering more self-service options, reducing the effort and cycle time for developing and deploying new services and applications, and simplifying support and operation of its applications and infrastructure. It also wanted the new portal to provide its customers with a central and secure repository for sharing data and communication.

“With MyHeidelberg.com, we have created a unified, central customer portal that can be rolled out and adapted to local markets, thus increasing our interaction and providing us with valuable customer insight,” said Michael Neff, chief information officer.

SOLUTION
In order to further its edge in the market, provide customers with more features, and enhance its web-presence, Heidelberg decided to evaluate a number of proprietary and open source solutions for the customer portal project, MyHeidelberg.com, in addition to an application platform solution to set up and restructure its global web presence

“In addition to JBoss, we evaluated proprietary and open source solutions, but we selected JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform due to its ability to deliver an agile, reusable framework, coupled with the benefits of open source to reduce costs, and freed us from vendor lock-in,” said Berg, “Although we had limited open source experience, we made our decision confidently due to JBoss’ established technology platform, flexible architecture, highly regarded enterprise support, and the expertise of Red Hat Consulting.”

JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, based on open standards, was selected for its ability to meet the key requirements of the project, including: the ability to integrate seamlessly into the existing infrastructure based on VMWare ESX 3.0 and Oracle 10g, and the content management systems: Windows Server 2003 and Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

The MyHeidelberg.com customer portal needed to be flexible and reliable in order to adapt to Heidelberg’s local websites requirements, while at the same time, it had to scale for a steadily increasing number of users, which initially tallied more than 5,500 registered users and has been growing monthly by approximately 5-10 percent.

At an early stage of the customer portal project, Heidelberg made the decision to work with Red Hat Consulting in order to facilitate knowledge transfer, have a closer relationship with JBoss, and to have access to the engineers and developers behind the open source technology. Heidelberg’s IT teams in the U.S. and Germany worked with Red Hat consultants to enable a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure.

“We had a great experience with Red Hat Consulting,” said Berg, “The Red Hat Consultants worked closely with our IT teams in the U.S. and Germany to ensure a smooth integration of JBoss technology into the existing global infrastructure, by mentoring our team, demonstrating product features, providing documentation, and ensuring our team was prepared for success after the engagement. We view Red Hat Consulting as a trusted advisor to our team.”

“The MyHeidelberg.com portal, based on JBoss, creates a true value-add for our customers, and has enabled us to grow our business and serve our customers in a better way. MyHeidelberg.com provides a centralized web portal with tailored information for each customer with one gateway, one URL, one password, and one login.”

After successful testing and fine-tuning, the production environment and infrastructure for the MyHeidelberg.com customer portal went live.

“We now offer our customers an interactive portal, that can be adapted to every local market and is integrated with more than 45 websites worldwide.” said Berg.

Through back-end integration with ERP and CRM systems, Heidelberg enables portal users to securely interact with their data, such as service information, view and retrieve brochures, product specs, and account data, easily through one gateway. Additionally, the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform runs on Windows Server 2003 and collaborates with a content management system based on Interwoven TeamSite 6.5.

Heidelberg decided to expand its collaboration with JBoss when it decided to migrate its complete internet presence, www.heidelberg.com, from a proprietary application platform to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to set-up restructure its entire global web presence.

“Based on our successful deployment of JBoss Enterprise Portal for the MyHeidelberg.com project, and knowing that we had a stable, reliable, and fully supported solution, we quickly and confidently made the decision to migrate our global enterprise web applications from our previous proprietary solution to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform,” said Berg.

BENEFITS
Heidelberg’s use of JBoss for its customer portal and web application server has resulted in; improved customer web presence with a central portal, reduced costs, gained excellent support and continuous advancements of its portal software, and reduced vendor lock-in.

“All over the world, the name Heidelberg is synonymous with state-of-the art technology, top quality, and closeness to the customer, so we set the benchmark high for ourselves and we expect the same level of quality from all of our vendors,” said Neff. “JBoss absolutely delivered all we needed, by providing high availability, performance and scalability. Due to the Red Hat subscription model, we realized signification cost savings, faster ROI, and freedom from vendor lock-in.”

The introduction of JBoss has helped simplify IT administration: with only one portal infrastructure to manage, one platform and one brand for the company’s Web presence, helping to strengthen the brand of Heidelberg. The new self-service capabilities provided by the MyHeidelberg.com portal give customers fast, convenient access to critical information whenever they need it, increasing customer satisfaction and the credibility of Heidelberg as a valuable business partner.

“In addition to the enhancements for our customers, the MyHeidelberg.com portal based on JBoss Enterprise Portal, offers valuable customer insight and behavioral information that is being leveraged internally by our marketing, sales, and product development teams, which will allow us to make informed and targeted business decisions and increase company sales,” said Berg.

The cost of developing and deploying new services and applications has been reduced now that Heidelberg has a simple way to integrate content and information into the portal; the IT team can index content and expose it through the search capabilities; and can manage single sign-on. Also, JBoss has drastically reduced costs, as the subscription model has freed Heidelberg from the cost-constraints associated with proprietary software licensing and support.

“We were especially impressed with the performance, product features of JBoss and the quality of support, advice, and knowledge contributed by our Red Hat consultants,” said Neff, “The JBoss Enterprise Portal and JBoss Enterprise Application Platforms went into production and performed extremely well, and this is a great benefit for our customers and internal users, who can now access their data securely and without restrictions.”

“JBoss was always willing to work with us, as partners, to ensure the success of the project,” said Berg, “A prime example is when we identified the need for a unique feature for our customer portal, with any other vendor, we would have had to develop a custom feature ,with no vendor support. But with JBoss, we discussed our need, and they worked with us develop a new feature into the product, that will be fully supported by JBoss. This kind of commitment and performance is something that I have never seen before, from any technology vendor.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Red Hat

Industry: Open source software

Geography: US – Raleigh, NC

Opportunity: Implement and build a reliable, high-performance platform using SOA to meet growing business and performance demands

Migration Path: Tomcat 5 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle BPEL and, Mule ESB to JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Established a reliable platform with zero unplanned downtime, reduced hardware costs by more than 50 percent, increased performance by more than 25 percent, and increased resource efficiency for the IT organization

“The JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio is the cornerstone in our middleware infrastructure and our IT architecture vision. We have laid the groundwork to establish a world class technology stack, largely based on the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.”
–Lee Congdon, Chief Information Officer, Red Hat.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, offering choice to customers building open source IT infrastructures. Its unique business model provides open source subscriptions for its high-quality, affordable technology. Its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and service-oriented architecture solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware, deliver industry-leading value. The company is based in Raleigh, NC and has more than 60 offices around the world. Red Hat’s internal IT organization serves more than 2500 global employees with data centers in Phoenix, AZ.

OPPORTUNITY
In 2007, Red Hat was growing exponentially in employee size, and faced increasing demands on the internal IT systems, thus challenging the existing infrastructure. Red Hat’s internal IT organization was faced with increased system integration and support issues, that were consuming considerable time and taking focus away from strategic issues. The IT organization needed an enterprise grade solution that was stable, simple and scalable.

The IT organization was handling internal maintenance and devoting critical resources to solving commodity solutions which reduced cycles available for solving critical business problems. The IT organization devoted resources to developing and building custom solutions for Tomcat including: security solutions to support single-sign-on, a clustering implementation to handle high scalability, a transaction and persistence solution to support functionality similar to the Java Transaction Architecture (JTA) and Enterprise Java Bean (EJB) transaction support, deployment solutions to segment large application deployments into multiple contexts, and scheduling service implementations utilizing Quartz that were non-cluster aware and inefficient.

“We tightly coupled our in-house custom solutions to our internal processes in order to reduce the development effort. As a result there was no ability to upstream our contributions and we took on the burden of maintaining them,” said Mathew Hicks, IT manager, Red Hat. “The cost of this effort eventually became high enough to minimize our consumption of community updates and our systems were in danger of becoming dated.”

“Our team spent considerable time and resources creating valuable custom solutions to ensure we met the growing demands of our users. But as we grew we encountered server sprawl issues that constrained our resources. First, our custom solutions didn’t scale for high availability scenarios and the fragility of the infrastructure increased along with the number of solutions,” said Hicks, “We needed a solution that would reduce the burden of custom solution maintenance, eliminate single points-of-failure, and optimize the IT infrastructure for scalability,” said Hicks.

SOLUTION
Red Hat obviously had experience with JBoss Enterprise Middleware products, but the decision to deploy on the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and SOA Platform for internal systems was a strict business decision that would benefit the technical advances of Red Hat IT and better serve the entire company. Red Hat IT operates with its own performance requirements and those requirements were the drivers for choosing to implement JBoss products internally.

Red Hat IT decided to implement a modular based, service-oriented architecture (SOA) to replace its organization’s traditional IT infrastructure. The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform includes a next-generation ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) for service mediation, jBPM Framework and the JBoss Rule engine for business process automation infrastructure, which enables superior business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective, open platform. One of the features of an SOA is that it allows companies to build composite services in which business processes can be extended over a number of different applications. The first phase of the migration involved deploying JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Red Hat needed a supportable, enterprise-caliber solution that leveraged commodity solutions, maintained by the community.

Red Hat IT required:

• A framework to allow them to identify solutions
• Ability to work more closely with the business to understand future needs
• Better way for teams within IT to collaborate
• Means to scale their efforts and to expand capabilities
• Desire to collaborate with the community inside/outside of Red Hat
• Use products that allow for common system administration capabilities such as configuration management and RPM based packaging

Red Hat IT decided to migrate its customer facing Java application infrastructure, including the including 30 web applications and services, from Tomcat 5 to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

By deploying the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat was able to replace a complex clustering solution and utilize the JBoss clustering capabilities to dynamically size the application server cluster to any processing load the organization could encounter. Red Hat IT also replaced their custom single sign-on functionality with a JBossSX-based, cluster aware single sign-on solution.

