Dubai, U.A.E. – – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that the Emirates Group IT, operating under the brand name Mercator, a global provider of business technology solutions, delivering business transformation, process improvement and return on investment to more than 100 customers in over five continents, has standardized its IT operations on a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware after a three month pilot program..

In an effort to simplify its datacenter and reduce the total cost of operations for web server technologies, the Emirates Group migrated approximately 80% of its comparable servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat’s middleware solution portfolio offers a certified and supported platform for other open source technologies, a critical factor for the Emirates Group when deciding to standardise on open source technologies.

“Migrating to a new standard can be highly complex in an organisation the size of the Emirates Group/Mercator,” said Patrick Naef, Divisional Senior Vice President, Emirates Group IT and head of Mercator said. “Change management and confidence in vendor support are critical factors to successfully adopt a new standard- this is why we chose Red Hat.”

The Emirates Group IT/Mercator supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies.

The Emirates Group IT / Mercator strategy to migrate to JBoss was to first divert new applications for deployment on this platform. This allowed Emirates Group IT to quickly build capability, before applications were promoted to the production environment. The migration occurred seamlessly with Red Hat providing training and support to the Emirates Group IT department to ensure a more gradual adoption process.

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

About Emirates Group IT / Mercator
Emirates Group IT supports a global enterprise of approximately 40,000 employees as well as more than 100 customers outside of the Emirates Group under the brand name Mercator. Consequently it has a complex IT infrastructure made up of a variety of software and hardware technologies. The IT infrastructure supports a diverse and complex business from the Airline, to Cargo Handling, Hotels, Travel Agents, Tours and Catering.

© 2009 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, the Shadowman logo and JBoss are registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

COMPANY: Union Bank, N.A.

CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives

INDUSTRY: Financial Services

GEOGRAPHY: Headquarters: San Francisco, CA

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: An aging and costly IT infrastructure was impeding the ability of Union Bank to scale to growth and respond agilely to changing market dynamics

MIGRATION PATH: UNIX™ on high-end RISC machines to Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on Intel Xeon based HP servers; Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux™, Red Hat Network Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform™, JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, Red Hat Consulting

HARDWARE: More than 150 Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based HP ProLiant servers

BENEFITS: Improve reliability and scalability, cut costs, and deliver new financial services and products to market faster

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Union Bank, N.A., headquartered in San Francisco is a full-service commercial bank providing an array of financial services to individuals, small businesses, middle-market companies, and major corporations. Union Bank is California’s fifth-largest bank by deposits. The bank has 335 banking offices in California, Oregon, and Washington and two international offices. Its holding company, UnionBanCal Corporation, is the 16th largest commercial bank holding company in the U.S. based on assets at March 31, 2009.

Union Bank was selected for its operating platform migration from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Websphere to JBoss to support its mission critical applications at an improved price with greater performance and less up-keep. Union Bank used open source solutions to increase time to market, reliability and return on investment.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
When Mok Choe joined Union Bank in early 2007 as chief technology officer, the Union Bank IT infrastructure faced a host of challenges similar to those of many other companies at the time, mainly increasing costs and resources associated with the maintenance and upkeep of legacy systems.

Over the years, Union Bank’s IT infrastructure had grown increasingly large, cumbersome, and complex. Not only was it costly to operate and maintain, but it couldn’t scale to accommodate the bank’s rapid expansion into new markets. System availability was also a continuing challenge. And as the financial services industry expanded into electronic banking products, Union Bank’s reliance on IT was increasing. The bank thus required an IT infrastructure that could speed new products to market with rock-solid reliability and availability, and which could also scale as needed.

The hardware environment embraced a “big box” approach with a few massive servers at strategic locations that offered little relief when significant impacts occurred. This environment required tremendous overhead with constant monitoring and management of server problems.

The IT department at Union Bank was also under pressure to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of its overall IT operations. The solution needed to deliver a robust disaster recovery environment with minimal mean-time-to-restore (MTTR) and maximum mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) times. Finally, the solution needed to better leverage Union Bank’s most highly skilled IT workers. By enabling valued staff workers to reduce the day-to-day support required by overhead-intensive legacy systems, productivity would improve, and the bank’s IT department could move from a reaction to proactive support model.

“First and foremost, we needed to improve system availability,” said Choe. “Secondly, we needed to speed time to market of new financial services products. And at the end of the day, we needed to decrease the cost per transaction of delivering services.”

SOLUTION
Union Bank immediately focused on the task of establishing a new and innovative technology environment. The first decision: to create a new open source-based enterprisewide IT platform to obtain improved availability, agility, scalability and reduced TCO (total cost of ownership), while enabling the support of the bank’s growing IT needs and better alignment with the bank’s overall business plan.

“We did three specific things,” said Choe. “First, we migrated our entire Web-based infrastructure over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux so we could go from a scale-up to a scale-out architecture. Next, we ported our teller platform over to JBoss. And third, we wrote a brand new Web-based cash management application built on the entire Red Hat technology stack: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss, Hibernate, and SEAM.”

The strategy started at the operating platform level by replacing the aging UNIX based RISC servers with commodity x86 machines running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and migrating to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform at the application server level. Union Bank initially utilized Red Hat Network to set up centralized, secure management of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems.

Union Bank took advantage of Red Hat Consulting to assist the IT group with the initial design of the first phases of deploying the new architecture and Web-based applications. The bank’s infrastructure and application development teams attended Red Hat Training to learn valuable tools and lessons on integration and migration issues.

The new strategy also encompassed building a new data center that leveraged virtualization technology on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to dramatically reduce the bank’s hardware footprint. “The bank is very serious about its green initiative, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a key part of that,” said Choe.

One of the most strategic projects was to replace the bank’s operating system environment on branch teller systems with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Within just months, the Union Bank development staff was able to create a “silent” JBoss deployment package and distribute it remotely to over 330 production branch servers.

“The JBoss-based teller application has been running successfully at the 330 branch sites ever since,” said Choe, “The small footprint of JBoss has freed up much needed space on each branch server and has laid the ground work for future expansion. We plan to migrate other customer-facing web applications from Websphere to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.”

BENEFITS
Union Bank’s innovative approach to its IT re-architecture has resulted in improvements to system availability, scalability and, resiliency, increased ROI, enhanced security, provisioning, configuration management, and improved time to market.

The most significant benefits have been improved system availability and resiliency. Upon migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there have been improvements of the bank’s hardware infrastructure, as seen by improved mean-time-to restore (MTTR), and mean-time-between-failures (MTBF).

The return on investment (ROI) was also substantial. For example, the large RISC machines were running at less than 50 percent capacity. To ensure redundancy, the bank needed to double its hardware investment to allow for fail over. “With Red Hat’s commodity model, we were able to spread the load over multiple machines and reduce our overall spend by approximately 80 percent,” said Choe. “And these savings don’t take into account the reduced maintenance costs of moving to the Red Hat platform, which is easier – and therefore cheaper – to maintain.”

Additionally, because application performance increased significantly under the new JBoss and Red Hat architecture, the bank was able to reduce the time-to-market of new products. The bank was also able to improve customer service by boosting the performance of its teller application. “The success of that project gives us confidence to tackle the rest of our browser-based Web applications with a JBoss solution,” said Choe.

The move from a vertical to a horizontal architecture and process enhancement have improved both system availability and resiliency, which allows the bank to absorb normal glitches without impacting customer transactions. “The reliability of our Web applications has improved to the point where I can go to our business partners and confidently say we have better than ‘four 9s’ availability,” said Choe.

The Red Hat/JBoss solution requires less maintenance and enables Union Bank IT to reduce their efforts on day-to-day support of legacy systems, allowing for better resource utilization. This also helped the IT group move from a reactive to a proactive model more expediently.

Additionally, the bank’s overall cost-per-transaction declined 25 to 40 percent, something that Union Bank’s business centers appreciate. “We have a charge-back system in which our departments pay for the IT resources they consume,” said Choe. “They’ve seen their charges go down month by month.”

“We benefited greatly from Red Hat consulting services as they provided valuable input and assistance in helping us migrate to Red Hat technology and dramatically improved our ability to achieve our goals,” said Choe, “With Red Hat Consulting, we felt there was an immediate knowledge transfer, and we were very satisfied with the level of involvement and quality of knowledge provided to our team.”

And ultimately many of the ongoing benefits that Choe expects to reap in coming years as a result of transforming the bank’s IT operations come from his expanded technology options. “We’ve achieved tremendous cost, reliability, and availability benefits, but in the end it all comes back to the fact that we now have choices when it comes to deploying hardware and software,” he said. “We’re no longer locked into using a particular product or vendor. Open source – and by extension, Red Hat – makes that possible.”

“The high costs and overhead associated with legacy proprietary-software and infrastructure led us to the decision to deploy Red Hat and JBoss open source solutions, and this allowed us to provide core infrastructure and development platforms at a significantly lower cost and at a faster rate,” said Choe, “Our use of Red Hat and JBoss solutions demonstrate creative business innovation through the use of horizontal architecture and the improvements allow Union Bank to continue to increase our customer experiences.”

COMPANY: American Family Mutual Insurance Company

INNOVATION AWARD CATEGORY: Management Excellence

INDUSTRY: Property and Casualty Insurance

GEOGRAPHY: North America

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Needed a cost effective centralized management solution for its 1,200 instances of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform that would scale with its growing computing infrastructure

MIGRATION PATH: ad hoc monitoring solutions to JBoss Operations Network

SOFTWARE:JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON), JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on 150 plus systems, Red Hat Consulting, Oracle DB, HP OpenView

HARDWARE: Intel based Dell x86 commodity servers

BENEFITS: Improved availability and reliability of applications, a monitoring solution that can manage a large number of application server instances, simplified management, enhanced management and monitoring, and reduced costs

Download the PDF case study

COMPANY BACKGROUND
American Family Mutual Insurance Company, the nation’s third-largest mutual property and casualty insurer and 14th-largest property and casualty insurance company group, offers multiple insurance lines. These offerings include automotive, home, life, health, and business insurance.

American Family began with three employees in 1927 and has since grown to become a Fortune 500 company that generated $6.7 billion in revenue in 2008. American Family has 4,000 agents who serve 19 states.

BUSINESS/TECHNICAL CHALLENGE
An issue of scalability was American Family’s greatest technical challenge, as the Java application server environment was growing consistently and there was a need to identify a cost effective, stable and reliable management solution that would complement this growth. American Family’s prior management system could not scale to the size needed at an appropriate cost.

American Family deployed JBoss Operations Network (JBoss ON) across 1,200 JBoss application server instances and is using it to monitor and manage those systems.

DESIRED SOLUTION
American Family required a systems management solution that would provide: Real-time monitoring, alerting, historical trending, and the ability to control running systems in its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform environment. Performance of the product was a huge criteria-performance not only to scale, but to be responsive so that the operations team could use it successfully on a daily basis.

JBOSS PRODUCTS USED IN FINAL SOLUTION
About 3 years ago, American Family began migrating its IBM WebSphere environment to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to run many of the company’s business critical applications, including billing and claims, customer information management, an agent-facing sales suite, and web services. As the JBoss environment grew, American Family quickly identified the need for the tools to help monitor and manage the servers. The company evaluated a number of tools from several leading vendors and selected JBoss ON based on cost, scalability, and functionality.

The American Family operations team was asked to monitor, manage, and control a very large computing infrastructure with several different tools. JBoss ON will allow the Computer Operations team to manage the entire JBoss infrastructure with one console.

American Family will also continue to look for additional opportunities to use JBoss ON with their application developers. It is hoped that by using JBoss ON, American Family will be better able to detect and fix problems earlier in the software delivery life-cycle.

BUSINESS IMPACT
American Family expects to see improved reliability in the application server space due to the JBoss ON feature of historical trend analysis of key system metrics and faster time to react when there are problems due to the alerts based on those same metrics.

American Family is hoping to extend this capability into application support areas to detect problems early in the software development lifecycle. Through alerting, monitoring, and the opportunity to proactively address situations before they cause an outage, JBoss ON will improve the reliability and availability of Java application server applications and keep internal customers satisfied.

Ad hoc management scripts and tooling will be replaced with JBoss ON. The result should reduce time and effort needed to manage, monitor and control systems.

VALUE-ADD TO BUSINESS FROM JBOSS
American Family has been working in a collaborative manner with the JBoss ON engineering, support and product team for close to two years. JBoss provided four people on-site and over the course of two days, they worked out a number of technical challenges that could not have been tested or seen in the lab. This collaboration has resulted in improved scalability and features.

END-CUSTOMER VALUE
By working together, American Family and Red Hat have given back something of value to the open source community.

RED HAT CONSULTING / SUPPORT
American Family worked closely with JBoss ON resources to ensure that the product met functional and non-functional requirements such as scalability and performance.

ADVICE FOR COMPANIES FACING SIMILAR CHALLENGES
American Family suggests detailing the desired solution’s requirements and identify a provider who not only can offer the specific product, but also the support and willingness to collaborate and devote resources to making the relationship successful.

INNOVATION
The American Family and JBoss collaborative work on JBoss ON blazed a trail for the future features and scalability of the monitoring and management product and will provide benefits to other customers and developers to capitalize on.”

FAST FACTS

Company: Sherwin-Williams Company

Industry: Paint and Coatings

Geography: Global

Business Challenge: To develop and deploy functionally rich Web applications using a standards-based platform supported by a single vendor for both home office and field use

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Migration Path: HP/UX and Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: x86 servers

Benefits: Improve time to market of mission-critical applications. Increase staff productivity and efficiency using JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Higher-quality applications.

“JBoss has been a great fit for solving our primary business and technical challenges. We’ve accelerated the process of getting developers trained and up to speed. We’ve managed to get our arms around a vast set of web technologies by limiting our scope while providing our business users with the applications they need to be successful.”
-Alan Flowers, manager of the Java-Web-Integration Services team at Sherwin-Williams

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Founded in 1866, The Sherwin-Williams Company is a global leader in the manufacture, development, distribution, and sale of coatings and related products to professional, industrial, commercial, and retail customers around the world. The company manufactures products under well-known brands such as Sherwin-Williams®, Dutch Boy®, Krylon®, Minwax®, Thompson’s® Water Seal®, and many more.

For more than 143 years, Sherwin-Williams has been committed to making and marketing innovative products of superior quality; operating a safe, clean and friendly workplace while observing the highest ethical standards in business conduct.

With global headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio Sherwin-Williams branded products are sold exclusively through a chain of more than 3,300 company-operated stores and facilities, while the company’s other brands are sold through leading mass merchandisers, home centers, independent paint dealers, hardware stores, automotive retailers, and industrial distributors.

The Sherwin-Williams Global Group distributes a wide range of products in more than 30 countries around the world. For more information, visit www.sherwin.com

BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
Sherwin-Williams operates in three segments: Paint Stores Group, Consumer Group, and Global Finishes Group. The Consumer Group segment engages in the development, manufacture, and distribution of paints, coatings, and related products to third party customers primarily in the United States and Canada, as well as to the Paint Stores Group.

In 2005, the Consumer Group segment of The Sherwin-Williams Company migrated its web application infrastructure from a combination of HP/UX and Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, primarily for standardization and reliability reasons. Last year, the Consumer Group embarked on an ambitious plan to develop web applications that run in a standard browser in this environment. Among other goals, Sherwin-Williams wanted this standard platform to create a new portfolio of applications to promote operational excellence and green initiatives.

“We hoped to create a desktop-like user experience even though these would be Web applications,” said Alan Flowers, manager of the Java-Web-Integration Services team at Sherwin-Williams. Among other criteria, “we needed something we could support over the long term and sought a trusted relationship with our main vendor,” he said.

Sherwin-Williams was pleased with both the quality of the technology and the “excellent” level of support received from Red Hat for their infrastructure deployment. Flowers didn’t hesitate to evaluate JBoss Enterprise Middleware when it came time to consider a middleware platform.

“We were already satisfied with Red Hat and this contributed to the decision to use JBoss for our middleware needs.”

SOLUTION
After bringing JBoss in-house and putting it through a rigorous due diligence process, Flowers was satisfied he’d found a suitable solution. “Given our existing commitment to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our business goals and our desire to be very forward-thinking in our approach to Web applications, JBoss was the logical choice,” he said. Today, Sherwin-Williams is using JBoss Enterprise Middleware, specifically JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, in addition to running its Web IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Especially helpful was the fact that members of the Red Hat team did more than just fulfill the sales order; they provided Sherwin-Williams with strategic planning advice. “Red Hat sent experienced professionals over who had an in-depth knowledge of the JBoss offerings,” said Flowers. “We outlined what we were trying to accomplish, talked about our future plans, and were introduced to JBoss’ integrated development environment. This gave us a great head start. You can get plagued about what to use, what not to use, and what will be around down the road.” By standardizing on the Red Hat product line, “We know our platform, we know it will be supported, and we can get our people up to speed quickly and efficiently,” he said.

Flowers also liked the access he was given to senior Red Hat and JBoss engineers. As part of his due diligence, he attended JBoss World, the JBoss annual user conference, last year, and was “ pleased to meet the actual engineers who created the products I’d be using,” he said. “That kind of direct access is rare among top-tier IT vendors.”

BENEFITS
One of the benefits of adopting JBoss has been a development cycle time savings. “One of our primary goals was to create a swift Web development environment,” said Tracey Richards, manager of Electronic Commerce Services for Sherwin-Williams. “We’ve now begun to reach that goal.”

“We attended training, defined our scope, and documented our standards in preparation for development using JBoss,” said Flowers. Sherwin-Williams has also been able to reduce its overall technology portfolio. Since AJAX is embedded in the JBoss middleware stack and developers don’t have to deal with Java scripting, there is less code to manage and maintain.

Implementing a standards-based platform from one technology provider was a critical driver of Sherwin-Williams’ decision to go with JBoss. “Since we were developing business-critical systems, we wanted a single vendor to support the entire software stack, from top to bottom,” said Richards.

“We feel confident developing Web applications having the applications stack and operating system from the same vendor,” agreed Flowers. “Whether we get our account manager on the phone, or a Linux or JBoss expert, we’re certain that we will be well served.”

“JBoss has been a great fit for solving our primary business and technical challenges,” said Flowers. “We’ve accelerated the process of getting developers trained and up to speed. We’ve managed to get our arms around a vast set of web technologies by limiting our scope while providing our business users with the applications they need to be successful.”

Fast Facts

Industry: Education

Geography: United Kingdom

Opportunity: learndirect provides delivers online education, training, and advice for two million users, facilitating over 50,000 sessions and 10,000 new course enrolments per week. With systems needing to be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per week, there was no room for outages or failure. A reliable, high performance system was needed to replace learndirect’s Visual Basic-based legacy system, which was outdated and costly to support. A requirement to work with the source code and to adopt the most cost effective solution led learndirect to open source solutions from Red Hat.

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, JBoss Application Server 4.0.3, Hibernate 3.0.5, JBoss Clustering and current investigating JBossCache 1.4.1

Hardware: 4 x IBM Blade Servers

Services: Gold-Level JBoss Subscription, JBoss Operations Network, Red Hat Support, JBoss Training

Benefits: Immediate savings from choosing open source software with zero licencing costs. In addition, learndirect could easily scaled out its architecture as needed with no more incremental licensing costs An increase in system performance and stability with an application server which outperformed its proprietary competitors in extensive testing. The new JBoss-based learndirect system is currently running at 99.989% uptime Rapid development and time to market, thanks to the transparency of the software’s source code

“In terms of performance levels, JBoss Application Server actually came out as the fastest and this was a key factor in our decision as service levels to users are of upmost importance. As the evaluation continued we soon realised that JBoss competed extremely well with the proprietary alternatives and when we considered that scaling JBoss out as far as we liked would not create any extra licence costs on our bottom line, the decision was a very easy one to make – we chose open source from JBoss,” concluded Mather.

Background
Created in 1998 to take forward the UK Government’s vision of a University for Industry in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, learndirect is the largest e-learning network of its kind in the world. The organisation has instructed more than two million people and today delivers 25 percent of all adult skills for life achievement in the UK – an accomplishment that attested to the country’s leadership in the use of web-enabled services for workforce training.