“By removing the need for a dedicated clustering database, we realized a 4:1 reduction in hardware and the use of JGroups-based clustering yielded increased performance per transaction and higher availability,” said Chris Alfonso, enterprise architect, Red Hat. “We are taking full advantage of the high-availability solutions offered by JBoss including in-memory caching, clustering, HA-JNDI, and automatic discovery.”

Red Hat’s growth as a company and the constant addition of end-users, made dynamic scaling capacity a priority for the IT organization. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform enabled an increase in cluster capacity through the ability to auto-discover additional nodes, and the means to decrease the overall footprint when not in use.

“This gave us the flexibility to not invest in a ‘high watermark’ infrastructure,” said Hicks. “We were able to segment the cluster to manage workloads, with minimal impact to the infrastructure. This resulted in a more efficient use of our resources and ability to scale for future demands.”

Part of the overall initiative was to replace an existing Oracle BPEL and Mule ESB implementation with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. It provides a means to integrate vendor systems while transparently mediating their inherent incompatibilities and orchestrating the interactions.

The JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform implementation operates in a clustered environment, interacting with messaging queues backed by both Oracle and MySQL. The MySQL queues utilized database replication to provide database fail-over and high availability across the cluster.

“From a performance perspective, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform has proven to handle our heaviest workloads very well. During the peak of our workload, we receive about 7,500 messages an hour, yet the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform can handle approximately 7000 messages in 15 minutes, on a single node cluster,” said Rico Hendriks, manager of Middleware and Services, Red Hat. “This tells us that we have the ability to scale the business from a rate of more than $650M annually to a rate of more than $2.5B annually in transaction flow with our existing capital investment.”

As early adopters of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, Red Hat IT leveraged Red Hat Consulting for the implementation to assist with an aggressive scope and time line to ensure stability, and a seamless, uninterrupted, successful integration.

“The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the features that enabled us to ‘right-size’ our middleware infrastructure,” said Hendriks. “Mainly, with automatic discovery of cluster members and a cluster aware Enterprise Service Bus, we can now monitor utilization of the application server and appropriately resize to any given processing needs.”

BENEFITS
With JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat IT now focuses on helping users increase productivity and solve strategic business issues. There is also a focus on making the organization as a whole more competitive, rather than handling technical issues. Red Hat was able to reduce hardware costs, increase performance, maximize resources and rely on quality support.

“Red Hat IT made a conscious decision to utilize JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as opposed to JBoss.org Community projects, because it did not want to be in the software integration and support business, but rather focus on business goals. The availability of quality support, with no more than 24-hours before issues were closed, was a major benefit for the company,” said Lee Congdon, chief information officer, Red Hat.

Initial measurements of the performance under JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform were significantly improved compared to our existing messaging solution. “In benchmark testing, the results showed a substantial improvement in the response times for almost all transactions represented in the test,” said Alfonso. “The maximum time was reduced from 6.2 seconds to 392ms, and the average was reduced from 742ms to 304ms. Resulting in JBoss performance exceeding our existing messaging solution by 25 percent.”

Furthermore, “Through implementing JBoss solutions, we were able to reduce the hardware footprint by more than 50 percent, which significantly reduced long term costs on hardware, power and cooling. Additional IT benefits were speed and cost of implementation, including simplicity, openness and cost effectiveness,” added Alfonso.

“We depend on JBoss.org Community projects to drive the innovation and JBoss Enterprise Middleware to deliver the stability and support that we need. With all the moving pieces that go into a solution like JBoss, it’s very valuable to have a working combination of components so that we can focus on building solutions for our customers,” said Congdon.

Whenever new products or refreshed versions of product come out from the engineering groups, Red Hat IT is one of the first groups to evaluate integrating them into the production environment. “As Red Hat continues its investment in management tools such as JBoss Operations Network and oVirt, we envision introducing those solutions, to streamline our processes and better serve our workforce,” said Hicks.

“The JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio is a cornerstone in our middleware infrastructure and our IT architecture vision,” said Congdon. “We have laid the groundwork to establish a world class technology stack, largely based on JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.”

Fast Facts

Industry: Education

Geography: United Kingdom

Business Challenge: To launch an extranet service that would be available to its external users of more than 35,000 examiners and moderators

Migration path: Proprietary, closed solution to a more cost-effective and flexible platform based on JBoss Enterprise Application platform

Solution:

Hardware – HP ProLiant Servers

Software – JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Alfresco ECM, Enterprise DB

Benefits: Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), including cost and efficiency savings of £250,000 per year, and freedom from vendor lock-in

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
The Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) is the largest of the three English exam boards. It is the leading provider of qualifications for UK schools and colleges, awarding 49% of full course GCSEs and 42% of A-levels nationally. In total, over 3.5 million students take exams with AQA each year.

AQA is an independent registered charity, with no shareholders, therefore all of its income is used to run examinations and carry out research and development to improve its qualifications and services.

AQA employs 1050 permanent staff across its offices, headed up by its Executive Board. The organization also works with about 35,000 teachers, lecturers, advisers and consultants who assist in setting and marking exams.

AQA is committed to using modern technology to enhance the quality and accuracy of the examination process for the benefit of candidates and is always striving to modernize its assessment process.

OPPORTUNITY
AQA needed a secure extranet service that would be available to its external users of over 35,000 examiners and moderators. This extranet would contain valuable and important documentation allowing users to mark exam papers more effectively, eliminating the previous paper based process of printing and posting.

Security was a big consideration as all examination papers and marking schemes were held on the system along with overall guidelines on marking the papers. AQA needed a secure platform that would not be openly accessible. It was also important that the new system allowed users to access a variety of documentation twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

AQA had a system built around a more traditional, proprietary architecture that was too restrictive and costly to maintain. In order to reduce the costs associated with licenses, support and maintenance, AQA decided to replace all the proprietary software with open source solutions. This migration allowed AQA to benefit from an end-to-end open source solution deployed on open standards and at a value point that would allow AQA to continue to innovate into the future.

“We were spending six-figure sums every year on printing and posting documentation to examiners alone. We wanted to develop an extranet that could replace our paper-based manual processes with electronic documentation that could be easily updated,” explained Peter Morris, Programme Manager, AQA. “Prior to the implementation, we considered all the major vendors, but chose an open source strategy as it offered similar and even superior levels of functionality, security and quality, but at a tenth of the cost.”

Because of the high demand for AQA’s services the entire solution needed to be deployed, tested and put into production in just six weeks.

SOLUTION
AQA evaluated a number of open source solutions that could offer an alternative software delivery model to its existing closed proprietary solution.

AQA had an existing relationship with Red Hat and had been using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform for its servers for some time. Knowing that the same high quality support structure, value and superior technology development extended to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, AQA decided to migrate to the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as well. The overall stack proved to be far more cost effective than its competitors and significantly less expensive than keeping the existing legacy systems in place.

The solution AQA has chosen is based on an open source stack comprising Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, Alfresco and Enterprise DB, and will provide a strategic platform for future collaboration.

AQA used systems integrater Optaros to aid the smooth integration of the new open source platform. Optaros enabled AQA to create a customised user experience that focused on ease-of-use and utilised Rich Internet Application technologies to improve the overall experience. Optaros supported AQA in the adoption of an Agile Development strategy which reduced the timescale for development to around four weeks.

The extranet was initially rolled out to a pilot group of 200 examiners whose feedback has been resoundingly positive.

BENEFITS
Key requirements for the migration to open source technology were cost and efficiency savings. AQA calculated that it was 10 times less expensive to implement a solution from Red Hat than to extend the previous proprietary solution to this external audience.

Red Hat’s subscription model now provides AQA with increased value as it can consolidate onto a single subscription. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is reduced, and printing, posting, licensing and other ongoing operational costs are significantly reduced. By automating its manual process online and enabling users to update details themselves, they have improved accuracy and administration staff are now free to carry out other tasks.

As a result, AQA expects to save £250,000 or more than $340,000 annually.

The other important consideration was that migrating to an open source platform facilitated the rapid and agile development of the system, enabling two or more developers to work on different aspects of the project at the same time. This had not been practical with the proprietary technologies previously used and was another area where Red Hat’s solution helped the developers to meet the challenging completion deadline of six weeks.

AQA also utilised Red Hat’s expertise through its training and consultancy services to enable them to take the application stack and server to build a version that is ready to use and web facing. This had a significant impact in enabling the system to go-live within a very short timeframe.

AQA is no longer dependent on individual technology suppliers and now has the flexibility to decouple, plug and unplug solutions as and when required without impacting the whole stack. This has given AQA a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

The migration to open source solutions has helped AQA meet the commercial challenge of staying ahead of its competitors while improving the level of service for its customers, examiners and candidates.

Peter Morris from AQA commented: “The first phase of our project with Red Hat has been a great success. We will continue to innovate and grow the technology stack. The new system has changed the way we work and has had a massive impact in terms of cost and efficiency savings. Red Hat pulled out all the stops to deliver over and above our expectations. We are now looking to migrate further services to open source as it will give us the competitive advantage to maintain our position as market leader and stay ahead of our competitors.”

FUTURE
The first phase of the project has moved exam materials online for operational cost savings. The next phase will involve messaging capabilities that will help communication across the organisation. This includes adding more exam papers, marking schemes and even training material such as online demos and screen captures to further enhance the user experience. AQA would also like to implement a forum so users can participate in conversations and discussions, creating an online community to share thoughts and learn from each other.

Eventually, AQA’s plan is to open up its information to candidates and a broader range of teachers. This will require a system capable of scaling to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users; AQA believes its open source system will be able to scale to meet this demand.