By placing a unique emphasis on flexibility, accessibility, and support, learndirect has successfully individualised the delivery of learning to a mass audience. The learndirect service – comprised of learndirect courses, learndirect business, and learndirect advice – has enabled participants to gain new skills, renew their confidence, and reap new opportunities. On the other side of the divide, learndirect has also become a valuable service for employers, with around 200,000 businesses relying on it to train their employees. To complement its courses, learndirect provides live, interactive advice, and to date, more than 30 million advice sessions have been provided through the online and telephone services.

Supporting this number of users and sessions required a stable, high performing Web infrastructure. Administration for all three strands of the learndirect service is managed and processed by a central IT system based at headquarters in Sheffield, UK.

learndirect’s IT department also manages 600 UK online centres, which provide access to technology and support in using it to an estimated three million people a year. Based in communities across England, UK online centres provide a vital channel for reaching some of the most inaccessible audiences, helping people get online for the first time, learn new skills, and access e-government services. UK online centres have a cross-government role and support a wide range of policy agendas at national, regional and sub-regional level, from adult skills and employability to social and digital exclusion, e-accessibility, and e-government.

Opportunity

Since the launch of the learndirect service in 2000, the organisation had seen a steady increase in the number of users. On average, learndirect facilitates over 50,000 sessions and 10,000 new course enrolments per week. The core platform was responsible for ensuring that users receive the right learning for their specific needs and can be accessed by a number of different user groups, each with different access levels, including the learners themselves, tutors, administrators, and auditors. With systems needing to be available 24 hours per day, 365 days per week, there was no room for outages or failure.

In 2004, Simon Mather, Head of Software Engineering at learndirect, was tasked with developing a new core IT administration system that could handle the high transactional demands now being placed on it. The organisation’s legacy system, coded in common VB (Visual Basic), was not only costly to support but outdated; it was time for a change.

“At the time we had an aging, outsourced system built on common VB and we knew that if we wanted to maintain the levels of service to our substantial user base, then we needed to look at modernising the architecture,” said Mather.

Solution

Mather’s first decision was simple: move off VB. He explained, “This meant evaluating an outsourced. NET proposal against a new in-house Java approach. Either one had to be able to handle large work loads whilst remaining flexible for our future plans.”

Costs for each option were submitted and learndirect eventually chose to bring the project in-house, basing it on Java. Not only was this the cheapest option but Mather realised that by adopting the open, flexible standards of Java, integration would be easier with current systems as well as future-proofed for projects further down the line. Mather noted, “As a charitable trust we do have limited resources, so anywhere we can save money is always going to be favoured.”

The next key decision was to choose a Java application platform that could form the basis of learndirect’s central system. “We really needed a browser independent, highly accessible, scalable, and flexible application server so we decided to evaluate the top three: IBM Websphere, BEA Weblogic and JBoss Application Server. I wanted the best tool for the job, whether open source or not,” Mather continued.

At the time of the decision to redesign its core IT system on the JBoss platform, learndirect had already been using JBoss in non-critical systems for about two and a half years. This previous experience proved a great fillip to the project, as the company already had JBoss-savvy developers who were quickly able to get to grips with designing the new system.

For its operating platform, learndirect chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Mather has not been phased by the recent acquisition. He commented, “We envisage the acquisition of JBoss as resulting in a scaling up of their offer on support, training and consultancy. Financially I can see opportunities for a simplification in contractual arrangements, and technically there is scope for innovation around products such as JBossON. I see the acquisition as an opportunity for Red Hat to offer service improvements that keep Red Hat Linux and JBoss ahead of the game, and for me that can only be a good thing.” In addition learndirect uses JBoss Clustering for session replication and Hibernate to deliver a highly reliable overall structure. The entire system ran on two pairs of IBM Blade Servers and a 500GB Oracle database.

Despite having a good level of technical understanding within the project team, Mather wanted to take a “bullet-proof” approach to support, so learndirect subscribed to gold level support for JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, and JBoss Clustering, as well as Red Hat support and related training courses. With its JBoss subscription, learndirect also had access to JBoss Operations Networks (ON), an integrated management platform for JBoss Enterprise Middleware-based systems. JBoss ON enables a detailed level of management including: inventory management with auto-discovery; administration and control management; automated alerting, download, and deployment of certified patches; and updates and monitoring of JBoss Application Server.

“JBoss support to date has been a pleasure and I’ve heard nothing but glowing praise from operations,” reported Mather.

Benefits

By choosing to Red Hat open source solutions, learndirect has benefited from a number of key advantages:

• Software licence fee cost savings have been realised not only in the initial instances of each product, but as products have been scaled out, there are no more incremental costs for each extra instance as there would be with proprietary software.

• Speed and reliability have come to the fore and, following extensive evaluation, JBoss Application Server came out as the fastest application server tested and is currently running at 99.989 percent uptime.• Transparency and accessibility of JBoss’ source code combined with the development team’s previous experience with JBoss translated into faster development and quicker time to market with the new system.

• Project costs have been drastically reduced. By choosing an in-house Java solution based on an already familiar platform over an outsourced .NET solution, Mather estimated a total cost saving of 20 to 30 percent.

To summarise the success of the project and the benefits learndirect has witnessed, Mather commented: “For me, JBoss allows us to focus on the systems that we produce rather than worrying about the cost of the infrastructure and the drain it places on resources. Because there is transparency in the code, we are able to build applications more quickly and really have a better idea of what we’re going to end up with. Ultimately we can meet demand more quickly and above all serve the needs of our users to the best of our ability. This would not be possible without JBoss open source software.”

]]> http://customers.redhat.com/2008/07/09/learndirect-teaches-the-benefits-of-open-source-with-red-hat/feed/ 0 Red Hat Customer Reference Team LearnDirect http://customers.redhat.com/2008/06/25/booz-allen-hamilton-2008-red-hat-innovation-award-winner/ http://customers.redhat.com/2008/06/25/booz-allen-hamilton-2008-red-hat-innovation-award-winner/#comments Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:43:48 +0000 Red Hat Customer Reference Team http://customers.press.redhat.com/2008/06/25/booz-allen-hamilton-2008-red-hat-innovation-award-winner/ ]]>

Superior Alternatives

Winner: Booz Allen Hamilton

Submitted by: Christopher Dale

Vertical: Government

Geography: US

Website: www.boozallen.com

Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm with more than 18,000 employees serving government clients from more than 80 offices and has been recognized by major publications as a best place to work. Integrating the full range of consulting capabilities, Booz Allen is the one firm that helps government clients solve their toughest problems with services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology. Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure.

Business and/or Technical Challenge

In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton was asked by a federal government agency to develop a Microsoft Windows-based proof of concept for a document management system. The initial prototype consisted of both hardware infrastructure design and software development, but as the system’s user community grew, the newly promoted operational proof of concept quickly proved inadequate for handling the increasing volumes of data. After a budget for a “technology refresh” was approved, the Booz Allen Hamilton team decided to redesign the software architecture using JBoss Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Oracle 10G Real Application Clusters (RAC), and enterprise integration best practices. The system was transformed from a two-tier architecture to an event-driven Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) approach, but although the software redesign greatly improved the system’s ability to handle the increasing volumes of data, the physical infrastructure was still a bottleneck that prevented the system to scale as needed. Simply adding servers was not a viable solution because of space and energy constraints. The solution needed to be exceptionally efficient in terms of floor space, power, cooling and total cost. It also had to be easily leveraged for use in other Booz Hamilton consulting engagements.

“It wouldn’t be enough to just show that we had high server utilization,” said Christopher Dale, an associate at Booz Allen. “We had to get a ton of work out of our investment, with enough spare resources to be able to respond to new mission demands at a moments notice.” To do this, Booz Allen Hamilton needed a solution that would allow it to scale its CPU and memory resources independently of its network resources. In turn, network resources would have to scale independently of system storage capacity and throughput. “Finally, we needed to be able to dynamically allocate all available resources to the task du jour without jeopardizing the ongoing mission,” said Dale.

Vendor Selection Process

For the proof of concept, Booz Allen Hamilton needed to configure both an Oracle 9i meta data database and an Oracle 9i Text Index database. As it turned out, the federal agency client already possessed an Oracle site license. Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to “harvest” several Red Hat Enterprise Linux entitlements from a previous client project. “The icing on the cake was that I had experience installing Oracle on Red Hat Linux as a hobby,” said Dale. Once Red Hat Enterprise Linux passed security tests, it was viewed as the clear first choice for the project.

Solution

The solution consisted of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform, Red Hat Global File System (GFS) and Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Network Satellite and soon Red Hat Directory Server, JBoss Application Server, JBoss Enterprise Service Bus, JBoss Operations Network, and, most recently, Metamatrix. The deployed environment consist of a seven-node Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) grid (five Dell 2950s and two Dell 6850s all with maxed-out memory running Red Hat Enterprise Linux housing multiple Oracle RAC databases that performed data warehousing functions, online transaction processing (OLTP) functions and multi-language text indexing functions. There also is an eight-node (Dell 2950s with varying amounts of memory) services grid that acts as a clustered Xen host. The Xen machines on the services grid include a clustered JBoss application server, a Metamatrix node, and many other Xen machines that perform various mission-specific tasks. Both the database grid and the services grid can leverage the storage on the Fiber Channel fabric backed with multiple storage area networks (SANs).

Benefits

By implementing the new hardware and software architecture, Booz Allen Hamilton was able to transition its client from the initial proof of concept system-which had grown to a five-lab, two-building deployment that housed a single system, to an ultra-compact, highly available, high performance environment that enables three complete systems to reside in 1.5 labs. “We now have the capability to use spare capacity for the evaluation and hosting of new commercial off-the-shelf software, government off-the-shelf software, or custom software that previously would have been too expensive to implement even if the software was free,” said Dale. Additionally, using GFS to pool storage resources, Xen and Cluster Suite to pool processing and memory resources and using a bonded, link aggregated, VLANed, Xen-bridged network configuration to pool network resources, “we had successfully delivered to our client an environment that surpassed our goals in compute resource and software development agility,” he said. “In the Federal space, ROI doesn’t really have meaning, but our client was getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

Additionally, the enterprise-class system was capable of handling data volumes that commercial enterprises rarely see. “We can add new capabilities without the purchase of additional hardware, and, because we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we leverage unlimited virtualization for Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines. Indeed, many capabilities can be made available in hours instead of weeks or months. “This is how we delivered 10 pounds of capability in a two pound bag,” said Dale.

Red Hat Support, Training, and Consulting Services Leveraged

One of the best value decisions Booz Allen Hamilton made was to establish a subcontract for its government client with Red Hat Global Professional Services group. “Through that subcontracting arrangement, we were able to use a full-time employee slot to bring in a number of highly skilled Red Hat, JBoss, and Metamatrix professionals who accelerated our work at critical junctures,” said Dale. Additionally, as a result of the successes the team experienced in terms of capability delivery, many team members sought out Red Hat, JBoss and Metamatrix training and certification on their own, which further benefited the client in terms of day-to-day value enhancement.

Advice for Other Companies Facing a Similar Business Challenge

Be aware of all the possibilities. “Looking back to the beginning of the effort to re-engineer our legacy environment, I still cannot get my head around all that has been accomplished,” said Dale, who said that if he had been told a year ago, “This is the list of things your team needs to get done in the next year,” it would have been “soul crushing.” But now, having been through it, he is now finding it difficult not to look at any opportunity without thinking, “No problem, we have an answer for you and it isn’t going to cost you half of what you think. It’s also going to take less time, fewer people and be more capable and agile than you can imagine.”

Customer: Incentive Logic

Industry: Performance-based rewards solutions

Geography: Scottsdale, Arizona

Opportunity: Transforming the infrastructure for increased scalability and agility.

Solution: The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and an interactive, hands-on workshop

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Server, JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate

Migration Path: Pearl-based environment to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Benefits: Faster development, greater scalability and “Ignited Performance”

“We have a very smart, fast-moving team and had set very aggressive deadlines for
taking our designs and re-factoring them in JBoss. “Instructor-led or classroom training wasn’t going to work. We needed someone who had detailed
knowledge of the entire platform, as well as of the specific applications and who could
go shoulder-to-shoulder as we tore into the code.”
- Frank Gartland, Vice President, Solution Strategy and Development, Incentive Logic.

Read Their Story

Read full case study in French

Industry: Retail

Geography: France

Opportunity: The aim was to free CAMIF from overly-complex nested systems and come up with a more efficient information system which was structured
by business activity, thus enabling more transparent and targeted intervention.

Solution: CAMIF has built its technical base using Open Source components and can now offer business applications as both development frameworks and cross-functional services.
Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Server, JBoss Hibernate, JBoss Rules, JBoss Messaging, JBoss Eclipse IDE

Benefits: There are currently three application groups that benefit from the new architecture, which now integrates open source solutions, including several modules from the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Project summary: The CAMIF Group, a multi-specialist distributor and the third largest French mail-order company, offers a range that extends from household appliances and personal equipment to supplying local authorities and from home furnishings to fine foods, without forgetting financial products. In 2003, the company took the step of progressively decommissioning their twenty-year-old HP3000 servers and completely revising the software architecture that was in place.

“Now the different blocks of our information system all work together, thanks to the JBoss AS application server.In addition, we can intervene locally on any of the blocks at any time, thus minimising impact on neighbouring blocks.”
- Charles Detemple, Technical Architect, DSI (Information Systems Department), CAMIF Group

The Goal:
The aim was to free CAMIF from overly-complex nested systems and come up with a more efficient information system which was structured by business activity, thus enabling more transparent and targeted intervention. To do this, an internal working group assessed various market solutions and looked at Java J2EE architecture designed using Open Source components.

Solution:
Half of the internal developments intended for CAMIF’s information system overhaul are based on the JBoss Enterprise Application Server. The JBoss Hibernate, JBoss Rules, JBoss Messaging and JBoss Eclipse IDE modules are associated with this server, offering assistance and features that facilitate the development of J2EE applications. CAMIF has built its technical base using these Open Source components and can now offer business applications as both development frameworks and cross-functional services. “In parallel with training and workshops, the company has entered into a JBoss Silver support agreement, which has proved efficient and timely in its response to critical issues” says Charles Detemple, technical architect, DSI, CAMIF Group.

Results:
There are currently three application groups that benefit from the new architecture, which now integrates open source solutions, including several modules from the JBoss JEMS package. The first set of applications handles all the activities of the CAMIF Habitat subsidiary, the second uses specifically designed software to handle logistics: stock management, delivery deadlines and transportation. The third, which is in the start-up phase, deals with customer referencing. This changeover should be gradual, with complete migration within five years.

Read full case study in French

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: Joint JBoss/Red Hat Deployment
Winner: CompuCredit Corporation
Submitted by: Guido F. Sacchi, CIO and SVP, Corporate Strategies, Cindy Hayden, Manager of Real-Time Integration
Industry: Financial services
Geography: Atlanta, GA

Overview
Used JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to construct an XML Gateway that serves as the company’s main real-time transaction hub—enabling rapid growth, increased productivity, faster service, and millions of dollars in cost-savings.

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

CompuCredit Corporation is a leading provider of credit and related financial services and products for the underserved consumer credit market. Offering branded credit cards and other fee-based products, the company’s strategic competitive advantage lies in its ability to serve creditworthy consumers in a market segment often bypassed by traditional financial institution. For the year ended December 31, 2006, the company had over 4.3 million customer accounts with an aggregate managed portfolio of $2.81 billion in receivables.

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

In 2006, CompuCredit was facing two challenges: one business related and the other technical. From the business point of view, our traditional method of using a direct mail campaign of pre-approved credit cards to attract customers had dried up, and we needed to exploit innovative new sales channels such as Internet-based marketing and real-time telemarketing. The ITA (Invitation to Apply) sales channel had a much more significant potential for growth, but required a platform where information was instantaneously available in real-time in order to effectively turn qualified leads into real customers.

Our second challenge was the real-time interoperability of many fragmented applications that existed in our organization. The applications ranged from “Fat Client” type to web-browser based, and were written in a variety of languages such as C, Java, Python, VB, and .net. Our ultimate goal was to create a seamless experience for users and customers (at the presentation or application layer), despite the fragmentation of the application and data sources.

What was the desired solution?

We wanted to create a solution that would quickly obtain data from different areas of CompuCredit, as well as systems outside of the company, and aggregate that data into a single view for the many different business units. It needed to provide interfaces for a variety of applications, such as Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM), credit card acquisition, on-line services, and even IVR (Interactive Voice Response). The solution also needed to have scalable, reusable components that could be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit.

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

In the past, CompuCredit had been primarily a Solaris™ shop. We had been running Apache but had to eliminate it since it only provided pure web services. When we started with the project, we looked at the available solutions for Electronic Services Busses (ESB), but couldn’t find anything in the marketplace that met our needs at the time.

We originally became aware of the JBoss solutions by reading press reports. We had previous experience with BAE’s WebLogic™ and IBM’s WebSphere™, but getting JBoss up and running was much simpler. These proprietary (non-open source) programs took a lot of configuration to get them working the first time. JBoss worked right out of the box, although we have done some configuration over time to streamline and optimize the system. Plus, we liked the concept of having a “one stop shop” for support of both Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

The last, and possibly most important factor, was that JBoss was open source. We like open source products for their ease of use and the availability of the open-source developer community. While we have not yet had the need to modify the source code, knowing that we can if we need to tweak something is a big plus. This is especially important for innovative projects, such as the new application and frameworks that we are building.

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

The XML Gateway is a platform that uses all open-source applications with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the core. We were able to create a system that fulfilled our vision for the seamless provisioning of real-time information. The system now masks the complexity and fragmentation of data sources and applications. The XML Gateway was developed in conjunction with a network of partners that each brought their individual expertise to the project, but CompuCredit was the driver in the project.

The CompuCredit web framework relies on the XML gateway as one of the main transaction processing engines for all of our real-time services. The solution we created is similar to a home-made ESB that is focused particularly on real-time and web services. We believe that this is a very innovative approach to solving our problems. In the future, we want to look into leveraging JBoss solutions, not just for the XML Gateway, but for a wide range of applications within the company.

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.)

• The XML Gateway was a key factor in our continued growth. In absolute terms, we have doubled the number of accounts we service in just two years.
• We have also seen tremendous business benefits. Just the improvement in productivity in handling collection and customer service calls saved us between $2 and $4 million per year, and we have seen similar benefits across the entire organization.
• Having reusable components that can be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit saved us considerable development effort. There are services that are used by all of the different applications, including customer service, telemarketing, collections, online services, customer acquisition via Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM).
• The time that it takes to process a transaction reduced from minutes or seconds to milliseconds, resulting in increased productivity and greater customer satisfaction.
• The project was easy to implement, taking only eight months from beginning to end and involving the efforts of only four people: one full-time developer and three contractors.

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

The XML Gateway is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform that uses all open-source applications, such as JBoss. It consists of three hefty Dell appliances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server, Sun JDK 1.5, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform We use Oracle as the primary database, but with some SQL Server. Each server runs two real-time incidences of JBoss and two hot-failover instances should they be needed.

Our application is meta-data driven. We built a large-scale User Interface (UI) for testing and configuration that allowed us to exercise the web services before exposing them to the customer. Then we were able to easily modify that UI to meet the needs of the individual users.

Our platform serviced 100,000 transactions on the first day, and is currently serving 4 million transactions per day. The average transaction time is only a few hundred milliseconds, and the performance continues to improve over time as pieces are honed and hardware improved.

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

We have had several people on our team participate in JBoss training and plan to send more in the future. We are willing to make a commitment in training our own people so we can become proficient in developing and maintaining systems of this complexity. We feel that it is a good investment to have this capability in-house. We also used some of Red Hat’s consultants to help us “tune” our environment for peak performance.

We have been a support customer since 2005 and currently have a 24×7 Premium support subscription. We are pleased with our support experience. Everytime we have had to use it, the answers are good and quick.

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

We are firm believers in open source. The common myth about open source is that it is harder to get up and running. We have found that the truth is quite the opposite.

You also need to take risks and work through the initial investment, which pays off in the long run. Writing the first web service is a lot of work, but once that is done, each additional service is easy.

Category: New Generation Technology
Winner:Lexicon Genetics
Submitted by: Buckley Kohlhauff, Mark Ma, Jason Williams
Industry: Biotechnology
Geography: The Woodlands, Texas

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss Seam to glue together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBoss jBPM to dramatically simplify their development process and create a robust platform that can deploy mission-critical applications for the Texas Institute of Genomic Medicine.