FAST FACTS

Company: Sensei, Inc.

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: US

Software: JBoss Enterprise Middleware platforms and frameworks including; JBoss Enterprise Application Platforms, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, and JBoss ESB, jBPM, Hibernate, Cache and RichFaces; all components of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and JBoss Enterprise Portal Platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Pentaho Business Intelligence, MySQL, and Alfresco.

Migration Path: Open source middleware projects from JBoss.org to JBoss Enterprise Middleware Solutions and Microsoft Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Benefits: Lowered infrastructure and development costs; more flexibility when deploying applications; greater scalability; enhanced standards and support.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software. But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”
-Tim Dion, Chief Information Officer, Sensei Inc.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
A wireless lifestyle is no excuse for leading an unhealthy life – that’s what Sensei Inc. aims to address with mobile and Web-based solutions that engage and empower consumers to live healthier, happier lives. Formed in 2005 by Humana, Inc, the company’s programs promote learning and lifestyle change through automated, personalized, interactive dialog that fits seamlessly into a consumer’s daily routine.

Sensei’s initial product, Sensei for Weight Loss, is a virtual weight and nutrition coach for users, helps them to plan grocery lists, meals and exercise routines. It also keeps consumers accountable for their actions with daily reminders about meals, weight loss and fitness goals. Providing unique real time integration between the mobile world and the online world, Sensei helps each individual, with their personalized plan, achieve success their long term lifestyle goals. The company has plans to rapidly expand its offerings to more closely align with the daily lives of consumers and to encompass more lifestyle and health issues.

Currently, Sensei’s user base numbers in the thousands, but this will increase quickly as the company introduces more consumers to their products and launches additional solutions.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Tim Dion, Sensei’s CIO and a 20-year veteran of the technology industry, was presented with a common problem among companies seeking to rapidly innovate product offerings – their current Windows-based technology platform simply was not meeting their needs.

“The design of our existing platform was very constrictive and made our initial trials and pilots extremely difficult,” said Dion. “Making changes was hard and application deployment was fragile. These difficulties opened our eyes to the fact that our underlying infrastructure itself needed a serious overhaul. A complete redesign was necessary to provide a solid foundation for current and future endeavors.”

After determining that a new platform and infrastructure were required, Sensei went through an extensive design period to break out necessary capabilities, explained Igor Royzis, Sensei’s director of technology.

“Our solutions are based on a service infrastructure with a lot of moving parts and complexity,” said Royzis. “We needed components that were flexible, scalable, cost-effective and that would enable us to design and deploy products in a timely manner.”

After examining commercial solutions, including proprietary middleware products WebLogic and WebSphere, Sensei selected an open source stack because of the high-performance and value advantages over proprietary software. Sensei chose Red Hat’s JBoss portfolio as their primary technology platform because of the wide-range of open source solutions that Sensei could deploy from a single provider, enabling cost savings and an easy migration path.

SOLUTION
Initially, Sensei tested their wellness and healthy lifestyle applications on a variety of JBoss.org products – JBoss Application Server, JBoss ESB, JBoss Portal, jBPM, Drools, Hibernate, JBoss Cache and RichFaces. Following the successful deployment of the community projects, Sensei transitioned to JBoss’ hardened and supported enterprise class open source solutions for production: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Enterprise SOA Platform and Enterprise Portal Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Sensei has chosen to standardize their I.T. environment on open source solutions, allowing for increased flexibility, scalability and the ability to rapidly develop and deploy products to market. In addition to JBoss and Red Hat, the company has also deployed the Pentaho Business Intelligence Suite, an open source solution for enterprise reporting, analysis and workflow capabilities, which has integrated perfectly with Sensei’s operations, thanks to the interoperability presented by the underlying JBoss middleware solutions. Other open source solutions deployed include MySQL and Alfresco.

In addition to deploying open source solutions, Sensei is also planning to contribute some of the integration code they have written in house back into the open source community.

BENEFITS
Flexibility and scalability are the most significant benefits Sensei has realized by deploying Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software,” said Dion. “But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”

By migrating from costly proprietary technology to open source solutions, Sensei has been able to carve out significant cost savings . According to Dion, the savings are “almost exponential over BEA or IBM.”

Sensei has also received a competitive edge through JBoss, thanks to Red Hat’s early adoption of various technology and privacy standards.

“Red Hat moves very quickly when it comes to supporting new standards,” continued Dion. “For our business, HIPAA and other privacy standards are becoming more and more important in not only winning new customers, but keeping those we already have. Red Hat’s agility around standards adoption helps us keep our competitive edge, and it’s one of the main reasons we put our trust in JBoss.”

For the future, Sensei is continuing to transition its JBoss community projects to JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as well as examining new JBoss solutions for deployment.

“With a proprietary solution, trying to grow our product line would be painful, both in terms of man-hours and integrating additional software,” said Dion. “But with the cost-effectiveness of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we are able to reallocate resources to scale our I.T. infrastructure.”

Organization increases ability to handle mission-critical educational demands utilizing JBoss Enterprise Middleware

RALEIGH, NC – April 28, 2009 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Brazilian National Institute of Educational Research and Studies (Inep), has migrated its applications to a full suite of JBoss Enterprise Middleware technology, including the JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal Platforms. Since beginning its migration to JBoss solutions, Inep has increased scalability, performance and stability for its mission-critical applications.

Inep, a Federal Institution linked to the Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), manages the data and results from educational studies, research and evaluations related to the Brazilian Educational System. It is also responsible for the National High School Brazilian Exam (ENEM), which had over one million online registrations in 2008. After regularly encountering IT issues that required reconfiguring Inep’s system, the organization decided that the performance and scalability of its complex IT architecture must be increased to better execute daily tasks.

After evaluating a number of middleware solutions to address its performance and scalability needs, Inep selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware for its ability to meet the organization’s mission-critical demands, as well as for its affordable, reliable architecture. Inep’s solution includes JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Operations Network (JON) and JBoss Seam Framework. All of the solutions are deployed on Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology and are in compliance with the Brazilian Federal Government’s recommendation of utilizing open source solutions.

“We believe that JBoss is the best middleware architecture for enterprise use because it brings together expertise and advanced technology to meet the mission-critical demands of our systems,” said Fábio Petrillo, information systems general coordinator at Inep. “Our choice to use JBoss’ open source middleware technology has been very successful. We now have innovative technology that reduces both software and hardware costs, provides large performance gains and allows for ease of management. Just after the exam results were released at the end of 2008, thousands of people had accessed the web site, with peaks of 90,000 simultaneous accesses. Between November and December of last year alone, we had around 2,000,000 unique access hits to our systems. Red Hat support had been essential for this success”, said Petrillo.

For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com.

For more press, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Inep
Inep, a Federal Institution linked to Education Ministry of Brazil (MEC), promotes statistics studies and valuations at all educational levels that help to create and deploy public policies to the educational area. In addition to Enem, Inep promotes the Certification and Competences National Exam (Encceja), Students Performance National Exam (Enade), Graduation Courses Valuation, School Census and Basic Education Valuation National System (Saeb), School Census, and University Census.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to delays or reductions in information technology spending, the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; fluctuations in exchange rates; adverse results in litigation; and changes in and a dependence on key personnel, as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations”. In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic conditions, and governmental and public policy changes. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. RED HAT® and JBOSS® are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. and its subsidiaries in the US and other countries.

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2009/inep.html

FAST FACTS

Company: The Clinical Research Information Exchange (CRIX)

Industry: Pharmaceuticals

Geography: Reston, Virginia

Opportunity: Create an electronic information exchange for all stakeholders involved in getting new drugs to market – from research and development, to clinical trials, to government approval

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss jBPM Framework, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and TriCipher

Benefits: Will enable previously unmatched levels of collaboration among pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, academic institutions, and health care providers to make the drug development, testing, and approval process more secure and efficient while reducing costs and safeguarding the safety of the end consumer

Download [PDF]

Background

Clinical Research Information Exchange (CRIX) International is a not-for-profit collaborative consortium that includes government agencies, members of the bio-pharmaceutical industry, academic researchers, healthcare providers, and other stakeholders in development of new drug therapies. CRIX has created a secure and standards-based electronic information exchange for everyone involved in clinical drug research that facilitates faster, less-expensive, and secure alternatives to exchanging clinical research information. Open to everyone involved in clinical drug research and development, the CRIX community currently includes more than 20 companies ranging from smaller clinical research organizations to pharmaceutical giants like Merck & Co. Inc. and Pfizer Inc.

Opportunity

Getting new drugs to market has always been a complex, costly, and labor-intensive process. One of the most painful aspects of this procedure has been the vast amount of paperwork involved in collecting, processing, and distributing documentation of clinical trials to submit to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). As it currently works, all the various parties involved in clinical research – the bio-pharma companies themselves, the doctors and hospitals performing the trials, and the FDA, as well as numerous other organizations – communicate with one another on a one-on-one basis: The bio-pharma organizations exchange data with the healthcare providers and academic institutions performing the trials; the bio-pharma groups interact with the FDA and other government entities, and the organizations involved in the marketing and distribution of the approved drugs have to establish independent connections with all parties.

Although most of the large bio-pharma businesses have implemented proprietary IT systems that attempt to automate most or all of the process, frequently, this information is still collected, processed, and exchanged manually. In either case, the result has been “siloed” data as well as investments in technology by different organizations that overlap and even outright conflict with each other.

“What we absolutely needed was a platform that could be used across this very broad arena of clinical research that was independent of business processes, legal documentation, intellectual property protections, and marketing strategies,” said Mark Vermette, product manager for CRIX International. “And the ultimate goal of such a platform would be to enable delivery faster, more secure, and more effective drugs to patients.”