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1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)
Lexicon Genetics is focused on the discovery of breakthrough treatments for human disease. We use our proprietary gene knockout technology to systematically discover the physiological and behavioral functions of genes to identify potential drug targets. We have advanced more than 70 knockout-validated targets into drug discovery programs.
Lexicon Genetics employs over 700 people between our two sites in The Woodlands, TX and Princeton, NJ. Lexicon’s revenue for 2005 was $76M

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.
The challenge was to re-engineer a legacy production system that has been running for five years. The business logic for the system was spread among various layers and components. Most of the documentation that existed was outdated. We had less than a year to redesign and implement the core architecture and workflows. In addition the new system needed to address the fundamental problems that were present in the existing system and be flexible enough to support the same goals with different business processes.

We needed to reengineer a legacy application from php/apache to an enterprise platform in order to support our major involvement in the recently established Texas Institute for Genomic Medicine (TIGM). We have implemented other projects on the JBoss platform and have been pleased with the results. JBoss is a powerful and stable application server and we feel that the JBoss Seam framework will revolutionize Java Enterprise development.

3. What was the desired solution?
Our guiding philosophy was to select a group of frameworks that prevented us from writing a lot of non-business code, but at the same time allowed us to make modifications quickly if we needed to. In addition we always want to leverage standards in the industry. We have utilized J2EE for 3 years so our solution needed to stay within that context to leverage our internal knowledge and skills.

We selected JBPM in 2005 as our solution for modeling our business processes. We selected JSF as our UI framework since the application needed to be accessed from a browser. The introduction of seam excited us because we felt that too much time was spent on connecting the backend layers in previous JSF applications we had written. We had some internal solutions that were built upon codegeneration, but they weren’t flexible and couldn’t help us with JBPM integration.

The Mouse production software encapsulates a complicated workflow covering many scientific and business processes involved in the production of genetically-modified knockout mice. It has to be flexible enough to meet the needs of a large user-base comprised of many distinctive roles. It also needs to be scalable and configurable enough to be used by other organizations involved in TIGM that may need customized workflows.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.
We already had selected JEMS as our stack for enterprise applications in 2004 after reviewing alternatives from BEA, IBM, and Oracle. That decision was based upon a matrix of feature requirements, cost, support options, references, and published data.

We also evaluated other application servers and frameworks such as Oracle JDeveloper/BPEL, JRun, and Spring. JBoss proved to be the most cost-effective and robust provider. JEMs allowed us to quickly adopt SOA-based development, increasing the reusability of our code. It enabled us to break our company’s scientific and business processes down into granular projects that fulfill specific needs and adapt to changing requirements in our fast-paced software development lifecycle.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
JEMS is our platform for application development. The trend we see is tighter integration with the JEMS suite, therefore we lean towards selecting tools from within the suite.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

The Seam framework significantly reduced development and deployment time by gluing together Hibernate, JSF, EJB3, and JBPM. It enabled us to focus solely on our complicated scientific and business logic without having to put together the pieces of the enterprise framework ourselves. With the traditional Java Enterprise architecture there are so many tiers that have to be explicitly implemented, configured and glued into place. Seam makes all of that transparent to the developer.

We especially benefited from Seam’s introduction of the conversation context, as well as the integration of JBPM. The conversation context helped us resolve classic technical challenges such as users using our software in multiple windows. The JBPM framework allowed us to clearly define our business and scientific processes, and it provided a simple and efficient way of implementing the workflows, while implicitly maintaining the data integrity.

For user interface development, we have been using JSF for 2 years. Seam’s direct integration of JSF made it the perfect framework to allow us to reuse some of our existing custom JSF components that provide a rich user interface for our users.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The project is directly tied to recognizing revenue as well as providing a competitive advantage for Lexicon, TIGM, and our partners.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
We have a clustered front-end and back-end running on Dell 2850 servers. We have 4 separate clustered instances of JBOSS spread on 3 servers. Our backend comprises of 3 servers running Oracle 9i RAC.

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?
We used JBoss support and training. The level of support and training is on par with what we receive from our other vendors. Early adopters clearly have an advantage to effect the direction of the product and therefore benefit from support.

10. Advice to other companies considering JEMS.
Get support and training early in the process. The learning curve isn’t steep but it can be completely avoided by doing what you would normally do with other software purchases.

Industry: Technology
Geography: Europe
Opportunity: ITo meet demanding new customer and integration partner requirements, Nuxeo decided to re-architect its flagship enterprise content management (ECM) solution. This involved migrating from the Python programming language to Java. Nuxeo needed to do this fast to minimize impact on its sales cycle, but more importantly, to be ready for a major forthcoming revision to Java: Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 5.0 (Java EE 5).
Software: JBoss Application Server, JBoss Cache, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, JBoss Seam
Services: JBoss Training, JBoss Certification
Benefits:

• Because JBoss played a leading role in the Java Community Process (JCP) responsible for the Java EE 5 overhaul, Nuxeo was ensured a partner that was always current with the latest Java EE 5 developments and specifications.
• By going with a Java leader and its J2EE 1.4 certified platform, Nuxeo did not need to worry about staying on top of Java developments. Instead, Nuxeo could focus fully on developing and differentiating its core business: enterprise content management.
• With JBoss expert training, combined with the simple set up for JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Nuxeo was able to quickly jump start the migration project, improving overall productivity.
• As an open source company, JBoss had an open and transparent development process that allowed Nuxeo to contribute to the evolution of JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Simply put, Nuxeo had a voice in adding new features and improvements.

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Background
Founded in 2000, Nuxeo is a leader in open source enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, which include Nuxeo Enterprise Platform (previously called Nuxeo CPS), a document and process management solution, and Nuxeo RCP, a rich client platform for building applications that can run natively on any operating system. The company supplies large corporate clients, both in France and worldwide, with global solutions to help them manage the production, publication, and storage of their documents. A team of experts provides a complete range of professional services such as consulting, development, integration, training, certification, and support. Nuxeo has headquarters in Paris, an office in Grenoble, and subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Romania, and Senegal. Nuxeo also works with a network of integration partners such as Capgemini, Euriware, LogicaCMG/Unilog, and Sword.

Opportunity
For over six years, Nuxeo successfully marketed and sold Nuxeo CPS (Collaborative Portal Server), an open source enterprise content management (ECM) solution, to large corporations and public sector firms. Nuxeo CPS is built on the Zope web application server, which is written in Python, a popular dynamic programming language.

While the decision to build its ECM solution on Zope and Python had enabled Nuxeo to quickly get to market, by 2006 it became clear that the system had matured to a point where it needed an enterprise foundation.

“We needed to provide our integrator partners and clients with proven and supported Java technologies in order to make our applications better integrated with their IT infrastructures and to optimize their internal competences,” said Eric Barroca, executive vice president of operations, Nuxeo. Specifically, as Nuxeo CPS became increasingly critical to customers and integration partners, the more demanding their requirements. This included the proliferation of data sources and volume, e-mail, regulatory compliance, online/offline work, Web 2.0 technologies, and mobility, among others.

Nuxeo made the decision in February to re-architect its flagship product by migrating to Java, the de facto enterprise programming language for developing and running distributed multi-tier architecture applications. Barroca explained: “With its flexibility, robustness, standards, speed of development, and large, dynamic ecosystem, Java was a perfect fit for the requirements of the next-generation Nuxeo ECM solution, Nuxeo 5. The timing was critical, as Java was undergoing a major revision.”

Java Enterprise Edition 5.0 (Java EE 5) was expected to be finalized in 2007 and Nuxeo wanted to be able to take advantage of highly anticipated new features such as Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 (EJB3), Java Persistence API (JPA), and JavaServer Faces (JSF). The Java EE 5 migration project was launched, with the goal of delivering the Nuxeo 5 platform in 4Q 2006.

Now, it came down to choosing a Java application platform.

“Apart from the excellence of JBoss products, were also attracted by the maturity and quality of JBoss expert support. In fact, to develop close and reciprocal collaboration with JBoss, we became a certified JBoss technology partner.”
- Eric Barroca, Executive Vice President of Operations, Nuxeo

Solution
With the final release of Java EE 5 not expected for another year, Nuxeo wanted an application deployment platform that was compliant with the existing J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition), but cutting edge enough to have early implementations of EJB3, JSF, and other forthcoming Java EE 5 features that they could start trying out. The key criterion for Nuxeo, however, was that the Java application platform be open source, which was essential to keeping Nuxeo 5 open source as well.

There was one clear name when it comes to open source Java: JBoss.

“The JBoss Application Server was an obvious choice because it is at the core of an open source software package, of which we had already tested several modules that were indispensable for our project,” noted Barroca. Nuxeo had already begun using JBoss Enterprise Middleware products such as JBoss Cache, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, and JBoss Seam in the development of its new ECM platform.

Barroca continued, “We were already testing several JBoss Enterprise Middleware components, so what could be more natural than to use JBoss Application Server, which provides excellent performance and is the market leader. Moreover, at the time we made our decision, JBoss was the only supplier with a credible offering that incorporates all Java EE 5 features.”

Nuxeo 5 uses JBoss Cache to provide the ECM platform’s distributed temporary storage for frequently accessed data; JBoss jBPM to provide business process management and workflow; JBoss Rules to enable the creation of business rules; and JBoss Seam, an innovative component programming framework, to provide a dynamic and extensible web layer that unifies Java EE 5 features like EJB3 and JSF, as well as Web 2.0 technologies like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax). Running the business logic behind Nuxeo 5 is JBoss Application Server. The microkernel that underpins JBoss Application Server also provides Nuxeo with the flexibility to create Nuxeo Runtime, the core infrastructure of Nuxeo’s platform for creating OSGi-based extensible components.

Barroca stated, “Apart from the excellence of JBoss products, we were also attracted by the maturity and quality of JBoss expert support. In fact, to develop close and reciprocal collaboration with JBoss, we became a certified JBoss technology partner.”

After a year of successful work, Nuxeo achieved the migration of its entire technological foundation to Enterprise Java running on JBoss Enterprise Middleware with the release of Nuxeo EP 5.0 GA in February 2007.