Solution

Initially created under the auspices of the National Cancer Institute in 2005, CRIX’s first pilot deliverable, called Firebird (for the Federal Investigator Registry of Biomedical Information Research Data), automated the FDA’s Form 1572 submission process. Form 1572 is the FDA-required document in which clinical investigators agree to conduct investigational new drug clinical trials according to federal regulations. The much-needed Firebird applications enabled the electronic completion, signing, and submission of the copious amount of paperwork that the doctors and other health-care providers have to complete during a clinical trial.

But although useful, Firebird was limited in scope, as it automated just a fraction of the clinical trials process. So in 2007 CRIX International was formed, and the CRIX project was placed under its jurisdiction.

The first decision that Vermette and his team made was to use open source to build what would be called the CRIX Collaborative Platform. To that end, CRIX International worked with Rivet Logic, the Reston, Virginia-based, open source systems integrator.

“This would ensure the end result would be based upon established standards, and also that it would be easier for participants to contribute their efforts to the general innovation and contribution we were making to the industry,” said Vermette. Once he started looking at actual products, “it was clear we wanted Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Alfresco Enterprise Content Management and JBoss Enterprise Middleware to support our efforts,” he said.

The CRIX Collaborative Platform was developed using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, including JBoss Hibernate for database access. It also utilized TriCipher as a unified authentication infrastructure.

Benefits

Launched in June 2008, the CRIX Collaborative Platform will create a shared knowledge base, enable increased opportunities for collaboration, and facilitate economies of scale unprecedented in the pharmaceuticals industry. Lower transactional costs will free up more funds for research; human errors will be reduced because manual data entry will be minimized or outright eliminated; and patients will reap the benefits of new therapies much faster. Perhaps more importantly, the fact that the entire clinical trial process will be easier will motivate project participants, which in turn will improve quality of health and life for people around the globe.

Because Red Hat technologies promote a modular approach to development, one of the biggest benefits of the CRIX Collaborative Platform will be that independent software developers will be able to create and own modules that reside on top of it. Bio-pharmaceuticals stakeholders will thus have an entire menu of open source functionality from which they can choose. “They will have a choice of implementing content management functionality, clinical analysis tools, or the document publication capabilities – there will be an entire laundry list of options they will have based upon their needs,” said Vermette.

Red Hat products were an integral part of the CRIX effort, said Vermette. “Although this would have been possible without Red Hat products, it would have been substantially more difficult,” said Vermette. “The biggest reason we went the Red Hat route, in addition to the technical excellence of its products, was its legendary support. And its reputation for it is well deserved.”

Alfresco ECM was also a critical part of the solution. “Alfresco provides us with an enterprise-scale content management solution, based entirely on open standards, enabling consortium members to accelerate collaboration and information flows for clinical research,” said Vermette.

Looking ahead, Vermette is anticipating implementing JBoss jBPM and Alfresco ECM to bring process automation capabilities to the CRIX Collaborative Platform. “The pharmaceutical industry has some very complex regulatory requirements, and – historically – binders and binders of paper documents with complicated rules on who gets to author them, how they are edited, and how the content is controlled,” said Vermette. “The JBoss jBPM Framework and Alfresco ECM are very sophisticated technologies that will provide these capabilities, and should be the ‘tipping point’ for getting organizations to adopt the CRIX Collaborative Platform.”

Company: Daiwa Securities America Inc.

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: New York

Opportunity: Build an utterly reliable, high-performance portal using open source to speed application development while reducing costs

Migration Path: Proprietary application server and portal solutions to JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal Platforms.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Rules Framework. Databases: Sybase SQL (transactional), Sybase IQ (data warehousing for production environment), Microsoft SQL (training data), Alfresco Software for enterprise content management (ECM).

Operating System: Windows 2000

Hardware: Intel dual-core Intel Xeon HP servers

Benefits: Established a reliable platform with no unplanned downtime, sped time-to-market by cutting application development time in half, dramatically improved application performance, and saved $300,000 in licensing and hardware costs

Daiwa Trusts JBoss: “If our portal were to go down today, it would be catastrophic. JBoss Enterprise Application and Portal platforms have been extremely reliable and stable. JBoss is a worry-free solution that helps us sleep better at night.” —Steve Dunstan, Enterprise Systems Architect and Vice President, Information Technology, Daiwa Securities America Inc.

Press Release

Download [PDF]

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BACKGROUND

Daiwa Securities America Inc. is a privately held, wholly owned subsidiary of Daiwa America Corporation, owned by Daiwa Securities Group Inc., one of Japan’s big three securities brokerages. The subsidiary focuses on sales and trading of Japanese and U.S. equities and fixed-income instruments, financial futures, and investment banking. For the year ending March 31, 2008, Daiwa Securities America posted net operating revenues of $2 billion.

OPPORTUNITY

In 2006, Daiwa Securities America was having trouble keeping its internal portal up and running. The portal was the lifeblood of the firm’s operations. Because Daiwa’s 250 employees depended on it to access the applications they needed to do their jobs, the frequent crashes created serious business and technical problems.“It got to the point where we couldn’t keep the server up for more than a week at a time,” said Tom Cordova, senior vice president, Information Technology, Daiwa Securities America Inc. The portal, called DSAweb, supported 120 applications ranging from a “Compliance Dashboard” to back office integration systems. “When it crashed, we’d be down for as long as 90 minutes at a stretch. Our users wouldn’t be able to do what they needed to keep our business running. You can’t get more mission-critical than that,” said Cordova.The problem resided in the popular industry-standard application server that Daiwa had used to build the portal. The company prides itself on being at the bleeding edge of technology, and had pushed the platform to its limits. But when the maker of the application server released a new version with much-needed functionality, it was loaded with bugs, frustrating Daiwa application developers and delaying application time to market. Even more significantly, Daiwa couldn’t get adequate support.“The vendor suggested we needed to purchase additional hardware and software licenses to solve the problems we were having,” said Cordova. “We thought that was outrageous. That’s what pushed us to find another solution.”

SOLUTION

Daiwa already had some experience with JBoss products in other in-house development projects. Cordova was impressed with what he saw and downloaded the free version of the JBoss.org Portal project. It took only a short trial before he decided to build the new portal using JBoss. Because of the mission-critical nature of DSAweb, Cordova purchased a subscription to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform to benefit from the stability and reliability of an enterprise class platform that included support, patches, and updates as well as a multi-year maintenance policy.

First, Daiwa successfully migrated the 120 DSAweb applications – most of them database-driven – from the previous application server to JBoss. This monumental task was accomplished within just 12 months by developing a template using Velocity, an open source templating tool, that described how each application “mined” the database and which then regenerated the applications on JBoss Portal. In the same timeframe, Daiwa also developed and brought online 80 new applications – something that would not have been possible using the old platform.

“With JBoss, we’re a much more agile company,” said Steve Dunstan, enterprise systems architect and senior vice president, Information Technology, Daiwa Securities America Inc. “Today, if the business needs a new application, we can deliver it immediately. That makes everyone happy.”

Daiwa depends on the breadth and depth of the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio to meet its business objectives. In addition to the JBoss Enterprise Portal Platform, the JBoss Rules Framework allows Daiwa to embed alerts into portal applications that notify employees of unfinished trade allocations, unusually large trades, or customers nearing their credit thresholds. Diawa also leverages the caching functionality in the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to seamlessly and securely share information across applications, and with Alfresco’s open source content management system, provides employees with single sign-on access to all the applications they need. In addition, Diawa uses the message queuing functionality in the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform with Informatica PowerCenter to asynchronously send messages to all distributed applications in it’s service oriented architecture (SOA).

BENEFITS

With JBoss, Daiwa’s IT team now focuses on helping users to be more productive. Additionally, organization can be more competitive rather than simply being in technical “fire fighting” mode.

Reliability is the bottom line. “If our portal were to go down today, it would be catastrophic,” said Dunstan. “The JBoss platform has been extremely reliable and stable. We have had no unscheduled downtime.”

Reduced cost and improved performance have also been big wins. Daiwa saved $300,000 by avoiding software licensing and hardware expenses that would have been incurred by sticking with the previous solution. “That’s a huge savings for us,” said Cordova. Applications are also easier and less costly to maintain, and when bugs are found, Daiwa can quickly propagate the fixes. Application performance has dramatically improved too. Developers can compile and roll out new applications in seconds, rather than the 15 minutes required by the previous platform.

Employees are more productive because the portal applications load faster – in just one second compared to the 10 seconds required with the old solution. Applications are also easier to use and require less employee training because the interfaces and functionality are consistent across all applications.

Developer productivity has also increased dramatically. The ability to develop applications using open source code allows developers to create new applications in half the time. “And shorter development cycles translate into a faster time-to-market,” said Dunstan. “We wouldn’t have been able to grow these services and capabilities for the business without accelerating our development cycle.”

The transparency of open source code and Red Hat’s conformance to open standards simplify developers’ work as well. “When we have problems, we like to work them out quickly in-house,” said Dunstan. “We can troubleshoot issues more easily with open source code.”

When Daiwa does need outside help, Red Hat’s JBoss support has been outstanding. “When you contact JBoss technical support, you get to the right person immediately – sometimes even the person who wrote the code you’re using,” said Dunstan. He constantly marvels at the fact that he has achieved 100 percent resolution on all support issues with Red Hat. “With other enterprise vendors, I feel lucky if I get 40 percent of my issues resolved,” he said.

Daiwa is starting a new project to develop Web 2.0 applications and will use a clustered server environment, which it plans to monitor using JBoss Operations Network.

In moving to JBoss, Daiwa has decreased its risk while getting very big returns. “JBoss is a worry-free solution that helps us sleep better at night,” said Dunstan.