Benefits
With its choice of JBoss, Nuxeo was also choosing a leading Java vendor. As an Executive Committee member in the Java Community Process (JCP), elected by members of the JCP, JBoss helps guide the evolution of Java technologies, including votes on specifications and new requests. As a result, JBoss was cognizant of the latest Java developments, ensuring that its JBoss Enterprise Middleware remained at the forefront. For Nuxeo, this meant they did not have to concern themselves with the latest Java issues or become Java experts. Instead, Nuxeo could concentrate on delivering and differentiating its core business: enterprise content management.

By turning its focus and resources to its core business, Nuxeo improved its ability to innovate and deliver higher value to customers through new features such as simplified integration with their information systems, high availability of critical applications, and the capacity to handle peak requirements and manage high volumes of data. The continuity of its Nuxeo 5 platform offering was now fully ensured through a new single platform that can manage all content used and produced by companies.

Nuxeo has also saw dramatic productivity gains thanks to constructive expert training from JBoss and the quick and simple set up for JBoss Enterprise Middleware. In addition, Nuxeo was able to resolve technical issues rapidly through close collaboration with JBoss’ accessible technical experts. Barroca explained, “Reducing initial training time and providing standard recognized technology like Java EE 5 for which it is easy to find skilled workers gives both our developers and customers highly competitive and measurable assets.”

Lastly, as a provider of open source solutions, Nuxeo appreciated JBoss’ open, collaborative development process, which welcomed participation and contribution from customers, partners, and individuals. This is the antithesis to commercial software where development is done behind closed doors and software arrives in a black box. Through its user experience with JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Nuxeo is able to contribute to the direction of JBoss development. Ultimately, it’s about having a voice and being heard.

Selected by the community as the 2006 JBoss Innovator of the Year
Category: Service Orientated Architecture
Winner:RLPTechnologies
Submitted by: RLPTechnologies Team (see below)
Industry: Bio Engineering
Geography: Farmington Hills, Michigan

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss AS and Hibernate as the foundation for their SOA-based platform that has revolutionized how data is collected, enhanced and compiled to increase data-file processing performance by 70%, increase scalability by 400%, and enrich the timeliness, accuracy and quality of R.L. Polk’s data for the automotive industry.

RLPTechnologies Team: Manoj Bansal, Celeste Castello, Kiran Dattani, Mike Davis, Darrin Deeter, Louis Devaney, Rick Drape, Cornell Furtuna, Bill Frost, Indira Harracksingh, Kusunam Srinivas, Joe LaFeir, Norm Marks, Sergey Melnichenko, Kris Musial, Hans Mosher, Kunnummal Naheed, Kathy Northcutt, Prabakhar Oiha, Ivan Provalov, Lawrence Rama, Mike Reed, Gary Rosteck, Clara Sagan, Scott Thibodeau, Kathy Northcutt, Vasconi, Geoff Volpe, Lisa Wagner, Pei Zheng

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

R. L. Polk & Co. is the premier provider of automotive information and marketing solutions to the automotive world and its related industries—automotive and commercial vehicle manufacturers and dealers, automotive aftermarket companies, insurance companies, finance companies, media companies, advertising agencies, consulting organizations, government agencies and market research firms.
A privately held global firm, Polk is based in Southfield, Michigan with over 1,300 employees located at operations in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

RLPTechnologies, Inc. is a wholly-owned research and development subsidiary dedicated to deploying world class data-driven technology products that support customers’ needs to turn vast amounts of data into business value with accuracy, speed and security.

RLPTechnologies specializes in building industry-leading data solutions that serve as the foundation for focused, in-depth research, analysis and action across multiple industries, enabling the effectiveness of business intelligence tools and applications that “mine” intelligence from the data.
Our company vision is nothing short of revolutionizing the way data is collected, standardized, enhanced and compiled into a Single Source of Truth. Our solution, the Enterprise Information Factory, does more than just build a consolidate view of data. It also:

• Processes data faster
• Improves data accuracy
• Ensures compliance with regulations and reporting needs
• Reduces the costs to process, support and maintain information assets

We’ve taken a unique approach to building the Enterprise Information Factory (EIF), applying the principles of lean and flexible manufacturing, along with IT industry standards including, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).

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

In 2004 Polk’s CEO, President and Executive Committee held a series of strategy meetings to discuss how Polk could first maintain and then improve its competitive advantage amid significant industry, regulatory and technology change.

Over the years, Polk has enjoyed a position as the market leader and is the “gold standard” for automotive vehicle and consumer data. This data is used by every automotive brand to make critical decisions about their businesses. Further, many automotive suppliers, dealers, and other automotive-related businesses (finance and insurance, media, research, government agencies) utilize Polk solutions. Polk’s data and applications are used by its customers to help them make decisions about areas such as dealer and network planning, parts and inventory planning, customer segmentation and target marketing, and vehicle verification to name but a few. Having served the automotive market since 1922, Polk provides data that is ‘court-tested’ to defend franchise decisions made by OEMs. Further, Polk’s data is used for recall purposes to ensure that every vehicle owner is notified of recall campaigns.

Never wanting to “rest on its laurels,” Polk has continuously improved its data management methods over the years. Given today’s environment, in which privacy compliance is introducing even tighter restrictions on how data can be used, the time was right to move beyond continuous improvement to develop a innovative approach that would revolutionize Polk’s core foundational data warehouse.

Polk’s executive leadership had a healthy debate centered on two fundamental issues at the earliest stages of the re-FUEL project.

First, to be successful with a project of this significance, size and scope, the IT team members tasked with accomplishing success would need to be focused fully on this project, and not burdened with other daily demands. In other words, we didn’t want to “change the tires on the car while it was moving.”

Second, Polk realized it was not alone in facing the challenges and complexities inherent in large-scale data management, data warehousing, and application development/integration. According to Gartner, in 2004 organizations were faced with managing 30 times more data than in 1999. This trend is not likely to change.

With both issues in mind, Polk’s senior management concluded that the appropriate course of action was to develop a new subsidiary, RLPTechnologies. The charter for this organization was to develop a working software solution for use by the parent that would also be viable for other organizations.

A plan was devised to totally re-engineer the core revenue generation engine that powers the company and to do it in such a way that it:

• maintains and improves the current competitive advantage for the next 10 years, and
• creates a subsidiary company to “spin out” the technology innovations into the market place.

In December of 2004, the Polk Board of Directors approved the re-engineering program and the creation of RLPTechnologies, a wholly owned subsidiary of R.L. Polk & Co.

The re-engineering program was code-named re-FUEL ( Re-engineering Functions with Urgency, Excellence and Leadership). The re-FUEL vision was described in the charter approved by Polk’s Board of Directors as follows:

“The re-FUEL vision is nothing short of revolutionizing the way data is collected, standardized, enhanced and compiled into data warehouses. …..The solution will be designed with the awareness of today’s security threats and data privacy issues…. The solution will be designed to incorporate a high level of quality automation and statistical trending to detect, and potentially predict, data quality issues….This effort should produce a world class data collection, enhancement, and compilation solution; a system that utilizes superior technologies and methods to produce superior results and profitability. It is not an exercise in continuous improvement, but a journey of discovery and innovation”

In essence the re-FUEL team was given the rare opportunity to take a clean sheet approach to designing the new systems, processes and organization. The business vision was established, and referred to as 50/50/100:

- Lower Total Cost of Ownership

- Improve data processing and timeliness and availability

- Protect Polk’s rich heritage as the industry standard, and provide improvements in identifying problems earlier in the process

The re-FUEL team evaluated and eventually embraced a standards based, service oriented architecture (SOA) as the foundation for the new system. As a new IT architectural paradigm, SOA provides significant benefits relative to protecting legacy investments, reducing costs, and providing accelerated time to development. The team also embraced the principles of lean manufacturing – continuous material flows, standardized process, and eliminating waste – which aligned closely with the 50/50/100 goals.

Over the next 14 months, a team led by the new subsidiary (RLPTechnologies) went through an aggressive project schedule to:

The system has been built, and is being deployed in phases. The project is entering the final phase of parallel operation, which will occur from March through June, 2006. Following this phase, the Polk “data factory” will use the new solution exclusively to manage the wealth of data Polk collects.

A conversion of over 2.5 billion data records from the existing Polk data warehouse will be run through the system for consistency.

The program has delivered on both the business vision (competitive advantage & 50/50/100), and the technology vision of a true service oriented architecture (SOA) – enabling Polk to recognize significant benefits, while leveraging the new system to further strengthen its competitive advantage.

3. What was the desired solution?

The solution (The Enterprise Information Factory) was developed by RLPTechnologies as a comprehensive software application that manages how data is collected, standardized and enhanced, and compiled it into a Single Source Of Truth (SSOT) to feed use in analytical and operational applications. The Enterprise Information Factory innovates in two primary areas: business process and technology.
Business Process Innovation
We’ve learned from the principles of lean manufacturing, and applied those lessons to the area of data processing in the development of the Enterprise Information Factory (EIF). Key lean principles of continuous material flow, process automation, standardization, quality controls and continuous improvement are built into the core of the solution.

The solution handles incoming data in much the same way as a factory built on the principles of lean manufacturing handles raw materials. As soon as inbound data (the EIF’s raw material) arrives, the factory immediately recognizes the availability of data and begins processing it. This automated collection and real-time processing of Polk’s data reduces the overall time for the data to reach its key business intelligence and other transactional business systems. The Enterprise Information Factory has eliminated manual processes, allowing Polk to recognize overall improvements of up to 70 percent on processing inbound data.

This type of real-time automated processing is possible because Polk’s business analysts have the ability to setup, or “tool” the Enterprise Information Factory with custom business rules for the processing of any particular source or type of data. Once configured, the EIF runs as a fully automated system, requiring minimal manual activity. Like any highly automated system, the solution needed a robust monitoring and process control system. An operations management dashboard was built to provide visibility into the health of the factory. The operations management portal displays real-time metrics of the EIF performance. It also provides access to exception queues, allowing analysts to resolve issues that occur during automated processing. When exceptions are encountered, the specific data in question is “pulled off the line” and alerts are sent out. This allows for the continuous flow of all other data moving through the EIF, and makes Polk business analysts immediately aware of the issue, so they can begin prompt resolution. Once an exception is resolved, the data is placed back into the Enterprise Information Factory’s workflow to complete processing.