City’s IT system benefits from stability, compatibility and cost reduction with Red Hat and JBoss solutions

Raleigh, NC — September 19, 2007 — Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the City of Recife’s Computer Technology Organization (Emprel) in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil is experiencing long-term success with Red Hat solutions. Emprel first selected Red Hat Linux in 1998, has since migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its critical applications and currently utilizes the full suite of Red Hat solutions.

Before migrating to open source solutions in 1994, Emprel was struggling with several problems in its proprietary-based IT infrastructure. It was experiencing operating system instability and budget limitations with its legacy software. It turned to open source to find a reliable, stable and cost-effective solution. Over time and after exploration of various open source solutions, it selected and deployed Red Hat Linux in 1998. With Red Hat Linux, Emprel was able to make its processing solutions available online, allowing the organization to take the municipal tax and urban planning systems to the city’s service centers. Then, the company updated and developed its tax, planning, health, education, budget, financial and shopping port software.

“In 2002 Emprel upgraded its real estate and commercial records and implemented them on the Red Hat Linux platform. Updating our records was a big challenge for us because these involve highly critical and complex systems which had been running on mainframes since day one” said Luís Siqueria, IT infrastructure director at Emprel. “But since we were finding success with Red Hat solutions already, and because we have always pioneered innovation, we decided to install Red Hat Linux on our mainframe. That was a deciding step toward the consolidation of Emprel’s open source software strategy.”

Today, most of the company’s critical services have been migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Its IT infrastructure comprises databases including DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL and MySQL. Its application servers include JBoss Application Server and WebSphere and it utilizes an Apache webserver and firewalls. Of Emprel’s 60 servers, 50 currently run on Red Hat solutions.

Since implementing Red Hat solutions, Emprel has enjoyed an extremely stable platform, compatibility with other commercial software versions and cost reduction for its management of over 2,000 machines. “The adoption of Red Hat solutions allows us to ensure compatibility and the knowledge that we can install its solutions without concern. Additionally, we didn’t have to use Red Hat support, which in our opinion is an excellent sign of stability and reliability,” said Siqueria. “This allows our tasks to be executed without interruption — the goal of any data processing center working 24×7.”

“We’re thrilled to see that Emprel has found such long-term success with Red Hat and JBoss solutions,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat. “Emprel’s use of Red Hat solutions since 1998, in addition to its migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its mainframes and critical applications, is a testament to the reliability and effectiveness of our solutions.”

For more information about Red Hat, visit http://www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the world’s leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 50 satellite offices spanning the globe. CIOs have ranked Red Hat first for value in Enterprise Software for three consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat provides high-quality, low-cost technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the integration of acquisitions; the ability of the Company to effectively compete; the inability to adequately protect Company intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to data and information security vulnerabilities; ineffective management of, and control over, the Company’s growth and international operations; adverse results in litigation; the dependence on key personnel as well as other factors contained in our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission’s website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions Risk Factors and Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. In addition, the forward-looking statements included in this press release represent the Company’s views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while the Company may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, the Company specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing the Company’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of the press release.

Category: Certified Service Provider

Winner:Amentra

Submitted by: Amentra Team

Industry: Amentra = Technology / La Petite Academy = Education

Geography: Virginia

Overview
Selected for helping enterprises deploy mission-critical business systems on JEMS through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Read Amentra Case Study

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Amentra, Inc. offers a distinctively different approach to business and IT consulting. By helping clients deploy mission critical business systems through a formal, experience-proven mentoring and software development program, Amentra has earned industry accolades for combining two areas that have historically been separate service offerings into a single solution: deliverable-based project solutions integrated with IT Mentoring. Amentra has great expertise in retail, insurance, pharmaceutical, telecommunications and finance. Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, Amentra also has regional offices in Reston, VA and Charlotte, NC. Amentra’s web address is http://www.amentra.com.

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The project had several significant business and technical challenges as outlined below:

Although these challenges were significant, they each also had reasonable solutions that could be addressed by a combination of proper project implementation and proper utilization of the JEMS stack. The challenge with the most far-reaching impact was the issue of the long-term implications of technology migration for the management of the IT department. This challenge alone had several major components:

– Any of the previous risks can negatively affect the total cost of ownership and return on investment – the gold standard of business success.

Although these risks are evident in every technology platform migration, they are rarely directly addressed and can often lead to the long-term failure or underperformance of a technology adoption effort and can poison the reputation of a product or technology solution.

3. What was the desired solution?
Amentra worked with the client to formulate a solution that involved two tightly integrated components: a traditional IT implementation with a focus on iterative implementation and heavy business involvement and a parallel mentoring approach that targeted developers, architects, IT support staff, and key business leaders.

Implementation and Architectural Approach

[ Note: At JBoss’s request, Amentra can describe every aspect of the business and technical solution (confidentiality agreements notwithstanding) in exhaustive detail. However, given that Amentra’s proposed innovation is its mentoring model for technology transfer and adoption of the JEMS stack, a brief overview of the technology solution will be provided for context while more attention is devoted to the mentoring aspect. ]

Amentra utilized its industry-leading expertise in J2EE implementation to help the client design a service-oriented architecture based on the JEMS stack. The architecture was specifically designed to provide scalable, reusable business and infrastructural services that would assist in the development of future applications. Amentra’s status as a JBoss partner also gave it additional insight into the future viability of various technology solutions on the JEMS stack, allowing further customization and refinement of the architecture.

A standard logical view of the architecture is provided in the JBoss World Innovation Award Submission
Mentoring Approach

The following section briefly explains Amentra’s mentoring approach as applied to this engagement and will provide a concrete case study of the mentoring process on a JEMS-centric project. The mentoring process is very flexible and based upon the level of the client staff’s experience and the client’s desired end result for mentoring, determined during the initial stages of the engagement. The process behind this methodology can be broken into several high-level steps:

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
Mentoring Topic Customization
Delivery Process Planning
Periodic Review and Adjustment

Staff Skill Set Evaluation
At project inception, Amentra met individually with each member of the technical staff who would be developing or supporting the application in order to establish a basic understanding of the backgrounds and relevant experience of those to be mentored. Amentra focused on obtaining information such as the person’s job description, education and experience, as well as asking each person to complete a self-assessment on their specific business or technology skill sets. It was important that Amentra included support staff as well, as the platform would eventually impact every single person in the IT department.

The resulting feedback received from these individuals along with the end result expectations as described by client management was used to select not only the high-level topics to be covered during the initial mentoring sessions, but to calibrate the level of detail and focus that was targeted for specific topics. For example, even though the development staff all came from Visual Basic 6 and RPG development backgrounds, all of the team members had a solid basic understanding of SQL and basic relational database usage. Identifying this at project inception allowed Amentra to skip classroom training for that area and reallocate the time to discuss less well-understood areas like practical object-oriented design.

Amentra had similar, but more subtle, conversations with key business stakeholders. This allowed Amentra to help IT leadership craft an effective message that emphasized the platform’s strengths, but also communicated the platform’s limitations as well.

Best Practices Opportunity Analysis
As the initial skill set evaluation was concluding, Amentra conducted a review of the client’s business processes, requirements management approach, and/or software development lifecycle processes as appropriate to determine opportunities for refining, augmenting, or reducing process in order to become more consistent with current best practices for the new business and technology environment. In this case, the client had a fairly sophisticated business requirements gathering approach that would work well with the new technology platform. However, the development and testing approaches would benefit from different approaches that better aligned with modern J2EE development. Mentoring in these approaches was thus added to the mentoring plan.

In order to maximize relevancy, Amentra’s mentoring process has been designed to be extremely flexible in its ability to be incorporated within any lifecycle methodology. Amentra has its own iterative methodology for delivering turnkey projects and will utilize this process if the client has not yet developed a process. In this example, the client chose to be mentored on portions of these processes and incorporate these portions into their enterprise direction. Amentra has substantial experience in incorporating its mentoring strategy within very rigid environments for some of the largest companies in the world, including heavily regulated environments like the pharmaceutical, insurance, healthcare, and financial industries.

Mentoring Topic Customization
Using the findings from the staff skill set evaluation and the current status review, Amentra customized a mentoring approach for the client and the team being mentored. The approach highlighted multiple key business processes, technologies, and methodology topics as high-level subject categories for the mentoring effort as listed below. A non-exhaustive list of the mentoring topics covered includes:

Agile Methodology
Requirements Gathering
Test Plan Development
Unified Markup Language (UML)
Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section I
Basic Java/OO Programming, Section II
Advanced Java Programming
Java Server Faces (JSF)
Java Messaging Service (JMS)
The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
Database Design
Hibernate
Logging
JUnit and Grinder
Subversion (SVN) Configuration Management
Ant
Maven

Amentra’s extensive experience helped to focus on the most appropriate foundational mentoring topics for initial efforts in order to help prepare the client team for more detailed and nuanced mentoring later in the project.

Delivery Process Planning
Amentra worked with the client’s management team to coordinate the mentoring plan with the overall project plan for the engagement. Like the project plan, the mentoring plan had formal deliverables, timelines, and milestones. The mentoring plan was designed in compliance with Amentra’s following guidelines:

Delivery of mentoring topics were coordinated with the project schedule so that topics relevant to the current stage of a project are covered just prior to and during that stage whenever possible. These topics sometimes spanned different groups participating in an overall mentoring approach and were executed in parallel with these groups by different members of the Amentra consulting team.
Classroom training was always confined to a limited period of time as knowledge retention drops off sharply in long training sessions.
Mentoring material preparation time for extremely customized mentoring topics was considered. However, since Amentra has already created a significant library of mentoring presentations and material, additional preparation time was typically quite small.

Mentoring Delivery
Amentra then iteratively implemented the mentoring plan with the client. Initial iterations for each topic covered involved relatively short (1-4 hour), highly interactive classroom training sessions. This helped establish a baseline among the team for new topics and provided some structure for how the new technologies and skill sets could best be used. Most classroom training sessions had a corresponding set of “homework” assignments for the team to complete individually. This allowed the team to immediately reinforce the learning. Just as importantly, the assignments provided Amentra with immediate feedback on the amount of comprehension that occurred on an individual basis. In one or two cases, training sessions were repeated or extended based on the results of the assignments. In other cases, planned follow-on sessions were eliminated when the team demonstrated immediate understanding of the subjects.

The classroom training sessions were carefully scheduled to be executed immediately before a corresponding opportunity to use the knowledge in practice. One the classroom training established a baseline of comprehension, Amentra immediately targeted follow-on project tasks that helped ensure retention of the knowledge. As the staff attempted to apply their new knowledge to a project challenge, Amentra consultants worked with them individually at various points each day to ensure that they were progressing towards an effective solution, and shared additional, more refined techniques as the staff demonstrated increasing confidence and competence with their new skills. This carefully planned, one-on-one mentoring approach is unique to Amentra and has been critical in helping dozens of clients migrate from legacy platforms to more modern solutions.

It is worth reiterating that Amentra’s mentoring was not just applied to developers. Key business stakeholders and analysts were mentored in the software methodology and requirements gathering sessions. QA staff members were mentored in the test-related topics. Administrators and support staff were mentored in the introductory and administration-related topics. This holistic mentoring approach ensured that all stakeholders were up-to-speed in the new platform and techniques that were being adopted.

Periodic Review and Adjustment
The effectiveness and progress of the mentoring plan was periodically assessed and adjusted throughout the project as Amentra worked with the client to design and implement the application. This iterative approach to mentoring allowed for adjustments to be made as Amentra saw evidence of strengths and weaknesses in the new approaches, creating an optimal learning experience for the project team.

Summary
Amentra’s mentoring model ensured the long term success of the effort by addressing each of the following risks:

Potential Loss of Personnel/Business Knowledge – Amentra’s evangelization and individualized attention helped initially convince the client staff that they would continue to be vital members of the organization after the adoption of the new platform and would continue to be strong contributors to ongoing project success. As the mentoring process progressed, the staff became even more excited about the new skills that they were learning and applying on a daily basis. In fact, the IT department experienced no attrition at all among legacy developers during the project span.

Critical External Leverage – By training the client team in all aspects of product development and administration with the JEMS stack and other technologies, Amentra ensured that the client would be able to support and extend the application without any outside assistance.

Failure to Realize Productivity Gains – Amentra’s critical contribution to the long-term reduction in total cost of ownership was to mentor the team in optimal development practices using the JEMS stack and related technologies. This not only included detailed training in sophisticated development areas like remote application server debugging using JBoss-IDE, but also in software development best practices like designing for reuse, automating integration builds, and test-driven development.

Failure to Realize Integration Savings – Amentra’s vast experience in large-scale enterprise integration helped make this challenge simple for the client. Even before Amentra was formally engaged by the client, Amentra helped the client understand the attractiveness of an integration solution based on a reusable enterprise service bus. Once engaged, Amentra then provided critical mentoring that allowed the client to understand how to extend the integration implementations required for this project.

Increased Total Cost of Ownership – The shared knowledge provided by Amentra in each of the preceding bullets helped to ensure the smooth transition from the legacy technology platform to a JEMS-based platform and guaranteed that the client staff had sufficient in-house expertise to continue to deliver systems efficiently on the new platform.

Inappropriate Long-Term Expectation Management – As noted above, Amentra’s mentoring methodology has evolved over time to include informal mentoring of key business stakeholders specifically to ensure that expectations are properly managed.

Amentra’s innovative mentoring approach to project delivery and the client-consultant relationship has delivered initial project success on the JEMS stack for customers while ensuring their satisfaction with JBoss and Java for years to come.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
Amentra worked with the client to evaluate the JEMS stack along with several other commercial software vendors and several partial J2EE-based solutions (e.g., standalone portals, standalone servlet engines) for features, adoption costs, expected productivity, support capabilities, and licensing costs. JEMS was the clear winner in each of these categories.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
At Amentra’s urging and with full client agreement, JEMS products played critical business and technical roles in the solution. JEMS products are used at every layer of the implementation, including:

Presentation Layer – JBoss Portal has provided the presentation infrastructure for the effort and has served as the interface into several of the reusable services designed for this effort (e.g., authentication/authorization, reporting).

Business Layer – JBoss Server has provided the central hub for the application and hosts the services that comprise the application.

Integration Layer – Hibernate has been used exclusively for all database integration and has drastically reduced the development time for this layer.

With Amentra’s encouragement, the client adopted Eclipse as the IDE of choice and leveraged the JBoss-IDE plug-in as well to help speed development.

Although the JEMS stack played an absolutely mission critical role in the technology stack, its most critical contribution was to allow the adoption of an enterprise-class, fully-supported J2EE solution at a price point that led to quick return on investment. Without this capability, the project might well have languished in the planning stage.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
Amentra’s mentoring approach gave the client the confidence to include a significant amount of functionality in scope for the first release of the platform. This created several critical and immediate positive benefits for the business:

Reduction in Labor Costs – Within seconds of any student or employee arriving or departing any of the client’s branch locations, the system is notified and recalculates the appropriate labor staffing ratio based on regulations at the state, county, and municipality level. Management in the field is instantly alerted if staffing is too high and can react appropriately. Managers can then react appropriately and with iron confidence to minimize overstaffing. This significantly reduces labor costs, the largest single expense for the client, while maintaining excellent quality of service for customers.

Increased Regulatory Compliance – State, county, and municipal ratios are now automatically calculated based on centrally maintained information instead of being calculated manually at each branch location. This eliminates any chance of inadvertent non-compliance at the branches.

Greatly Increased Operational Visibility – For the first time, corporate management now has near-real-time reporting capabilities on attendance data. This allows for true auditing capabilities from the corporate office, increasing management efficiency in the field and ensuring that every location is meeting or exceeding all appropriate staffing regulations at all times. The use of JBoss Portal as a web interface and delivery method also allows district and regional managers to use the system for self-service reporting when traveling, a critical capability for an organization where some districts cover tens of thousands of square miles.

The savings and operational improvements noted above fully justified the implementation on their own. However, Amentra used their longstanding J2EE expertise to help the client design the system as an extensible, service-oriented platform that can quickly and inexpensively support additional capabilities in future versions such as:

Improved Strategic Reporting – Because of Amentra’s mentoring approach, the client now has the JBoss Portal expertise required to easily deploy existing reports to executive and field management through the JBoss Portal-based interface designed as part of this application. This will also allow the client to further leverage the common authentication/authorization service built during this effort. Further, strategic reports can now be updated on a daily basis instead of a weekly basis due to the ESB-based common data collection infrastructure (q.v. above).

Yield Management Analysis and Improved Pricing Models – Amentra helped the client design the business rules service in a manner that will also support rule-based pricing as part of a future effort. Utilizing more sophisticated pricing methods will allow the client to increase their revenue in the future without a corresponding increase in labor costs. The common data collection infrastructure is a necessary prerequisite for this capability as well, allowing for models that react instantly to changes in student attendance and staffing levels.

Centralization and Portal-Based Delivery of All Applications – The success of this JEMS-based rollout and the low associated development costs have made it likely that more of the applications that are currently executed at the branch will be centralized. This will eventually allow complete central data storage, reducing the computing needs at the branch level and eliminating the existing data protection needs at each branch.

Increasing Automation of Complex Business Processes – The client’s newly acquired ESB experience has enabled them to more aggressively target automation efforts that span systems. This has created a paradigm shift for the client that will likely support years of future projects that generate further incremental cost improvements. Detailed knowledge of existing systems and processes will be equally as important to the success of these efforts as ESB expertise, but Amentra’s ability to retool the development team with ESB skills has ensured that the system knowledge acquired over years of experience at the client has been preserved for the future.

Amentra’s expertise helped the client correctly design the initial services to readily support these future initiatives for very low effort. Amentra’s mentoring methodology ensured that the client developed their own in-house expertise to implement these initiatives with little or no outside support.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
Confidentiality agreements with the client prevent Amentra from disclosing details of savings and expenditures at this time. However, some of the savings created by using JEMS was used to help implement additional services in the service-oriented architecture that will greatly lower future implementation costs for the client.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
In order to fully leverage the client’s existing infrastructure standards and investments, the following hardware/software stack was used:

Presentation/Application Servers: JBoss Portal, JBoss Server, Hibernate, Windows 2003, on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Enterprise Service Bus Servers: Cape Clear ESB, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Servers

Business Rules Engine Server: Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor

Database Server: Microsoft SQL Server, Windows 2003 on a cluster of 2-CPU Dell Enterprise-Class Server

Business Intelligence Server: Information Builders WebFOCUS on existing hardware.

In order to meet the client’s needs, the application will support thousands of simultaneous users and hundreds of thousands of messages per day from over six hundred branch locations.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
At Amentra’s suggestion, the client purchased JEMS support to guarantee support, warranties, and indemnification equivalent to that provided by a closed-source platform. Due to Amentra’s support and mentoring, the client has enjoyed the best possible experience with their support – they have not yet had cause to use it at all!

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
The obvious licensing cost and standardization savings resulting from the adoption of professional-grade, open source platforms have traditionally been countered by the perceived difficulty in quickly retooling existing staff to effectively use these platforms. The combination of JBoss’s demonstrated commitment to platform excellence and the proven results of Amentra’s mentoring methodology for retooling legacy developers from COBOL, RPG, VB6 and dozens of other programming backgrounds have overcome this challenge and drastically lowered the entry cost for J2EE platform adoption.