The EIF may raise exceptions for a number of reasons, but a sophisticated data quality module is the primary source. The data quality module evaluates data content at various check points in the factory, from the time data arrives through to the delivery of finished data products. The data quality tool allows Polk analysts to establish rules on such factors as data consistency, completeness and value distribution. Polk analysts can use business rules to adjust thresholds up and down for acceptable variances in the data. As a result, Polk quickly identifies data quality issues and responds to them early in the data processing lifecycle.

Through the innovative use of lean manufacturing principles in the field of data processing, the Enterprise Information Factory has allowed Polk to recognize significant business process efficiencies in a once very manual process.

Technology Innovation
The re-FUEL program was structured to allow the team to architect the Enterprise Information Factory from a clean sheet of paper, without concern for the technology constraints of existing platforms. This allowed the team to develop a very innovative technology solution. The three key areas of innovation include: the creative use of an enterprise service bus (ESB) as the solution backbone, a custom Service Orchestration engine that provides dynamic integration to web services, and the implementation of a GRID computing platform.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
The ESB serves as the JMS messaging backbone of the Enterprise Information Factory. The ESB is essentially the underlying foundation that holds together all modules of the factory, such as:

• Data Capture
• Standardization
• Data Enhancement
• Quality profiling
• Assembly

And common foundation services, such as:

• Logging
• Exception handling
• Scheduling
• Security

A standard message structure facilitates communication between components in the EIF. This approach provided a tremendous amount of flexibility when developing and integrating components of the solution to create a large composite application.

Service Orchestration Engine
The Enterprise Information Factory is founded on a service oriented architecture. At the center of that SOA is a custom developed service orchestration engine. This engine manages all business services executed against the data moving through the factory. The Service Orchestration engine was specifically designed to handle high volume and a high degree of flexibility for the handling of changes to data and business services.

The solution provides an application that allows Polk business analysts to create and modify service orchestration profiles. These profiles are based on registered services and the type of data that is being processed.

The EIF service orchestration function is based on a data driven dependencies engine (D3E). At run time the service orchestration engine retrieves a profile that defines what services have been assigned to the data source. Through the use of Web Service Description Language (WSDL) in the service registry and the inbound data schema, the engine automatically derives an optimized execution path. Unique parsing, segmenting and aggregation routines developed by RLPTechnologies allow the engine to perform parallel processing and manage calls to and from all services. All communication with registered business services use common web service standards and protocols such as SOAP, JMS, HTTPS, XML and WSDL.

The capability provided by service orchestration allows Polk to quickly integrate business services provided through either the use of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS), legacy applications, or external providers. Polk integrated business services and used COTS such as DataFlux for name and address cleansing, and iLog for sophisticated VIN rules processing. Additionally, Polk’s legacy business logic in COBOL was wrapped with a web service interface and connected to the factory.

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

The selection of JEMS was decided very early in the project. During the early stages of the reFUEL project, the team completed a conceptual and logical architecture. Based on this target architecture several key foundation software and hardware components were identified, which included application server and object/relational persistence amongst others.

The aggressive time frame did not allow the team to do a broad sweep of available products, so the team quickly developed a short list based on market research firms such as Gartner. Based on this research the team evaluated the first round of candidate technology in a lab, to assess stability, maintainability, performance and interoperability. The results of this testing, coupled with the desire for RLPT to eventually develop a commercial product – JBoss was the clear winner.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

The JBoss Application Server and Hibernate Object/Relational Persistence products were critical components of the technical foundation for the solution.

The JBoss application server is used to run all Java components of the Enterprise Information Factory (EIF) developed using Hibernate. The core EIF Java applications used to configure the operations of the data factory include: Data Capture, Reference Data Management, Data Quality, Service Orchestration Gatekeeper and Assembly functions. These are critical business applications used by Polk Analysts to perform their day to day jobs.

The performance and scalability of the factory was paramount for this project, and was achieved using the JBoss application server. The solution needed to scale to support over 100 transactions per second while processing though several business services. The EIF Service Orchestration Engine (developed in Java), is the foundation of the SOA architecture and manages all data movement, and calls to and from all registered services. In addition to running custom developed components, JBoss application server was also used to run several of the COTS products used in the solution. This included an implementation of iLog jRules business rules execution engine running in JBoss. The business rules implementation for Polk Vehicle decoding contains well over 600,000 rules in multiple rule sets deployed across multiple application servers, one of the largest implementation of rules for a solution using iLog.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)
The Polk Executive Committee approved the re-FUEL project as the #1 priority for Polk’s FY05 and FY06 business plan.

At its basis, the re-FUEL project focused on re-engineering and boosting the performance of Polk’s core revenue-generating engine, the power driving the company’s business success. Polk has realized significant business results from the re-FUEL project, including both revenue protection and generation, combined with equally significant cost-savings.

Revenue Generation
The project positively impacted Polk’s revenue picture, both in terms of protecting current revenue streams as well as supporting additional revenue growth.

Revenue Protection
Over 50 percent of Polk’s market-leading automotive data and analytical solutions are supplied by the new solution. Enhancements in the speed, accuracy, and quality of the data, combined with improved regulatory compliance capabilities, have enabled Polk to maintain a position of strength compared to its competitors. Two elements of the 50/50/100 plan—50 Percent Faster and 100 Percent Quality–are worth noting as drivers of significant business benefits for Polk.

50 Percent Faster – Tests to date show improvements of up to 70 percent in data-file processing speed (on average). For example, an average state registration file that previously would have required manual processing by as many as three full-time employees (FTE’s) and four hours of processing time, now is processed in an automated fashion in roughly 23 minutes. Further, RLPT’s approach to grid computing has allowed the solution to scale to process ~100 transactions per second, nearly four times Polk’s average of 25 transactions per second – providing headroom to accommodate, processing spikes, future transactions or business growth.

100 Percent Quality – The standardization and enhancement functionality of the Enterprise Information Factory measurably improves the accuracy and completeness of the data, preventing quality problems that might impact customer satisfaction. Automated data quality checkpoints allow for earlier recognition of problems and enable the team to resolve issues before the data is delivered to Polk’s business intelligence and operational applications. This functionality drives a focus on preventing issues–or at worst, recognizing them early–following the rule of thumb that “It costs $1 to prevent a problem, $10 to identify a problem, and $100 or more to fix it.”

Faster delivery of higher-quality information should translate into improved customer satisfaction, resulting in continued long-term business commitments. Given Polk’s subscription-based models, this will enable continued positive financial returns for the 135 year-old company. Fending off any threats to the core business will allow Polk to maximize new revenue generating opportunities and drive double-digit growth.

Revenue Generation
A significant benefit delivered by the solution for Polk is their ability to shift focus from data management to product strategy and application development. Armed with the flexible environment provided by the Enterprise Information Factory, Polk’s Product Strategy group can look for new data sources to enhance its offerings, while also developing new analytical and operational applications to leverage more timely and complete data. Polk expects these new capabilities to prime the company for future growth, and embolden managers with the knowledge that they will experience reduced time to market in future development efforts. The EIF solution will be rolled out in phases, and the team is currently working on how best to deploy it globally to further strengthen the consistency and completeness of Polk’s data and product applications worldwide.

The formation of RLPTechnologies was founded on the knowledge that the Enterprise Information Factory could also solve challenges facing other large organizations–and generate new revenue streams in the process. Market trends support this approach. A November 2005 Gartner study on data integration, for example, shows that in North America, 21% of respondent companies expect constant investment in data integration, with 60% expecting to increase such investments in 2006. Further, the same study asked respondents about the “degree to which their SOA initiatives included the service orientation of data assets and creation of data services.” Gartner concludes that “with only 37 percent indicating a strong focus on this topic, most organizations appear to be at risk for failure in their SOA efforts because they are probably not addressing fundamental issues, such as consistent transformation, delivery, and quality improvement of the data.”

With its comprehensive approach to data integration and management and with a service oriented architecture at its core, RLPTechnologies solution (the Enterprise Information Factory) is well positioned to capture continued investments by businesses in these areas.

Supported by strong partnerships with industry-leading consulting firms and software technology companies, RLPTechnologies will provide significant growth for the parent company. The three-year business projections are expected to deliver between 5 and 10 percent top-line revenue growth for Polk.

Cost-Savings
The first element of the business vision that was established in the 50/50/100 plan was 50 percent more efficient. The re-FUEL project allowed this goal to be met, with significant cost benefits to be realized by Polk in two core areas:

Leaner, Better Aligned Team
Prior to the re-FUEL project, Polk’s previously-named Data Operations team had moved from Cincinnati to Polk Headquarters in Detroit in 2003, resulting in a centralization of IT functions. The re-FUEL project transformed the structure and size of this group, creating a more cost efficient and focused unit. Renamed the Data Factory, the group is now 43 percent smaller, and team members have significantly different roles and responsibilities. The group is structured more efficiently, with roles that align directly to the functions of the solution (Data Capture, Standardization & Enhancement, Reference Data Management, Single Source of Truth/Operational Data Store, Assembly, and Operations Management). Further, the reduction in manual processes has enabled the group to focus on strategic management and analysis of data, including areas such as issue resolution and handling.

Lower IT Operating Costs
The implementation of RLPT’s grid computing model will result in significant savings for Polk. By moving away from a mainframe-based system, the grid will operate with hardware costs that are 65 percent less. This change amounts to savings of millions of dollars per year for Polk. Finally, improvements made to the open systems environment are leading to additional savings of 30 percent per year compared to prior operating budgets.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The savings gained from the project including those from the implementation of JEMS are invested back into the business to drive product development efforts to strengthen Polk’s competitive advantage as the market leader in business intelligence for the automotive industry.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
GRID Computing Platform
The technology stack for the Enterprise Information Factory operates in a grid computing environment running Linux Redhat on Intel Xeon processors. The target production grid is comprised of 49 servers and 118 processors. The database holding the Single Source of Truth contained in a 4.5TB database with over 2.5 Billion transactions. The operation and management of the grid is accomplished through the combination of JBoss clustering, the EIF Service Orchestration and Oracle 10g GRID.