Category: User Experience
Winner: Daiwa Securities America
Submitted by: Steve Dunstan, Vice President / Enterprise Systems Architect
Industry: Financial services
Geography: New York, NY

Overview
Migration of 120 separate applications running to JBoss Portal using a series of unified templates. This enabled rapid growth, increased productivity, faster service, and hundreds of thousand of dollars in cost-savings.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Daiwa Securities America is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Daiwa Securities Co. Ltd. of Japan. The subsidiary focuses on sales and trading of Japanese and U.S. equities and fixed income instruments, financial futures, and investment banking, including mergers and acquisitions and structured finance. For the year ending March 31, 2007, Daiwa Securities America had ¥14,684,000,000 (134 billion dollars) in net operating revenues.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

In 2006, we successfully migrated one section of our prior portal to JBoss Portal. The section we migrated contained our Compliance Dashboard, a portal that ensures new financial and securities compliance regulations remain updated and implemented across our company. We initiated the migration because of the serious problems we were having with our prior vendor—not just technical, but organizational, and with tech support in particular. Because we are small and agile, we were more bleeding edge than their other customers; we had stressed the prior vendor’s platform to the breaking point. The prior vendor’s support team couldn’t answer any of our questions and were unable to support their own product. In addition, the slow speed and unreliability of the prior vendor’s portal was becoming an issue for our users, and the complexity of porting new applications was an ongoing problem for our IT department.

Based on the ease of the Compliance Dashboard migration and the resulting stability we experienced, we decided to migrate the remainder of our applications onto a new JBoss-based portal. Because we are on the leading edge of technology, we also needed a solution that we could support ourselves. This gave an open source solution a natural competitive advantage.

What was the desired solution?

We required a high-performance solution that was stable, fast, and flexible. Our IT department needed to be able to roll out new applications quickly and insert them on-the-fly. We also needed to gain more control over the vast number of applications that were running on the portal because supporting them was difficult and time consuming.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

When we had the problems with our prior vendor, we brought in a large, well known IT vendor for an interview. From their very high-level PowerPoint presentation, it became apparent that our agile corporate culture was not in line with theirs. We also evaluated another vendor’s product, but it was overly complicated.

On the other hand, our previous experience with JBoss products and technical support had been excellent. We had purchased a support subscription for the Compliance Dashboard and used it during our JBoss migration. When we had problems with the applications we were building, we were able to leverage JBoss support, sometimes communicating directly with the engineers who actually coded the program. The high quality of first-line support JBoss provides impressed us. We don’t have to go through a bunch of call center people to get answers to a problem.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

Our portal had about 120 applications built on top of it, and we weren’t sure how we were going to perform the migration. We completed a broad analysis of the applications, looked at what they did and what they were used for, and found that they all did pretty much the same thing. They were mostly database-driven applications with minor differences in the inputs and outputs (commissions, broker dealer set-up, client set-up, etc.).

We used JBoss Portal to front end the database. Then, we designed an idealized template that described our applications in terms of how they “mine” that database, and ran the Velocity templating engine to regenerate all of our applications on the new JBoss Portal. Once we decided how to do this, it only took us three months from development to production. To complete the migration took one year. We had four people working on it: one person worked on the bulk of the templates; three developers handled the others that were more complicated or needed different business rules.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• From the user’s perspective, the biggest gains were speed, reliability, and ease of use. Since all of the applications are now from a common source, the method of operation and presentation of data is consistent from screen to screen. As a result, we’ve reduced training cycles for employees.
• From the developers’ point of view, we can create new applications in far less time. The compile time for an application dropped from five minutes in the prior vendor’s portal to less than a second in JBoss. In addition, the modularity of JBoss allows us to plug new pages into the portal easily. With our prior vendor, we either had to roll the entire portal (which took over an hour), or use WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets), which had lots of inherent problems. With JBoss, we’ve experienced much shorter development cycles, which means we can be more innovative in our approaches.
• The JBoss solution is also easier to maintain. With our prior vendor’s product, we had some difficult, opaque technical problems that we were never able to get resolved. Now, when we have a really tough problem, we look at the JBoss source code to help us debug it.
• Because we’re only running one program, the applications are also easier to maintain. When we find a bug, we re-roll the applications and the bug fix propagates to all of the pages.
• The system is far more reliable, as well. During the last year, we have had no unscheduled down time.
• Our IT team’s credibility with management has improved significantly. Since our applications no longer crash, management is now comfortable coming to us with their problems and required improvements. Turnaround time for developing new applications they request is only a few weeks.
• JBoss has provided us with the scalability we require. Since the time we switched over to JBoss, the number of applications running has increased from 120 to 170, and continues to grow at 40% a year.
• In strictly monetary terms, we’re saving $90,000 by eliminating the prior vendor’s support costs.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

Our back-end database is Sybase running on a Solaris server. For development, we are using a single four-CPU server that is front ended by Apache on a single CPU Solaris box. For production, we have a Windows 2003-based server online, with a hot backup (the total number of servers is doubled because of our disaster recovery setup).

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

Our key people took the JBoss for Administrators class 18 months ago. We currently have a Premium Subscription to the JBoss Portal Platform and are very happy with the high level of support we receive. During the migration process, we also worked with a JBoss consultant. We had some tough integration problems related to security, so we asked for help from JBoss. They got the job done.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

If you’re going to be a fast, nimble organization, you need to consider open source options. The ability to self-support yourself means that your down times will be minimized. It also means that you can develop cutting-edge applications by exploiting the openness of the program.

Category: Portal
Winner: Cendant Distribution Travel Services Group, Inc
Submitted by: Brad Lindow & Jason Cohen
Industry: Travel
Geography: Chicago, IL

Overview

Selected for use of JBoss Portal to improve user experience, reduce transactions and reporting times, and reduce costs and overall development time in building myaccount.galileo.com, Cendant Travel Distribution Services’ portal was built to provide self service capabilities to thousands of travel agents and suppliers.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Download JBoss World Las Vegas Presentation

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Orbitz is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cendant Corporation and part of Cendant Travel Distribution Services division. The division that developed and is deploying JBoss Portal is part of the 8,500 person travel distribution services.

Orbitz is a leading online travel company offering leisure and business travelers a wide selection of low airfares, as well as deals on lodging, car rentals, cruises, vacation packages and other travel.

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

3. What was the desired solution?

Build portal for Galileo, the business unit of the Cendant Travel Distribution Services division. The Myaccount.Galileo.com portal is an interface for thousands of travel agents. The portal project was initiated to service these business customers better and automate manual processes.

The main functions needed for the portal are: Online Contract Renewal, Reports (running, scheduling), and Online Ordering. Administrators from each customers company can also manage their employees as they pertain to our portal (add users, delete users, add permissions).

Portal provides user customization including different views for different types of users (e.g. administrators, contracts, reporting). Also provides the ability to generate automated e-mail reports of activity, thus saving customers a significant amount of time.

Orbitz chose JBoss Application Server, JBoss Portal, Eclipse IDE, MySQL, and Pentaho; all open source products as well as Novell’s eDirectory. They also leveraged JBoss consulting, training, and the JBoss Subscription to assist with support and integration questions and issues. The entire project was completed in less than five months by a team of seven full-time technical staff and an average of three external advisors at any given time. The project successfully launched on January 30th, 2006.

See Innovation Award Submission for snapshots of the Galileo Portal Project

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.

The Orbitz team evaluated extensively several Portal vendors – both Proprietary and Open Source.
The main criteria in selecting the Portal platform were:

• Reputation of the vendor
• Previous experience with vendor’s technology
• Cost (initial and future license costs, support and maintenance costs)
• Certified and/or integrated products to avoid integration issues and costs associated with the project (including integration with Pentaho, MySQL, and Novell eDirectory)

Ultimately, Orbitz chose JBoss because of our previous experience and overall satisfaction with JBoss Application Server and because JBoss Portal was open source. Choosing JBoss Portal allows us to avoid costly product licenses. This cost savings will allow us to spend on headcount instead of paying money to vendors.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
Clustered JBoss Application Servers Version 4.03, JBoss Portal Version 2.0, JBoss Eclipse IDE and EJB3.0 were all utilized in the solution.

JEMS was specifically used for the customer facing portal features. See diagram in innovation award submission. JBoss Portal is used for customization on the user side. It changes per profile of the customer depending if they are administrative, contracts or reporting.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

ROI savings – When comparing the JBoss Portal solution to their 2nd proprietary options, the total savings equal $600,000 for the initial year and $150,000 in maintenance for every following year.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
With the projected cost savings by choosing JBoss Portal, they did not count the money as a reinvestment, however a solution to keep expenses and cost down. They were able to keep the bottom line down which in return was a positive result on the headcount.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
Application Server – Clustered JBoss Application Servers Version 4.03
Portal Server – JBoss Portal Version 2.0
Database for use with Portal – MySQL 4.1
Identity Management – Novell eDirectory, Identity Manager, iChain
Reporting Server – Pentaho BI Platform
IDE – JBoss Eclipse IDE
Distributed Component Architecture – Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

10. Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

Be willing to take a chance on open source projects. Realize that open source projects can be every bit as good as commercial equivalents without the expensive license fees. You will probably also experience much better overall support – via the combination of community support tools such as Forums and Wikis and the for-pay technical support offered as part of the JBoss Subscription.

Another nice thing about open source is the ability to write their own patches if necessary – something not possible with commercial/proprietary offerings that don’t provide the source code. When we have an issue, we don’t want to be at the mercy of a commercial vendor’s support organization to solve our problem. We like the ability to solve it on our own if we need to. We haven’t to date because the quality of JBoss Support has been excellent, but knowing that option exists is important to us.