Embedded in the EIF solution is leading commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS); Oracle 10g database grid, portal and Oblix, Tibco BusinessWorks, Dataflux dfPower Studio and iLog jRules to accelerate the time to market for the solution. The EIF application that wraps all of these technologies together is a series of J2EE applications running in clustered JBoss application servers.

The grid based computing platform has allowed both significant cost savings and flexible scalability options to provide capacity on demand.

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

Yes, we engaged JBoss for support, training and consulting. The development team ramped up very fast and a number of outside contractors were used. To ensure proper use of Hibernate we purchased training programs for our team. Additionally, we used JBoss consulting to provide assistance with tuning activities.

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

Establish a sound SOA architecture up front and stay true to it as much as practical.

Category: Clustering
Winner: J. Craig Venter Institute
Submitted by: Pete Davies, Indresh Singh, Tom Dolafi, Chris Lemieux, Sean Murphy, Adam Resnick, Angelo Trivelli, Bryan Yu, and Saul Kravitz
Industry: Bio Engineering
Geography: Rockville, MD

Overview
Selected for use of JBoss messaging and clustering to provide the stability and scalability necessary to process in excess of 40 million traces in batch across a 2 node cluster that supports over 100 DNA sequencers (scaling to 8 nodes to process large collections of traces) while also saving the not-for-profit genomic research center over $500,000 per year in licensing and maintenance costs.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission

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

J. Craig Venter Institute is a not-for-profit research institute dedicated to the advancement of the science of genomics; the understanding of its implications for society; and the communication of those results to the scientific community, the public, and policymakers. Founded by J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., the Institute is home to approximately 200 staff and scientists with expertise in human and evolutionary biology, genetics, genomic and environmental policy research.

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

The J. Craig Venter Institute’s Joint Technology Center (JTC) opened in June 2003. The facility was designed to be one of the world’s leading DNA sequencing organizations, providing DNA sequencing and resequencing services for the Venter Institute and collaborators worldwide. The JTC executes 150-200 projects a year, 45-50 concurrently, and has a capacity of 80 million sequence reads (lanes) per year. The facility was designed to scale to 320 million lanes per year. Producing high quality data from a 24×7 high throughput DNA sequencing facility servicing many concurrent projects requires a comprehensive and robust Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS).

The challenge was to build a LIMS supporting the JTC’s evolving lab processes that would provide the performance, scalability, and robustness the JTC’s high capacity operation, with materials tracking, workflow, and process control. In addition, the LIMS was required to support integration with hundreds of laboratory instruments, computational pipelines, and analysis tools; real time quality control reports and data delivery to collaborators and public data repositories. We evaluated COTS LIMS tools, but all fell well short of the JTC’s LIMS requirements. The primary shortcomings were performance at the transaction and data volumes contemplated, and the ability to integrate with analysis pipelines and instrumentation.

3. What was the desired solution?

To track all the lab processes and the data, we designed and implemented a suite of LIMS applications, providing bar-coded tracking of users, reagents, and material transfers throughout the facility. The LIMS is built on an Oracle 10g database, with a rich stored procedure layer. Business logic is implemented in EJBs, and most user interaction is via JSPs. The first version of the LIMS was deployed in April 2004.

Extensive integration of laboratory robotics has been facilitated by the use of J2EE technology provided by JBoss. Our ~110 DNA sequencers each host a JBoss instance, supporting user interactions via JSPs, data transfer and remote monitoring via HTTP, and interaction with the LIMS via JMS and EJBs. We have integrated fluid handling robots used to setup experiments in a similar manner. Symbol wireless PDAs have been integrated to track steps where lab staff mobility was critical.
DNA sequence data flows from the sequencers to a pipeline where it is reduced and analyzed, and loaded into the LIMS database. The pipeline is built using both JMS and EJB technology and integrated with both our in-house Oracle database, as well as a Sybase database from one of our key customers. The robustness of this pipeline in the face of DB connection stability enabled by the J2EE features as embodied in

JBoss has produced dramatic increases in customer satisfaction as well as greatly reduced production IT overhead.

Suites of LIMS applications are deployed on three, 2 node JBoss clusters. For on demand, batch processing, we have an 8 node JBoss cluster, which can easily process 40 million traces within days.

We are leveraging JBossMQ with HAJMS to process traces with a JBoss cluster using a fork and join approach. We used this approach to parallelize trace processing for high performance. When the TraceProcessing MDB receives a trace processing request, it forks the job into many smaller jobs by sending messages into another JMS queue. These messages are received by a second MDB and the smaller jobs are then executed on all clustered servers in parallel. The TraceProcessing MDB waits for completion messages from all of the MDBs which are processing the smaller jobs. After receiving the completion messages from all of the jobs, the TraceProcessing MDB aggregates all results and sends a message into another queue which is processed by a Loading MDB to persist the data. This is a very simple, stable and highly scalable approach to process millions of traces. In case we need to add more computing power to our JTrace server farm, we simply add new JBoss nodes to existing JBoss cluster.

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

Members of our team had experience using JBoss since 2000. Once we made our strategic decision to heavily invest in J2EE, JBoss was our first choice. The main considerations were its feature set, quality, cost, and clear development roadmap.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

Building on JBoss has dramatically reduced the development time for our LIMS, and increased its stability. The ability to deploy Java application servers to all of our DNA sequencers has greatly improved the cost effectiveness of our LIMS integration with the sequencers. JBoss JMS and Clustering provided the vertical scalability to our application; we setup an 8 node JBoss cluster to process large bundles (40 million) of traces in batch.

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

We currently deploy about 140 JBoss application servers in production, using advanced features like HAJMS, clustering, cache etc. We have probably saved more then $500K per year on application server licensing costs by using JBoss. JBoss free, open source applications provide the unmatched scalability, where we can add new JBoss instances without worrying about any licensing cost.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
Any software dollars saved through the use of JBoss have been reallocated to development software that is core to our scientific mission.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
DNA Sequencers: 100 ABI 3730xl and 6 ABI 3100 DNA Sequencers
Integration with ABI 9700 Thermalcycler
Beckman Biomek® FX Laboratory Automation Workstation
Hudson Controls Laboratory Automation Stackers and Print and Apply Stations
Zebra Barcode Printers and Scanners
Application servers run under Linux on HP BL20p blade servers
DB Server runs on a two node Linux cluster (HP DL580s).
Symbol PPT-8846 Wireless Pocket-PC based PDAs with scanner
3 Oracle 10gRAC cluster with more then 1Terrabyte of data.
JBoss 3.2.6 Java Application Servers
Panscopic Scope Server Reporting Tool ((www.panscopic.com)
Bugzero Issue Tracking System (www.websina.com)
DiskXTender from Legato
Celera Assembler
Custom Bioinformatics Software developed at the Venter Institute

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

Yes, we used JBoss advance training provided JBoss and we found it very good. Training added a lot of value to our employees.

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

JBoss provided excellent enterprise applications which are open, stable, and scalable. We scaled from 1 standalone server to an 8 node clustered sever with some trivial changes. JBoss stability and scalability is exceptional. Why pay for other black box applications server when you can get JBoss open source applications, which can add value while drastically cutting costs.

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:

Category: Return on Investment (ROI)
Winner: Kroger
Submitted by: Kroger Team
Industry: Retail
Geography: Cincinnati, Ohio

Overview

Selected for building out a shared infrastructure (grid) system on JBoss AS that deploys the majority of their mission-critical applications, boosting overall capacity by 40% and saving Kroger over $100,000 in licensing costs and $400 per CPU in yearly maintenance costs.

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

Kroger Co. spans the vast majority of the United States with store formats that include grocery and multi-department stores, convenience stores, and mall jewelry stores. They operate over 2,500 grocery stores nationwide and hold the number one or two market share position in 40 of the 52 largest markets they serve. They also operate over 790 convenience stores and more than 430 jewelry stores. Kroger also owns and manages 42 manufacturing and food processing plants that produce high-quality private labels sold throughout their stores. They thrive by building strong local ties and strong brand loyalty with their customers.

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

Kroger was a long-time customer of another leading J2EE application server vendor and made a corporate decision to investigate open source alternatives in an attempt to dramatically reduce license costs and free up funds for a strategic shared infrastructure project.

3. What was the desired solution?

Kroger’s first foray into open source was the Eclipse IDE development environment. After achieving success within the development organization with Eclipse, Kroger decided to turn their attention to Application Servers.

They worked through several evaluation processes before concluding they wanted to standardize on JBoss AS

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

Kroger originally identified two open source options to investigate: JBoss Application Server and Apache Geronimo. After a quick research project on both options, they chose to pursue JBoss for the following reasons:

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

JBoss AS is now a standard platform within Kroger. Many existing J2EE applications will be migrated to JBoss AS and new applications will be developed on JBoss. Key applications within Kroger that are being migrated include the manufacturing applications used to ensure their 42 manufacturing and food processing plants are properly stocked with ingredients, real estate applications that manage their vast properly collection around the country, finance applications critical for closing their books on a quarterly basis, and

A series of management applications that Kroger executives rely upon to make strategic decisions for the company. These applications are highly mission critical to Kroger and all run on JBoss AS today.

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

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

By moving to JBoss AS, Kroger was able to save enough on licensing and maintenance costs to fund a large shared infrastructure (grid) project that consolidates the majority of their applications, boosts overall capacity by 40%, and saves the company approximately $500,000 in future hardware and software, and $70,000 per year in maintenance costs.

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

The MCP Manufacturing applications run on IBM Linux Blade servers clustered behind an Edge Server for load balancing. They use Red Hat Linux version 2.1 and an IBM DB2 database (8.X family). For the Web-tier, they leverage Apache Web Server 2.0.5 and Apache Tomcat with mod-jk. JBoss AS (version 4.x) is utilized for the Middleware tier.

Additionally, Kroger is currently refreshing a lot of their infrastructure as they move to a shared infrastructure (Grid) environment. In addition to the MCP manufacturing applications, Kroger also currently runs a set of 15 store systems-side applications and 6 financial applications on the Grid. The total shared infrastructure consists of 8 physical servers (all IBM P570 boxes with 8 CPUs per) with 17 virtual Apache servers and 16 virtual JBoss AS servers. These servers handle production as well as staging and test. The staging servers act as a mirror of the production environment.

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?

Just do it