Category: Persistence
Winner: ADP
Submitted by: Patrick Urban & Nicholas Whitehead
Industry: Financial Services
Geography: Roseland, New Jersey

Overview

Selected for building an AJAX Adaptor for Hibernate that supplies AJAX clients with a rich and high performance data access API and for their use of Hibernate and other JEMS products to improve uptime and reduce cost of their EasyPayNet 5 and TeleNet 1.X Web-based payroll systems.

• ADP
• Business Software & Services
• 44,000 employees
• Market Cap: $27.09 Billion

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

• EasyPayNet 5 and TeleNet 1.X Application Suites: Web Based Payroll Entry Systems for External (Web) and Internal (Extranet) User Bases.
• Replacement of existing solution.
• Migration to new J2EE platform and adoption/deployment of new technology.
• Replacement had to run in parallel with existing system for extensive parallel run. (Like changing the tires on a moving car)
• Business Uptime Requirements (99.99%)
• Very competitive marketplace.

3. What was the desired solution?

• Adoption of JBoss Application Server starting with 3.2.3 in 2003 provided a higher quality server, more transparency, better support and excellent performance.
• Implementation of JBoss Clustering for EasyPayNet 4 and EasyPayNet 5 provided seamless HTTP Session failover and dynamic load balancing.
• Administrative applications that support the EasyPayNet and TeleNet platforms have been migrated to JBoss Portal for ease of development, consistency of interface and support for portlet standards.
• Developers started migrating to JBoss IDE in 2005.
• TeleNet persistence architecture enhanced with Hibernate/JBoss Cache for high performance queries and data caching.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.

The vendor selection was a straightforward process. A group was formed comprised of management, architects and senior developers. We listed a group of vendors for which there was at least one supporter. (E.g. Pramati was not on the list since no one supported them, BEA was unanimously agreed to be too expensive.) The short list came down to Macromedia (JRun), Oracle, JBoss and IBM. Then we proceeded to list any and all features that could be evaluated or that any member of the group considered important or a factor in evaluation. This list was condensed and categorized.

Each member of the team then ranked the feature from 1-5, 1 being of low importance, 5 being of critical importance. All the scores were averaged out. Then each of the four vendors was ranked by each person on how well they supplied each of the features ranking between 1 and 10 on each. These scores were averaged out and a score for each vendor was calculated by multiplying the feature importance factor by the vendor’s score on that feature and summing up those totals.

Based on this methodology, JBoss won the evaluation. A sample spreadsheet attached illustrates this process. We found it worked well by awarding higher scores to features people though were more important (at the time, J2EE certification was not considered important so it had a lower weight). By the same token, it did force us to consider a wide breadth of features. For example, some research we did indicated that Persistence Power Tier was by far the fastest J2EE server as the time, but we certainly did not want to adopt that server, so it forced us to consider a variety of factors instead of the knee-jerk reaction of “buy the best (most expensive)” or “buy the fastest”.

The process was also backed up by numerous white papers and presentations.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
With the exception of JBoss Rules and JBoss jBPM, we have implemented and benefited from every piece of the JEMS stack. We have evaluated and prototyped with jBPM, but it has not been implemented in production.

JBoss Application Server: Currently runs every client facing application in SBS and half of the internal ones.

JBoss Portal: We have eliminated three proprietary web based support applications and centralized all support functions under a JBoss Portal based application. This actually works really well because different teams and different applications have vastly different needs and JBoss Portal allows us to seamlessly integrate portlets developed by various different groups and that administer completely different applications and we are able to deploy them in a way that makes the user think that they are working with one seamless and integrated support application.

Hibernate: Hibernate is a crucial component of the TeleNet system where it manages the persistence of EasyPay’s CRM data. We have benefited from the ease of development, the flexibility and sophistication of Hibernate’s mapping capabilities, the performance of the data caching and we have also developed what we call an AJAX Adaptor for Hibernate which is a custom service designed to supply Ajax clients with a rich and high performance data access API. See Appendix D.

JBoss Eclipse IDE: Now the majority of EasyPayNet and TeleNet developers are using the JBoss IDE and the Hibernate tools have saved us substantial development time through the use of the reverse engineering and HSQL tools provided.

JBoss Cache: JBoss Cache is enhancing the performance and uptime of EasyPayNet and TeleNet in the following ways:

• HTTP Session Clustering implemented with JBoss Cache provides our users excellent uptime by allowing uninterrupted service even when we have infrastructure or system issues forcing hardware maintenance or downed systems.
• Hibernate Caching using JBoss Cache is giving us excellent query performance making the TeleNet front end web applications respond perceptively as fast as the green screens they are replacing.
• JBoss Cache allows us to cache arbitrary content such as serializable JDBC result sets and static reference data saving thousands of trips to the database per minute.

JBoss Transactions: We rarely interact directly with the transaction manager, but we make extensive use of Container Managed Transactions which gives us a simpler architecture, ease of development and excellent data integrity capabilities.

JBossMQ: JBossMQ is used to support the use of J2EE Message Driven Beans implemented to provide asynchronous operations in the application server.

Apache Tomcat: All of our JBoss based applications but one are web based applications and Tomcat’s support for JSP, Servlets and Struts is used extensively in each web application.

JGroups: We do not make use of JGroups directly but it is the underpinning of the clustering and distributed caching services that have been critical to our success.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• Significantly improved application uptime.
• Expected cost savings to the business from improved data quality, reduced errors, reduced phone calls from clients and an overall reduction in operational costs.
• See Appendix A and Appendix B.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
Undefined.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

See Appendix C.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
1.) Since initiating our first support agreement in March 2004, we have opened 39 cases with JBoss support on the JBoss Customer Support Portal. Each case was responded to within the same day and 97% of the issues were addressed in short order. We have been impressed with the effortless ability to have our issues addressed by competent and knowledgeable support staff, including referrals to the actual developers of the components we were having issues with. Resolutions have come several forms including:

• Correction of our approach or implementation.
• Defect detection in our own code ranging from core Java code issues to more esoteric uses of JBoss components.
• JBoss defect identification and subsequent patch releases.
• Telephone conference calls with JBoss developers at 9:00 PM accompanied by immediate emailed diagnostic utilities and debugging sessions of live code. (Thanks Adrian).

2.) In the early days of JBoss adoption, a number of our developers attended JBoss Advanced training off site. Our experiences in this training were uniformly positive and significantly propelled our expertise and accelerated our productivity as well as making us extremely comfortable with not just the application server itself, but also the core architecture, design approach and philosophy of JBoss and our understanding and use of the JBoss source code itself.

3.) A number of developers have attended additional training courses in Hibernate and jBPM and we have additional training attendance scheduled.

• Subsequent to the individual JBoss Advanced training we attended, we were collectively so impressed with the value of the training and the pragmatic approach to knowledge transfer, we contracted with JBoss to deliver the same JBoss Advanced training on site and all of our Java Developers attended the training. Feedback to the training was extremely positive and productivity and comfort with the product was measurably enhanced.

10. Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

I recommend our evaluation methodology or something similar:

Appendix A: ROI Estimates for TeleNet Platform

Actual dollar savings for these items is considerable but confidential.

TeleNet Phase I
1.) Improved Quality of Data Entry

• Reduction in Payroll Reruns by 40%.
• Significant Reduction in Service Calls
• Significant Reduction in Operational Costs

2.) Improved Client Retention
3.) Accelerated Learning Curve for Users
4.) Improved Associate Retention

TeleNet Phase II (Pending)
1.) Continued Efficiency & Quality Improvements
2.) TeleNet Front End engineering to predictively prevent known reasons for client service calls.
3.) Reduction in Operational Costs of Client Service By 25%.

Appendix B: Application Availability & Uptime Improvements in EasyPayNet

EasyPayNet 4 was the first version of EasyPayNet to be implemented using JBoss Application Server and the first to be fully clustered for high availability and seamless failover. The graph below presents EasyPayNet application availability trends before and after EasyPayNet Version 4.

However, the application availability is impacted by a number of factors of which JBoss availability is only one. Less than 50% of the down time of the application is due to actual application server outages. Factoring this in, the uptime for JBoss application server in EasyPayNet 4+ has been consistently over 99.9%.

Appendix C: Generalized EasyPayNet / TeleNet Application Architecture

The following is a generalization of the architecture of EasyPayNet and TeleNet. The two applications share a common code base and are used to server external users and internal users respectively. Download the JBoss Innovation Award Submission for diagram

Appendix D: TeleNet AJAX Adaptor for Hibernate

The TeleNet application provides some CRM functionality that allows users to quickly track and administer upcoming scheduled events for our customers. During the design process, we analyzed a requirement that involved providing a near free-form query interface to allow the user to list customer events by a wide variety of possible parameters from a web interface. We decided to implement a basic XML based query API that is invoked by JavaScript in the client browser and returns data in XML format which in turn is parsed and bound the UI widgets on the browser screen.

This allows the browser full flexibility in issuing custom queries for customer events and was easily implemented on the server side using a SAX based XML parser and the Hibernate Criteria Query API. The following is a picture of the TeleNet Event Query Screen.
The performance and maintenance of data retrieval for this critical part of the application is improved as follows:

• Relationships between entities and mapping optimizations are managed by the Hibernate mapping files so the front end developers can focus on search parameters.
• The state of the filter list in the UI can easily be synchronized with the pending request which resides in a DOM. The simple XML structure of the query language is intuitive and flexible with respect to typing, format and scalar vs. array conditions.
• The use of the background XML-Http requester reduces the amount of network traffic back and forth by not requiring a refresh of the browser screen for each new query. What is observed is more of a client-server style data only request.

See the JBoss Innovation Award Submission for a picture of the test utility we use to debug XML queries generated by the AJAX adaptor which helps to visualize how the adapter works: