FAST FACTS

Company:Brazil Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF)

Industry: Government

Geography: Brazil

Business Challenge: Needed a service-oriented architecture that improved Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s (STF) system integration process and the database and deployment governance in the STI (Technology Information of Office Secretary)

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Operations Network, JBoss SOA Platform, JBoss ESB, JBoss jBPM, JBoss Rules, and Hibernate

Hardware: x86 commodity servers with Intel Xeon-Based Processors

Benefits: Reduced costs and increased agility, functionality, and flexibility with a combination of Red Hat and JBoss solutions

Download the case study[PDF]

BACKGROUND
Brazil’s Federal Supreme Tribunal’s Information and Technology Office (STF) provides systems development for the Brazilian High Court’s coverage area which involves all Brazilian regional tribunals for second court appeal, which means something about 35 tribunals from all Brazil states. This includes providing new technology adoptions, computing and database net management, and software and equipment technical support and specialized assistance. All these systems supported by the Technology Office have both internal and external users who constantly demand new functionality. Among these demands is system integration, which was one of STF’s most critical functionalities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
While STF had a functional level system and solid applications development, they were experiencing a lagging performance in regards to collaborations and information sharing. Users consistently complained about slow access and the business delays caused by shared files not appearing in real time.

In addition to low performance and a great demand for court trials, STF also experienced system integration problems. The team needed an architecture that could offer a quick and easy integration between systems, that would enable the needed components, applications, services, programs and users to easily integrate with one another to successfully share critical files, such as contracts and processes. STF demanded the system integration capabilities that could handle requests per file and setup procedures for remote calls by shared database and message lines.

SOLUTION
When considering various platform options, STF researched:

• The Federal Government guidelines for open software usage

• STI’s prior experience with Red Hat

• Evaluation of the capabilities and experience of system administrators, developers, and other IT professionals with the platform vendor’s technology

The team determined that an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was the best solution to meet its demands and requirements in a message system with the capability to implement several open integration patterns. After researching several SOA and ESB vendors and solutions, both community projects and open source software providers, the team selected Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

JBoss Enterprise SOA provides automatic message routing and supports several information exchanging providers and channels, such as FTP, SMTP, JMS and Web Services. JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform enables business execution, responsiveness, and flexibility in a cost-effective, open platform and aggregates pluggable security, auto-discovery, localization independence, and integration patterns implementation functionalities.

Every STI/STF architecture is now developed on open source software with Java technology. For software development and support needs, STF now uses Red Hat’s JBoss Enterprise SOA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. STF uses (ESX 3.5) Virtual Machine, 2 Processors 3 GHz, 2 GB and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform memory.

The JBoss SOA Platform (customized by STF for services patronization) is currently in the implementation phase. STI has a subscription for Red Hat’s technical support for four CPUs in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

STI’s governance project will begin generating its services still in 2009, which STI expects to improve the aggregate value and transparency of the entire organization. 90 percent of its new projects will be based off JBoss Enterprise SOA and 100 percent of its legacy is currently in migration from JBoss.org and Fedora to JBoss Enterprise SOA. By using more efficient services, all of those who communicate with STF are expected to have benefits. For example, the lawyers win agility when they have to introduce a petition to the ministers of government. It can be done electronically, which represents a great evolution of government service.

Every STF service in production must be monitored and manageable, such capabilities are achieved using JBoss ON – JBoss Operations Network, which offers accurate information about the processing of the Services hosted in the JBoss ESB, as well as the quality and metrics delivered by the JMS technology. Based on Alerting features of JBoss ON, we can receive alerts in order to prevent any unpredictable service behavior, in addition to this, in certain cases, some default actions can be taken according the alerts, it allowed the IT team to focus exactly on real potential problems, letting JBoss ON resolve issues that can be addressed by an the enterprise SOA management solution.

For the STI team the most important benefit has been getting an infrastructure that is flexible and mature, coupled with development systems to assist the STF IT team. Also, the IT team got governance, being able to manage and measure its contribution for the Supreme Tribunal’s strategies with JBoss ON.

BENEFITS
STI reports positive experiences with Red Hat’s support as the team receives quick and informative responses. Red Hat’s support model eliminates the need for STI to staff Red Hat specialists in-house, thus cutting costs.. The STI also finds great benefit in the Red Hat Business Partner Tecnisys, which provides specialized technology consulting and support, as training and specialist technicals to assist STI needs.

STI has experienced increased agility and flexibility with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. From the commercial point of view, the cost savings are significant with the usage of open source software, and from a technology perspective, the infrastructure is more stable and failure tolerant; the service buses allow the IT team to work on more strategic work deployments, by the reuse of the available services in the service buses.

An additional, unexpected benefit from using Red Hat and JBoss is the STI developers’ attitude shift. Instead of thinking in components, developers now think in terms of aggregating services. This attitude shift contributes to increased service performance, agility, and maintenance economy.

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

FAST FACTS

Customer: Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG (Heidelberg)

Industry: Printing & Publishing, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering

Geography: U.S., EMEA

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

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

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

Hardware: Virtualized servers and F5 Load balancer

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

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

Download the PDF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

COMPANIES: Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Rivet Logic

CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Publishing

GEOGRAPHY: Cambridge, Massachusetts

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: The HBP’s ability to get new products to market and the quality of the customer experience at its e-commerce site were hindered by a proprietary operating system, a difficult-to-use legacy content management system (CMS), and inflexible customer-facing Web applications, which were negatively impacting the HBP’s revenues and limiting growth

MIGRATION PATH: From a proprietary operating system running a proprietary legacy CMS application to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running the Alfresco Content Management System

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Frameworks including JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, jBPM, Oracle Database, and Alfresco’s open source Content Management System

HARDWARE: Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based Dell™ 2950 multicore servers

BENEFITS: Increased employee productivity, lowered IT operational costs, and increased Web site traffic and e-commerce transactions

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University which publishes a range of content – both print and online – bridging the knowledge gap between academic and the corporate world. It serves three primary markets: academic, enterprise, and individual managers. With more than 250 employees, the HBP’s mission is to explore and improve management practices around the world. HBP’s major Web properties include the online version of Harvard Business Review (hbr.org), Harvard Business Digital (harvardbusiness.org), and Higher Education (www.hbsp.harvard.edu). Rivet Logic and HBP were selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for the use open source solutions from Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco that have enabled increased stability and the ability to develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions that help organizations engage with customers, improve collaboration, and streamline operations. The company offers a full suite of JBoss professional services – including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack. With complementary expertise in the Alfresco content management platform, Rivet Logic offers integrated, content-rich, and Web-oriented architecture (WOA)-enabled solutions that power a new generation of interactive Web properties, enterprise intranet applications, and collaborative Web 2.0 communities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
To stay innovative and develop new products faster, HBP’s business users require the ability to easily access and use content from a variety of systems across the range of HBP business units. But the existing aging content management system was limiting access to only a few trained power users, which routinely resulted in productivity bottlenecks across all units.

To further challenge the workflow and production of HBP products, critical content resided on various shared drives across the enterprise or was locked up in the proprietary system, making it increasingly difficult for HBP to repurpose existing content into the kind of new digital media products that the fast-moving business information marketplace was seeking.

“Strategically, HBP knew it needed to transform itself from a print organization – which what it was for the past 10 to 20 years – to a digital media organization,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic Corporation, a professional open source services and solutions firm hired by the HBP to reengineer the core IT platform and mission-critical applications.

The growing array of aging and disparate legacy middleware and operating systems used to run HBP’s Web sites was also proving increasingly unstable. The system routinely caused integration hurdles, IT bottlenecks, and escalating operational costs due to personnel overhead and software licensing fees. The lack of easy-to-use Web publishing tools hindered the editorial staff’s ability to deliver fresh and innovative content and, consequently, limited HBP’s ability to drive site traffic and therefore the ad revenue and e-commerce transactions that contributed directly to the firm’s bottom line.

In addition to the financial overhead due to high software licensing and maintenance costs, a large percentage of IT operational costs and human resources were spent just keeping the old systems running, leaving little time and resources for developing innovative new products. The proprietary legacy systems were difficult to customize and integrate, and could not scale to keep pace with HBP’s expanding business.

SOLUTION
HBP recognized it needed to replace its proprietary content management system with a robust, yet easy-to-use enterprise-grade content management system that would facilitate access to its high-value content to its business users and integrate seamlessly with existing systems such as enterprise content repositories, search and merchandising tools, e-commerce systems, ad networks, Web analytics, and community-building applications such as blogs.

HBP required a solution that provided increased flexibility around page design and messaging, easy access to digital products, a uniform user experience, easy-to-use e-commerce experience, and improved visitor experience for user registration and session management. HBP also sought a higher level of performance, scalability, and rock-solid stability.

One absolutely non-negotiable requirement: the new solution needed to be built with open source software and an open architecture with an enterprise Java foundation at the core. It also needed to support rapid, lightweight development at the upper layers of the application stack – most notably at the user interface layer and presentation tier. This requirement would focus on HBP’s business goals and on leveraging HBP’s very high-value content and core capabilities to enable future innovation.

This is where Rivet Logic came in. Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions and offers a full suite of JBoss professional services including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack.

Rivet Logic implemented an end-to-end open source solution that delivered on all of HBP’s requirements. HBP’s production ecosystem was built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell 2950 servers with dual and quad core CPUs, running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Apache, Oracle Database, and the Alfresco Content Management System.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was used as a core component for the dynamic content delivery system and e-commerce experience. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the basis for a WOA that enabled straightforward integration with numerous enterprise back-end systems and third-party Web services, including enterprise resource management (ERP), ad servers, XML repositories, taxonomy management, third-party search, Web analytics, and a user ID management system.

In addition, JBoss Seam served as the rich user interface (UI) framework for an intranet application for enterprise content management, and the public-facing Web applications for the online versions of Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, HBP’s e-commerce site at harvardbusiness.org, and HBP’s Higher Education site at www.hbsp.harvard.edu. In all cases, the JBoss Seam applications were integrated with Alfresco for back-end content management. The intranet application utilized Alfresco’s document management (DM) repository, whereas the Web site applications utilized Alfresco’s Web content management (WCM) repository.

JBoss Hibernate provided the persistence layer for all application logic and user-generated content, and jBPM governed workflow for editorial content and publishing processes. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the foundation necessary for HBP’s mission-critical applications that required high performance and scalability. Rivet Logic used a WOA approach for the need for single-sign-on support, while also enabling integration with a variety of systems, including a blogging platform (blogs.harvardbusiness.org), e-commerce, an XML repository (for HBR article content), and community platforms. Integration with a third-party search engine offered powerful faceted search and navigation functionalities. This content delivery approach also met standards-compliant XHTML/CSS requirements, maintained SEO-friendly URLs, and allowed for straightforward integration of Web analytics. Integration between JBoss and Alfresco was streamlined by using free and open source software from Rivet Logic, including the Remote Alfresco API rivet for Alfresco DM integration and the Crafter rivet for Alfresco.

The JBoss Seam intranet application allows enterprise users to:

- Navigate, search, find and retrieve relevant content quickly through a combination of full-text search, metadata search, and content relationship browsing

- Create and enter new content and associate metadata and relationships

- Manage digital rights of product-related media

- Restrict access to certain types of content through role-based user authorization

“The new JBoss and Alfresco based intranet provides an easy way for end-users to search and find content, as the search results deliver detailed content, such as individual chapters, images, author bios and the public-facing HBP site provides visitors a rich experience for navigating and consuming HBP’s digital content,” said Vertal, “The JBoss and Alfresco based Web content delivery system provides the dynamic and feature-rich functionalities HBP needed in a simplified manner by seamlessly connecting the presentation, application and content repository layers.”

BENEFITS
By using Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco open source solutions, HBP has gained platform agility that enables brand management, broader community functionality, and increased site traffic. The JBoss and Alfresco integrated solution has enabled HBP to gain the stability and ease of use it required to empower business end users and integrate with a host of critical applications and systems. With the new system in place, HBP can now develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

From a developer perspective, HBP’s IT department can now focus on value-added development of new application and site features given the open source architecture and the modern WOA infrastructure. Dramatically less time and resources are now spent on maintaining rigid, legacy systems that carried expensive maintenance and software licensing costs.

The new implementation has enabled HBP to better leverage the value of its branded content, including articles, books and book chapters, blogs, podcasts, and videos – easily, quickly and securely.

“Uniting all content across the enterprise led to the rapid development of new digital media products and richer content on HBP’s revenue-generating Web properties,” said Vertal, “With Red Hat, JBoss and Alfresco, HBP has enhanced the visitor experience with improved navigation, along with much faster Web site performance. By offering fresher and more dynamic content and increasing site traffic, HBP has started to expand its revenue opportunities.”

“This project was as mission-critical as they come,” said Vertal. “It encompassed the back-end repository, the front-end application that internal users deployed to create new content and products, and a customer-facing Web application that delivered those products to customers through a variety of channels. Red Hat Enterprise Linux coupled with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform drove a total transformation of the way that HPB approached product development and delivery.”

Business agility has also increased by orders of magnitude, said Vertal. “Because we were on the new platform, in a matter of months we were able to replace the entire e-commerce front end with a much better user experience and more manageable applications.”

The stability of the system has also proven itself. And, looking forward, HBP has plans to begin incorporating social media into the site using collaborative tools and community applications that will enable its employees to become better engaged with customers. “This will allow HBP to build and maintain better customer loyalty across its entire customer base,” said Vertal.

“We utilized leading edge, open source platforms from Red Hat, Alfresco, and Rivet Logic to implement a large-scale, high-value, business-critical solution that spans internal enterprise collaboration applications, public-facing Web properties and communities, and business-critical e-commerce applications,” said Vertal, “We believe this project demonstrates the powerful benefits that commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss and the open source ecosystem is ready to deliver to major enterprises for the converged world of content, community, collaboration, and commerce.”
CUSTOMER ADVICE

“Any enterprise or government agency that is looking to increase employee productivity and/or improve relationships with customers should seek to leverage next-generation solutions that expand their use of content, community, collaboration, and community. And just as the consumer Web 2.0 was built on open source software, these next generation Enterprise 2.0 solutions are being built on enterprise-grade, commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss, Alfresco, and others. All organizations should seek to leverage commercial open source software as much as possible for any and all future enterprise software initiatives,” said Vertal.

“Businesses should remember that software is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Companies should first focus on business requirements and desired results, and leverage the best-of-breed software technologies that will help them get there. And whether the business needs better internal-facing, content-enabled enterprise applications, improved external-facing Web properties, or e-commerce platforms, JBoss software has proven it can help deliver tremendous bottom- line results,” said Vertal.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Transportation

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: Provide an alternative channel for taxi booking to alleviate phone call booking overload during peak periods

Solution: Short Message Service (SMS) booking system developed on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Seam

Benefits: Allows customers to book a taxi anytime, anywhere using SMS in just 30 seconds, which means less waiting time for customers and more booking jobs for cab drivers

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
ComfortDelGro is the world’s second largest public-listed passenger land transport company with a fleet of 45,000 vehicles. The Group has a global workforce, shareholder base and outlook. Headquartered in Singapore, it has operations in China, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

ComfortDelGro was formed in 2003 through the merger of two land transport giants – Comfort Group and DelGro Corporation. Both had started out in the 1970s and had, by the time of the merger, grown to become successful listed land transport companies.

Comfort and CityCab, the group’s two taxi companies, are the largest in Singapore with a combined fleet of about 15,000 taxis.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Catering to more than 20 million taxi bookings annually, ComfortDelGro’s Customer Contact Centre is running at full capacity, with the situation becoming more pronounced during peak hours and on rainy days.

In 2007, the Company started to explore more ways to automate the booking process so as to handle the increasing volume of calls and reduce the time it takes for calls to be handled. Part of the booking process had already been automated with the broadcasting of call bookings to taxis using General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology via the in-vehicle Mobile Data Terminals.

As mobile phones are widely used in Singapore, ComfortDelGro decided to implement the Short Message Service (SMS) taxi booking service.

SOLUTION
A closed tender was called with three vendors pitching for the project. “Our criteria were the vendor’s experience in the SMS platform, its track record and support level. The platform must be able to integrate seamlessly with our existing Java-based solutions,” said Ms Wong Oi Mei, Vice President, Information Technology of ComfortDelGro’s Taxi Business.

After carefully considering the options available, the Company decided to pick the JBoss Seam-based solution proposed by Maven Lab, a Red Hat Business Partner under the Infocomm Development Authority’s (IDA) Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP).

“Maven Lab’s proposal matched our requirements. The Red Hat solution also offered lower cost of implementation,” said Oi Mei.

Maven Lab took three months to develop the system, which runs on Windows on HP Intel-based servers. JBoss Seam was used as the application server. A pilot run involving staff and selected customers started in January 2008 and following feedback gathered, the improved and more user-friendly SMS taxi booking service – the first of its kind in Singapore that enables commuters to book a taxi via SMS any time from any location without having to register – was launched.

BENEFITS
The service has proven to be a hit with many customers switching to SMS taxi booking since waiting time is now a mere 30 seconds. It has, in particular, been a boon to another group of customers – the speech- and hearing-impaired passengers. They now can book a taxi by themselves via SMS without having to rely on others for assistance.

“All that our customers, including the speech- and hearing-impaired passengers, have to do is to send a SMS and wait for a SMS response. This process bypasses the contact centre agents and IVR, saving time on waiting for the call to be answered and waiting on the line for confirmation. Our customers will also not have to experience getting an engaged tone during busy periods,” said Oi Mei.

Around 2% of all taxi bookings are now made via SMS. ComfortDelGro aims to increase this figure to 5% of all bookings by the end of 2009.

“ComfortGelGro is using the SMS taxi booking service as another channel to help improve customer experience. Using the Red Hat’s JBoss Seam-based solution has ensured that the company has a stable, reliable and cost-effective system to support this service,” said Hiew Wee Soon, Director of Maven Lab.

Oi Mei is pleased with the success of using open source solutions. “We are impressed with JBoss for its reliability and flexibility, and the support and service level from Red Hat,” she said.

Building on this good experience, ComfortDelGro will be using JBoss Seam and Hibernate for its customer and driver portals, both of which are expected to be launched later in 2009.

FAST FACTS

Company: MedQuist Inc.

Industry: Clinical Documentation Workflow Solutions

Geography: Mount Laurel, New Jersey

Business Challenge: Enabling a rapidly growing, high-volume, 24×7 business, through the creation of an agile and highly productive development environment for building and running mission-critical applications.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: x86 servers

Migration Path: From many database centric Windows platform components towards a SOA enterprise architecture providing service orchestration, platform independence and loose coupling of coarse-grained application modules. The latter allows for an evolutionary approach to re-platforming of a very large enterprise system without a large up-front cost and significant business risk.

Benefits: A highly productive, flexible and robust application development environment that enables MedQuist to proficiently produce innovative functionality for customer-facing solutions and to quickly take advantage of newly acquired applications by efficiently integrating them into its DocQment Enterprise Platform.

“Our applications are mission critical and absolutely need to be available 24×7. Red Hat’s JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux products just work, enabling us to focus on building industry-leading software, which in turn helps our customers reduce their costs and improve patient care.”
– Dan Garnett, Vice President of Product Development, MedQuist.

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
MedQuist Inc. is a leading provider of medical transcription software and related services. By delivering solutions that automate document creation and workflow to hospitals, doctors, and other healthcare providers, MedQuist helps its customers efficiently manage large volumes of complex clinical information.

The company has two separate but connected sources of revenues. First, it offers comprehensive software solutions that include digital voice capture, speech recognition, electronic signature, medical coding systems and services, and mobile dictation devices. It currently sells these solutions to more than 1,500 healthcare organizations throughout the United States. Secondly, MedQuist employs more than 4,000 skilled medical transcriptionists who process approximately 2 billion lines of text annually. The company employs more than 7,500 employees and earned $327 million in revenues in fiscal 2008.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Because of rapid growth since the early 2000s, MedQuist was looking for innovative ways to keep pace with ever-increasing system demands.

“We process more than 100,000 distinct dictated medical reports and notes per day,” said Kirk Elder, director of software engineering for MedQuist. “Our systems have to categorize them, classify them and route them through our workflow processes – from the time we receive the digital recordings until the final report is delivered to the customer.”

MedQuist currently has 10 clusters of speech recognition servers with each cluster containing 30+ servers, for a total of more than 300 servers to perform the all-important task of converting voice recordings to text-based documents. The voice recordings and related text files are than sent to medical transcriptionists (MTs) to correct and edit. After the MT finishes transcribing the report, the MedQuist platform sends the report to physicians to electronically sign the documents. Those documents are then routed back to the hospitals or clinics to printers, automated systems and/or their electronic health record (EHR) system, depending on whether the customer requires the information to be in paper or electronic form.

Before 2007, most of the MedQuist software used for this complex workflow routing was developed using various proprietary technologies, including C++ among others, making it more and more challenging to quickly respond to new market requirements and opportunities. Because MedQuist was quickly growing through acquisition, it also became difficult to efficiently incorporate the systems of newly acquired companies into the MedQuist DocQment Enterprise Platform.

“We are in the process of moving to an n-tiered SOA architecture based on Java middleware. With the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, we are positioned with the tool set to evolve our product suite towards towards SOA, without the upfront costs of re-writing everything at the same,” said Brian Ellenberger, development manager at MedQuist.

SOLUTION
Due to the economics of re-platforming a system this large, MedQuist has taken an evolutionary approach to moving its application platform to a JBoss-based environment. In fact, Elder’s group chose JBoss in 2002-2003 when their division was a separate company. At the time, there were two reasons for doing this: price and performance.

“As JBoss is open source, it was much less costly than proprietary application server options,” said Elder. “JBoss was a bargain compared to proprietary application servers.”

There were technical advantages to the platform itself. “JBoss seemed to be a very good platform for our developers, as the open architecture gave us lots of options. It was high performing too, and easy to understand,” continued Elder.

When his company was acquired by MedQuist, the IT team at the parent company evaluated what Elder’s team had done using JBoss, and was so pleased with the results, that it decided to make JBoss the platform for developing new software modules.

“We have 20 to 50 software modules that run on hundreds of servers that must all work in concert with each other,” said Kirk. “Previously, because of all the acquisitions, there was not development standards for making sure everything worked together.”

Today, the JBoss Application Server is embedded in the developer platform that Elder’s team releases to all MedQuist’s software engineering teams each quarter. “So everyone is developing software in a standard way with standard third-party libraries,” said Ellenberger. “Because we do development all over the world, this keeps us in sync and helps us maintain efficiency, while simultaneously reducing our overall development costs.”

Today, in addition to the JBoss Application Server itself, MedQuist uses Hibernate. Although just starting to use JBoss Seam for reporting, it is considering basing all future thin-client development platforms on Seam.

Underpinning all this, in mid-2007, MedQuist moved from a Microsoft Windows-based infrastructure to one based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“When we were looking to upgrade our enterprise database operating system to a more scalable, reliable, and cost-effective solution than windows, Linux was the obvious choice. We looked at which company would be a partner and help ensure our success. Red hat proved it then and every day since,” said John McKenna, Director of Software Engineering.

BENEFITS
The fact that JBoss is built using open standards has been a major boon for MedQuist. Indeed, its JBoss implementation has been so successful that MedQuist made an enterprise-wide decision to eliminate its dependence on vendor-specific solutions.

“We like the fact that JBoss is so open,” said Elder. “With the JBoss micro kernel architecture, we can even replace JBoss modules with other modules without any trouble. This allows us to avoid the vendor lock in we had experienced before.”

How critical are JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to MedQuist’s business?

“Our applications are mission critical and absolutely need to be available 24×7. Red Hat products like JBoss and Red Hat Enterprise Linux just work, enabling us to focus on building industry-leading software, which in turn helps our customers reduce their costs and improve patient care,” said Dan Garnett, Vice President of Product Development, MedQuist.

The open nature of the JBoss platform has delivered other benefits as well. For example, in the case of JBoss, “His team “can debug all the way through the code, and work around and fix even the most complex development issues by utilizing the source code,” said Elder. “JBoss also integrates well into our build process. We’ve been very successful at creating build scripts that get standard JBoss environments up and running for new developers or projects very quickly and painlessly.”

Finally, Red Hat as a company has proven to be solid and reliable. “Over time, we’ve developed a solid relationship with Red Hat and JBoss, and anticipate that our partnership will only get better over time,” said Elder.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Financial Services

Geography: Hong Kong

Business Challenge: Rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace website with an efficient financial information portal, and to leverage virtualization technology to reduce hardware footprint and increase operational flexibility

Migration Path: Microsoft Windows and UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux AP with integrated virtualization

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 with integrated virtualization, Red Hat Satellite, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate

Hardware: Intel Xeon based servers

Services: Red Hat Consulting

Benefits: High-performance, flexible IT infrastructure delivered through the integrated virtualization technology in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and 50-70% Reduction in software and hardware costs

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors. We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs.”
-Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Quam Limited serves both institutional and retail investors and provides an array of services supporting participation in capital markets and wealth management. The company’s history goes back to the founding of Quam Limited in 1986 and the listing of Quam Ltd on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 1997. Today Quam Ltd is the holding company of a diverse financial services and wealth management group with a major and fast-growing stake in Mainland China through strategic alliances and intermediaries.

The Quam Limited used Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform with virtualization technology and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, to re-build its website, www.quamnet.com, as a high-performance information portal in three languages and serve several million customers. The new portal is designed to combine the financial services offerings with an online financial information and investment advisory portal, for retail clients and investor relations services for corporate clients.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
In 1998, Quam built the first financial services website in Hong Kong. However, by the spring of 2007, Quam’s rapid business growth and the expansion of its service portfolio made it necessary to replace the existing website with an efficient financial information portal that would provide a much stronger link between the firm’s financial services and its hundreds of thousands of members.

Slow access time was becoming a problem with the old website. “In our business, users expect very rapid response time,” said Philip Choi, Head of Technology for Quam Limited, “and our infrastructure was not able to handle the large user base that we had acquired.”

The financial information portal also has to process direct connections to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for stock announcements on listed companies as well as wire news services, including Xinhua and Infocast Financial news for news of Hong Kong and Asia.

“We have a very large number of active members, many of whom are involved in online trading,” said Choi. “We needed to provide them with market information, including financial news, reports, analysis and real-time stock quotes.” In addition, the financial information portal needed a redesign of its front-end, the Content Management System, and back-end, the Customer Relations Management System, in order to enable Quam to know and serve our members better.

Another problem with the old website was the inflexible infrastructure, which made updating web content a tedious business. “Our financial information has to be altered frequently, so we needed a fast, simple way of updating the site,” said Choi.

When Philip Choi joined Quam in May 2007, he was asked to completely re-build the website. “We were asked to totally revamp and restructure the website, so we basically did everything from scratch,” said Choi.

SOLUTION
The main operating systems used in the existing website were Windows and UNIX. “For the financial services industry, Windows may have some security issues,” said Choi. “UNIX is more costly, in terms of license fees and related hardware. I also had to consider the availability of skilled support labor.”

In his previous experience, Choi had used Red Hat Enterprise Linux successfully, so he decided to measure it against the existing alternatives. “One advantage would be that Red Hat Enterprise Linux can run on powerful and inexpensive servers, with a wide choice of hardware vendors,” said Choi, “So we would not be locked into any proprietary technology.”

Another factor in Quam’s decision was the wide acceptance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the leading platform within the financial services sector. Quamnet has the same demands for performance, availability and security as other major financial institutions, said Choi. “Like other players in the financial services market, we seek alliance with the leading vendors to optimize the performance and security of our operations.”

Today, Red Hat is a very mature OS, and the vendor provides high quality direct support. “I have confidence in the top management of Red Hat in Hong Kong and believe the company is a long-term partner for Quam,” said Choi.

Quam IT Department started the study project on the new financial information portal in May 2007, and the staff talked to several vendors. “We decided to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its cost-effectiveness, enterprise support, ease-of-management, and flexibility,” said Choi.

Red Hat Consulting provided guidance and hands-on support to the Quam IT team, right from the planning stage. “Once our server hardware was installed, Red Hat Consulting certified the platforms as stable and scalable and carried out all the software installation work, providing a guarantee to remedy any platform issues,” said Choi.

Throughout the installation process, Red Hat helped Quam with the sizing and planning of how to configure the resources. “We gave them figures, such as the number of portal visitors and page views per day that we needed to support,” said Choi. “This helped us determine how many servers, how many CPUs and how much memory we needed. We have a requirement of so many transactions per second, and we need to guarantee the response time provided to end-users.”

Quam’s infrastructure includes server farms to support front-end users’ access and back-end service delivery with all Intel Xeon based servers on rack mounted blades. Quam relied on Red Hat for the majority of the sizing work on planning the financial information portal, server utilization, and connections to the database and application layers.

In the Red Hat Linux Advanced Platform, virtualization is more powerful than ever. Features such as distributed lock management, global file system, logical volume management, can now operate over multiple physical systems and guest operating environments.

Quam also uses Red Hat Network Satellite to help the company keep its open source environment up-to-date and to help efficiently manage its physical and virtual servers. “The beauty is we can reassign memory and CPUs on-the-fly and whatever applications need more resources, we can provide them immediately,” said Choi.

Clustering is one of the elements of virtualization that Quam required. Red Hat Advanced Platform Virtualization Technology allows Quam users to easily move applications and resources between servers.

Powerful middleware: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform
The financial information portal build was carried out at high speed, aided substantially by Red Hat Consulting, and was mostly complete in months. “My in-house programmers had to write a number of new applications from scratch, mostly using Java J2EE,” said Choi. “It was then subjected to extensive testing, after which we went live in mid-January 2008.”

To support the large number of applications on their financial information portal, Quam selected JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which it found to be the best platform for innovative and highly scalable Java applications. Integrated and simplified, it includes powerful open source technologies for building, deploying and hosting enterprise Java applications and services.

A key part of Quam’s use of JBoss Application Platform is Hibernate, a framework that
enables users to express queries in native SQL, an extension called HQL, or with an object-oriented Criteria and Example API. Hibernate provided a ubiquitous object-relational mapping and persistence framework which does not require hand-written SQL or stored procedures and this provides a significant increase in performance and scalability.

Another JBoss technology used was the JBoss cluster, which is a group of nodes comprising JBoss server instances within a server partition. “Individual nodes can be added to or removed from a cluster at any time,” said Choi. “JBoss Clustering provides high availability for J2EE applications running inside of JBoss.”

The use of JBoss middleware enabled Quam to speed up the creation of applications. “Our system is very stable, and that enables our IT team to concentrate on the programming operation,” said Choi.

BENEFITS
Quam has invested in multi-lingual market communications. “Our financial information portal provides both traditional and simplified Chinese language versions, plus English,” said Choi. “Our competitors have traditional Chinese only, some with English. I am proud of the fact that we were able to build a best-in-class information portal with Red Hat within six months, in three languages.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform provides integrated server and storage virtualization technologies. The virtualization provided is easy-to-deploy, simple to manage, flexible. “Red Hat Virtualization has enabled us to reduce the numbers of servers we need,” said Choi, “and that in turn has reduced the space, cooling and power consumption.”

For users, the new information portal provides a much faster response to queries, even at peak times during the stock exchange trading hours. It’s also much easier to update information on the new financial information portal. JBoss provides a programming framework which facilitates changes to business logic using minimum programming effort.

“Previously, in the financial services industry, companies were forced to rely on proprietary vendors,” said Choi. “We are using Red Hat because of our confidence in the company to meet our very high levels of availability, performance and security that are essential in our business. But we are not locked in to any vendor. The beauty of open source is that it enables freedom of choice.”

Red Hat service team not only supported the financial information portal build, but also provided valuable information on best practices. This was vital in helping Quam to achieve an outstanding time-to-market for the project. “The use of Red Hat and JBoss has enabled us to save approximately 50-70% overall on the entire project costs and even more in annual costs,” said Choi.

The success of the project confirms the value of open source solutions as a long-term strategy. “Overall we made a solid decision in choosing Red Hat as our partner and our customer’s have benefited from our decision to use Red Hat and JBoss technologies,” said Choi.

“Our next project will be a financial information portal specifically for the Mainland China market and we will need to deploy servers on a larger scale,” added Choi. “We are committed to open source software over proprietary software, and we definitely plan to keep using Red Hat in future.”

FAST FACTS

Company: EnerNOC

Industry: Energy

Geography: North America

Business Challenge: Improving the efficiency of its demand-response network that helps manage energy supply and demand

Software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middleware

Benefits: Streamlined the complex workflows involved in aligning the needs of utilities/grid operators to avoid blackouts during peak energy-consumption times and the desire of energy users to generate revenues through better managing their energy use.

“It would be very difficult for us to compete successfully without jBPM. We could not deliver our solutions nearly as efficiently and cost-effectively in this extremely aggressive market without it.”
–Ed Kusnitz, lead platform engineer, EnerNOC

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As a leading provider of technology-enabled energy management solutions, EnerNOC is changing the way the world uses power. Through the use of advanced technologies, EnerNOC helps utilities and grid operators maintain the delicate balance between supply and demand.

EnerNOC’s demand-response solution is based upon an innovative business model. It pays the more than 4,000 business and industrial organizations in its network to reduce their electricity usage during times of high demand. This decreases stress on the electric grid, preserving the reliability of a region’s electricity resources and helping to prevent blackouts and brownouts while also alleviating the need to rely on fossil fuel-burning power plants. By acting as the middleman between energy providers and consumers, EnerNOC plays an important role in allocating what can be a scarce resource, especially when weather conditions, problems with the electrical grid, or other events create unusual demand or cause unanticipated disruptions in the flow of power.

EnerNOC is perfectly positioned for success due to three major trends: first, demand for energy is rapidly outpacing supply; secondly, due to regulatory and community concerns, it is difficult to build new regional power plants located close to energy users; and third, emerging regulatory trends on both national and local levels are changing utility business models with incentives that promote efficient energy practices.

EnerNOC is growing exponentially. At the end of 2007, EnerNOC had approximately 1,100 megawatts under management across approximately 2,200 individual sites. It ended 2008 with more than 2,000 megawatts under management across more than 4,000 sites.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
EnerNOC’s demand-response solution consists of three distinct steps: first, a customer sends out a request for additional power so as to alleviate stress on the grid or in response to high wholesale energy prices. EnerNOC takes that request and initiates actions across its network – turning out lights, turning on generators – to enable participants to follow through on their commitments to conserve power when requested. This in turn allows EnerNOC to fulfill its contracts with its customers to help reduce demand on the grid.

Prior to 2005, EnerNOC’s depended heavily on manual processes. Although certain procedures were automated, a great deal of human intervention was required to ensure that the workflow proceeded seamlessly. EnerNOC saw an opportunity to both slash operational costs, and provide greater customer service.

EnerNOC also saw an opportunity to position itself for future success. “Our strategic vision is to build highly scalable, best-of-breed technologies to support a comprehensive suite of energy management solutions and services,” said Terry Sick, vice president of product development and engineering at EnerNOC. “To accomplish this, we needed supporting technologies based upon open standards and interoperability.”

SOLUTION
Choosing the operating system was easy: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, due to its market dominance and technical leadership, was the obvious choice. And after investigating all the options for business process management (BPM) on the market, EnerNOC decided that the JBoss jBPM solution was the best choice.

JBoss jBPM is a JBoss Enterprise Framework that delivers workflow, business process management (BPM), and process orchestration in a scalable and flexible product footprint. “We were still a startup at that point, and needed a very cost-effective solution that still provided us with all the functionality we required,” said Ed Kusnitz, lead platform engineer for EnerNOC. EnerNOC also deployed JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, which includes JBoss Application Server, Messaging, Clustering, Seam, Hibernate, and EJB3 along with MySQL to complete the solution.

For help with the JBoss implementation, EnerNOC selected Amentra, a leading provider of systems integration services for SOA, business process management, systems
development and enterprise data solutions. Amentra was acquired by Red Hat in March 2008.

BENEFITS
Because JBoss jBPM provides all the tools and process execution engine needed to automate complex workflows in Java and Web applications, EnerNOC was able to reduce business process errors, speed process execution, and enhance overall business performance.

Today, upon receiving an email that one of its customers requires power, the now-automated workflow process is immediately triggered. This one step alone can be extraordinary complex. “A single action initiated by an utility or grid operator can impact 300 sites on our network, and each one needs its own workflow,” said Kusnitz.

For example, some organizations want to be notified in advance before their power is curtailed; others are fine if EnerNOC just takes appropriate action. “jBPM allows us to manage the state of each site very easily, while giving us transparency into the entire operation,” said Kusnitz.

“If we had to code all this ourselves, it would be very difficult to accomplish what we need to, much less see what was occurring at any particular point in time,” agreed Andre Quina, software engineer at EnerNOC. “Under jBPM we can bring up a graphical image of the state of the workflow, which immediately shows us the state of the processes.”

jBPM has also allowed EnerNOC to achieve tremendous flexibility, reliability, and scalability. “If we need to make changes to the workflow – which happens all the time – we can do that without having to go in and actually edit the code,” said Quina. “That eliminates the risk of introducing errors, and makes for much more reliable operations.” And because EnerNOC is growing so rapidly, jBPM’s ability to manage ever-greater numbers of organizations’ power capabilities has been essential. “jBPM is enabling us to meet escalating market demand for our solutions,” said Quina.

Looking ahead, EnerNOC is currently using jBPM to create the business logic involved in curtailing and restoring sites. For example, before turning off lights, an on-site generator might need to be started, and the power load transferred to that generator. “When we get this last phase automated, we’ll be able to respond even more rapidly to a request from an ISO for more power,” said Kusnitz. “In effect, our jBPM application will be transformed into a virtual generator. We’ll be able to power it on, and provide our customers with power within just a few minutes notice.”

Amentra contributed enormously to the success of the project. “Amentra’s expertise with both JBoss jBPM and the messaging layer allowed EnerNOC engineers to focus on core business logic, which is helping us prepare for future expansion into new markets,” said Sick.

What would EnerNOC do without JBoss? “It would be very difficult for us to compete successfully without jBPM,” said Kusnitz. “”We could not deliver our solutions nearly as efficiently and cost-effectively in this extremely aggressive market without it.”

Agrees Sick: “Technical innovation has been key to EnerNOC’s growth. Open source in general – and Red Hat in particular – have been behind our success in this area.”

FAST FACTS

Industry: Car rental

Geography: EMEA

Business Challenge: To replace Avis’ costly proprietary software with reliable open source solutions to reduce acquisition and ongoing costs for the organization’s IT department

Migration Path: Proprietary Sun hardware with Solaris and Weblogic-based application server platforms to a more cost-effective and flexible platform based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running on Windows Server 2003

Hardware: Wintel environment incorporating Dell hardware, Intel-based dual-CPU, quad-core machines with 8-16Gigs of RAM, Windows Server 2003 32bit and 64bit

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate framework

Benefits: Experienced significantly reduced TCO of at least 50 percent from reduced maintenance costs, as well as increased licensing flexibility and reconfigurability and decreased server load

“Avis has absolute trust in JBoss and its mission-critical enterprise applications. We are very satisfied with the results that we’ve achieved since migrating to JBoss solutions.”
–Jens Utech, Director Revenue and Fleet Applications at Avis.

Download the case study [<strongPDF]

BACKGROUND
Avis Europe is a leading car rental company with a presence in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia. It serves over eight million customers per year via the Avis and Budget brands in over 3,800 locations. Avis holds leading positions in many markets in Western Europe, with approximately 80 percent of its revenues generated in the five major markets of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK.

OPPORTUNITY
Avis’ revenue management system, undoubtedly the organization’s predominant application affecting main business function, is used to conduct forecasting for business areas including future demand for car rental, the best placement of cars for rental services, what types of customers to target, and pricing decisions. Used in over 500 stations across Europe, the system needed to be upgraded and simplified to enable ease of use.

Avis’ station application, allowing agents to check in cars via handheld devices, and the company’s system for printing rental agreements both also needed to be optimized. The previous processes were conducted in-station using noncompliant, non-customer friendly, and incumbent systems.

In 2006, Avis recognized the need to replace these expensive, incumbent systems based on proprietary software with a reliable and affordable alternative. Though it had little experience with open source solutions, it decided to migrate its proprietary Solaris and combined BEA and Weblogic application server platform based on Sun hardware to the more cost-effective and flexible platform offered by open source solutions.

SOLUTION
Avis evaluated a number of open source solutions that could offer reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), expanded flexibility, and unmatched scalability. Avis required a J2EE-compliant Application Server on the Windows platform that offered support and a related monitoring and management infrastructure.

Ultimately, Avis selected a Wintel environment combining Dell hardware, Windows Server 2003, and JBoss Enterprise Application Server. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform also incorporated the use of JBoss Operations Network for monitoring activities.

The solution ecosystem consists of Windows Server 2003 32bit and 64bit, JBoss Enterprise Application Server, and SQL Server 2005. The overall solution includes 10 production servers used for the organizations revenue-management systems. Half of these solutions are based on JBoss Application Server, and all use the Hibernate framework.

The migration involved no integration with the incumbent platform, and was a full-system port. The process operated on a phased, three-year timeline with iterative releases occurring approximately every three months. No system integrators or value-added resellers were leverage during the migration process, as all development was done in-house.

Avis used consultants to aid the smooth implementation of JBoss Operations Network Server monitoring and management. This allowed the company to rapidly incorporate the tool without having to invest heavily in administration and installation internally.

BENEFITS
Avis selected JBoss solutions for the offering of reduced TCO and increased performance, flexibility, and availability of resources with familiarity in the market.

One of the distinct advantages of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is that it enables ease-of-use for development. The solution integrates easily with IntelliJ IDEA, and Avis’ development cycle, and Avis employees are now able to run the JBoss platforms on their personal laptops.

The platform has enabled significant development efficiency and developers are more effective running JBoss in their processes and taking advantage of the full IDE integrationand very rapid start-up times. The time required for startup with the new JBoss-based system has been reduced considerably. Now, with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Avis can quickly and easily add new servers to its architecture. The new architecture has allowed Avis to buy, deploy, and redeploy additional servers at very competitive prices.

In addition to reduced TCO amounting to savings of at least 50 percent of original costs, Avis also achieved enhanced performance from its newly implemented JBoss platform.

“It’s now definitely easier to scale a number of CPUs up and down in the current model and the system really brings us a lot of value, especially in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in the development process. We have saved at least 50 percent on TCO,” said Jens Utech, Director Revenue and Fleet Applications at Avis. “Thanks to JBoss’ integration with the development tools and the ability for the developer to work in very flexible ways, common development tasks around deploying, re-deploying, and generally working are three to four times faster with JBoss than any of the competitors.”

“Avis has absolute trust in JBoss and its mission-critical enterprise applications. We are very satisfied with the results and we are also impressed with JBoss support. We are provided with very professional, very prompt, and very helpful answers as opposed to the usual vendor nonsense. We use the support portal website as well,” said Utech.

In addition to all of the valuable benefits delivered by JBoss solutions, Avis also found that many of its development staff perceived the use of JBoss and open source solutions in general as very positive. This has led to increased motivation and expanded recruiting for Avis’ internal staff.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Real estate

Geography: Australian Capital Territory (ACT), Australia

Business Challenge: Rebuild the All Homes Pty Ltd technology platform in order to modernise its website, ensuring an optimal user experience and equipping the site with support for future expansion plans

Migration Path: Outdated, costly software and hardware solutions to enterprise Linux servers, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Hibernate Framework

Solution:

• Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Hibernate, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Hardware: IBM xSeries x3550 and x3560 servers

Benefits: Experienced increased performance, reliability, flexibility, scalability, and cost-effectiveness

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As a sales and rental listing service dedicated to residential property in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and surrounding regions, All Homes Pty Ltd has one of the most popular real estate websites in Australia. In January 2008, http://www.allhomes.com.au was rated 25th on Top100Australian.com’s list of the 100 most popular Australian websites [1].

The All Homes website is delivered through several portals, including a public site, a site for real estate agents and a back-end management interface. It also incorporates the online classifieds operation www.allclassifieds.com.au.

“Generally users only see a small part of the All Homes offering – behind the scenes there are seven portals that are interrelated to create the site and the application itself is some 360 screens,” said David Elliot, Managing Director of Agile Digital Engineering, All Homes’ technology partner. “This is where the majority of the work takes place and the reason why the site’s success demands a rock-solid foundation.”

Managing an estimated 1.4 million page impressions per day, with anywhere between 30,000 to 40,000 unique users, the All Homes technology platform has a loyal user base and is highly regarded for its speed and reliability.

“Users have high expectations of the site, so we set the bar very high when it comes to the technology we put behind the site,” said Elliot.

CHALLENGE
In November 2006, All Homes embarked on an ambitious project to completely rebuild its www.allhomes.com.au technology platform. The aim was not only to modernize the site, but also to replace the existing, stale technology with dynamic new systems that could deliver an optimal user experience and support future expansion plans.

“We needed a totally fresh approach to our infrastructure, which meant overhauling the hardware and software that we’d been using since 2000,” said Tim White, Business Development Manager, All Homes Pty Ltd.

All Homes had strict criteria for the new technology, including the ability to deliver impressive performance results to exceed the abilities of its previous solution. Additionally, All Homes demanded access to cutting-edge Java technologies to enable fast and efficient site development, along with easy, ongoing maintenance. Flexibility was also a priority for the allhomes.com.au technology platform, as along with the capabilities to scale up or down according to fluctuations in user activity.

“The average number of daily page impressions is nearly one and a half million, with about 40 page views per user, per session. That number can skyrocket and the technology that drives the site must be able to handle that sort of workload without any hiccups,” said White.

All Homes is a 24/7 service and its user base expects 100 percent uptime. When considering a new solution, stability and durability were also key considerations.

SOLUTION
Working with its technical partner, Agile Digital Engineering, All Homes implemented its new infrastructure, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux based on IBM System x Intel servers distributed between Sydney and the ACT. The infrastructure also incorporated clustered application servers, based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and JBoss Hibernate Framework to handle page creation.

“We were excited about working with JBoss solutions, because they offered the cutting-edge Java technologies, like Hibernate with annotations, that we needed to build the screens quickly and ensure ease-of-maintenance going forward,” said Elliot.

“It also meant All Homes could be a leading technology innovator in the real estate industry, with access to tomorrow’s technology and the ability to introduce new operational possibilities into its business.”

BENEFITS
After launching into production in December 2007, All Homes’ new system has exceeded expectations.

“We set the bar very high when it came to system reliability and performance, but JBoss middleware and the servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux have already given us the assurances we were looking for.”

The business has also recognized the financial benefits of working with the open source middleware solution, compared with equivalent proprietary systems.

“It’s certainly an advantage when you don’t receive extortionate licence renewal bills every year, just for the pleasure of using the software. Working with JBoss, all we pay for is the support,” said White.

Pleased with the benefits of having JBoss Enterprise Middleware at the core of its new infrastructure, All Homes is exploring future implementation of Red Hat solutions to assist with the organisation’s plans for expansion.

[1] Top100Australian.com’s list of the top 100 Australian sites posted on 21 January 2008 at http://www.top100australian.com/allhomes.com.au.html

Experiences 500 percent increase in website capacity after implementing Red Hat and JBoss technologies

Raleigh NC – February 13, 2008 – Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that The Decurion Corporation, a real estate and movie exhibition corporation, has achieved success with a full suite of Red Hat solutions. Since implementing JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Global File System for Decurion’s ArcLight Cinemas website, the company has experienced enhanced support and increased performance, scalability and cost-effectiveness.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Calif., The Decurion Corporation is parent to three primary operating businesses: Pacific Theatres Corporation, Robertson Properties Group and the ArcLight Cinema Company (ArcLight). ArcLight provides a transformational movie experience that enhances the viewers’ connection to cinema through design, amenities, service and programming. ArcLight formerly operated one theater in Hollywood with 14 auditoriums and the world-famous Cinerama Dome. The company opened a second theater in December 2007 in Sherman Oaks, CA.

Approximately 40 percent of ArcLight Cinemas ticket sales are sold through its online ticket site, ArclightCinemas.com. With a growing online customer base, ArcLight looked to fix issues with its ticket sales website, previously based on Microsoft’s .NET framework. The website had experienced issues including extensive downtime and lengthy resolution time for issues.

“When researching solutions for our ArcLight ticket website, I referenced my successful past experience with JBoss’ proven technology. There was no need to explore other technology options, because I knew JBoss would solve our issues,” said Brad Bahmanpour, Enterprise Systems Architect at Decurion. “Open source is much easier to work with in terms of licensing for the user, and it’s extremely cost-effective. JBoss Enterprise Middleware helps us accelerate solution delivery because it provides the beneficial features associated with open source solutions, combined with easy deployment and impressive customer service and support.”

Since the migration, ArcLight has experienced benefits, including ease of development on J2EE platforms and the utilization of Web Services technology. “It’s like a black and white experience between .NET and developing with JBoss,” said Bahmanpour. “We’ve had far fewer issues, and those that we have experienced have been dealt with very quickly and efficiently. JBoss technology makes development much easier and it’s very open for natural extensions like JBoss Hibernate.”

Additionally, utilizing the clustering features of the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has made the ArclightCinemas.com website scalable. ArcLight will now be able to add new nodes to its servers and enable more users and heightened traffic on its website without a change in application. Prior to implementing JBoss technology, the website could only sustain about 100 concurrent users. Now, with JBoss Clustering, it can sustain more than 600 concurrent users. For this capacity increase, ArcLight uses the same number of HP DL580G machines with only the addition of one load balancer and two application servers.

“With Linux and JBoss, we have a lot of room to grow right now. In addition to our ArclightCinemas.com website, we have utilized the JBoss, Apache and Linux platform to develop the Decurion Management company website, www.decurion.com, and also the forums.arclightcinemas.com and experience.arclightcinemas.com websites. We are planning to incorporate JBoss Operations Network, JBoss Hibernate and JBoss Seam into our solution in 2008,” said Bahmanpour.

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

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

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

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: Certified Service Provider

Winner:Amentra

Submitted by: Amentra Team

Industry: Amentra = Technology / La Petite Academy = Education

Geography: Virginia

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

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Read Amentra Case Study

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

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

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

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

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

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

Implementation and Architectural Approach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business Rules Engine Server: Fair Isaac Blaze Advisor

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

Business Intelligence Server: Information Builders WebFOCUS on existing hardware.

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

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

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

Category: Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Implementation
Winner:Vivat (client = US Trust)
Submitted by: Max Yankelevich, Chief Architect
Industry: Vivat = Technology Partner / US Trust = Government, Financial
Geography: Bensalem, PA

Overview
Vivat (www.vivatconsulting.com), a professional services organization focused on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Application Integration, was selected based on its work with US Trust, one of the oldest private banking firms in the U.S. Vivat successfully moved US Trust’s main revenue stream, the Client Fee Calculator, from an antiquated legacy system to a new SOA system built on JBoss technologies, including JBoss Rules and JBoss Application Server. The solution is expected to bring in an additional $20 million over the next five years as well as maximize customer profits, thanks to newly transparent and manageable fee rules.

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

Vivat is a boutique professional services organization, focused on Enterprise Application Integration, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Technical Architecture of Enterprise level components, that delivers superior service and cost saving to its clients by coupling exceptional talents with deep understanding of the industry. With over 100 employees, Vivat is one of the largest “small” and perhaps most successful SOA firms on the east coast.

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

Our client, one of the oldest Wealth Management and Private Banking firms in the US, was looking to re-engineer its key, proprietary engine, the Client Fees Calculator, which was responsible for the entire firm’s revenue stream. Highly customized and complex in nature, Fees Calculator was created over 20 years ago as a large set of Mainframe programs. Fees were calculated, in batch, on monthly or even yearly bases. Revenue was lost due to the lack of understanding how the code base actually worked under current market conditions, since most of the original Assembly and COBOL programmers have left the company or retired. The firm also had to deal with numerous industry compliance issues due to the above mentioned challenges.

What was the desired solution?

Business stakeholders were looking to move to a more real time fee schedules, as well as the ability to change and model fee rules on per customer bases and to use in financial projections. Technology stakeholders were concerned with making the Fee Calculator more maintainable and scalable, as well as migrating it to a distributed, commodity, cost effective technology stack from the expensive Mainframe platform.

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

Professional Open Source software was the focus of the selection process, as we were looking to reduce the project’s overall budget by avoiding software license expenses. We were also looking for modular and flexible component set, with good industry acceptance. JEMS product suite provided the most complete offering for the project with the best support quality and options.

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

The new Enterprise Fee Calculation Service was built in strict compliance with Service Oriented and Event Drive Architecture principles. JEMS product suite provided all of the necessary building blocks to help in successful implementation of this project. Red Hat Linux OS and JBoss Application Server provided the core run-time platform for all the layers of the application. Financial transactions, such as trades, bank deposits/withdrawals and loan payments, were received in real time through the Messaging layer (JBoss Messaging). The receipt of a financial transaction would kick off a Fee Calculation Business Process (jBPM). Fees were recalculated by the Rules Engine layer (Drools/JBoss Rules), which housed over 5,000 core business rules. The new fee amounts and details were stored in the relational database (MySQL) using Object/Relational layer (Hibernate).

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 estimated Return on Investment (ROI) was calculated to be $20M over next 5 years, as this was the amount that the firm undercharged their clients by every year. Also, profits were maximized on per client basis because the fee calculation rules were transparent and manageable, hence allowing for creative deals to be struck on the fly.

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

Enterprise Fees Calculation Service was deployed on top of Red Hat Linux / JBoss Application Server cluster spanning across 2 HP DL360’s. The application stack included Drools/JBoss Rules engine, jBPM, Spring and Hibernate. The database cluster was running MySQL RDBMS on top 2 HP DL380 boxes with GFS deployed over SAN.

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

JBoss Enterprise support contract was money well spent! We fully leveraged JBoss support organization and tools, got very positive results, quick problem turn around and concise answers.

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

Practical expertise in implementing SOA solutions is key when undertaking and Enterprise transforming initiatives. Don’t be fooled by SOA software solutions as being the answer – expertise of bringing process, software and people together is what gets rusults!

Category: Increased ROI
Winner: Alintec
Industry: Tech and Government
Geography: Milan, Italy

Overview
Alintec (www.alintec.it) (previously Politecnico Innovazione), a non-profit consortium promoting technological innovation within SMEs and public institutions and technology transfer between academia and industry in Europe, was selected following the high return on investment (ROI) it achieved after the implementation of multiple JBoss technologies within its Internet-based Library Management System (LMS) for the Province of Bergamo. The JBoss-based solution increased library loan rates by more than 25 percent and the frequency of inter-library loans by over 30 percent. Overall, it has positively impacted the end-user experience in terms of speed and ease-of-use.

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

Alintec is a non-profit consortium, whose aim is the promotion of technological innovation within SMEs, public institutions and the cooperation and technology transfer between University and Industry in the European dimension. We support research and technological development (RTD) activities by:

• Acting as Project Manager providing key competences in the development of innovative projects. Coordinating multidisciplinary activities and embody the only company’s referent making cooperation with University easier.
• Evaluating technological solutions and the main strategies that should be adopted.
• Identifying the company’s needs for new technology in order to develop new products, to start up new productive processes and to improve the company’s business management.
• Developing applied research projects defining how to exploit the new technology as well as its impact on the enterprise or public administration.
• Technology transfer concerning information technology and its management.
• Analysis and support for the use of innovative ICT technology to make strategic changes.
• Promoting the cooperation between University and Industry Providing responsive and professional services to find, develop, apply and improve innovative solutions for small and medium enterprises, private companies and public bodies.

Coordinated by experienced faculty members, young engineers are encouraged to take part on the projects as needed and as motivated by their specialization.

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

The project goal was to design, develop and implement an internet based Library Management System (LMS) to integrate the 230 libraries of the Bergamo province. It was presented to us as a challenge, literally: commercial companies had tried to implement a solution to the needs of the library leading, operators, end users and public administration. They failed: the proposed solutions resulted too slow to accommodate all concurrent users, unmanageable, inflexible, buggy, crash-prone and the constant bug fixing had painfully slow resolution times and was very expensive. The original contractor preferred to back out from the support agreement; so the public administration came to university for advice, got it from our analysts team, was satisfied and so finally proposed us to build a new implementation using the technology and developing processes we had recommended them. The main challenge was quickly identified as the joined need for fast searches, changing business rules, and very high concurrency. Also, W3C WAI-AAA compliance was set as a requirement. The main business processes to support:

• Cataloguing
• Acquisitions
• Circulation
• Inter-Library Loan (ILL)
• Document reservation
• Web OPAC (Open Public Access Catalogue):
  • Public search engine
  • Open reservation
• Reporting The business numbers:
  • 230 public libraries
  • 500 operators (librarians and cataloguers)
  • 200,000 final users (citizens with library card)
  • 1.6 million loans by year (maximum 10,000 loans per day)
  • 4 million documents

What was the desired solution?

To simplify IT management and maintenance costs, they didn’t want to distribute software clients to all machines, to avoid client software management. A browser-based solution could meet this requirement, but they would prefer not to change radically the rich client user interfaces they were accustomed to: the interface should be similar to past solutions to avoid extensive training of all operators. The solution needs full web2.0 technology support, even library operators and cataloguers don’t want to install/maintain client software other than their browser. This is also a political need, with a higher usability more people will be using the system and the public bodies who endorsed the system will get credit for a good choice. In order to provide a good user experience a responsive system is a requirement: they wanted a fast system, and a lot of full text searching. They preferred to invest in fast and scalable software than to buy expensive hardware, as the Italian government endorses a software reusability program. During the analysis phase we were not sure we could provide the needed performance, so we were looking for a scalable architecture to eventually have the possibility to add hardware. We needed a flexible architecture to accommodate all requirement changes and to be able to provide the agility needed for new features and fixes, also speed and processing efficiency have always been a primary concern.

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

We wanted to develop with open source components, so we began looking at JBoss, Spring and Struts. At the time, in May 2006, JBoss was providing an almost-full compliance with JSF and EJB 3.0 as JBoss RC9 was released. Seam looked very promising and innovative compared to other competitors and was backed by a team we trusted, as we already had had some experience with JBoss’s connection pool and hibernate on previous projects. As a research centre linked to University we were particularly interested in trying out bleeding edge technologies. Also JBPM and AOP were looking like the solutions to our flexibility needs, and the Seam recommended patterns found in the first examples released in those times looked very promising. We didn’t know yet whether we would need much more features such as web services and schedulers, but it was nice to know that they would be available when needed. After some preliminary testing the choice was easy.

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

We configured the complete stack from the hardware configuration, operating system up to the java enterprise ear. We use Fedora as operating system, Apache httpd to serve some static content and finally JBoss to run the application and to serve all dynamic content. The ear contains much more technology from JBoss:

• Seam: the whole application is extensively based on Seam, we are using it as core technology from first beta releases; we use conversations, Seam JSF tags, internationalization, iText reports, email support, remoting and jboss-el capabilities.
• RichFaces: obviously, to implement web2.0 rich clients we used many RichFaces JSF components.
• Hibernate: the complete persistence layer is built on hibernate 3.2, mostly through ejb3 persistence API, sometimes using hibernate annotations. Hibernate Search is a core component; when the beta appeared on the hibernate website we immediately began testing it. Unfortunately the timing was wrong and it was still too “on-the-edge”, so we ended up using a mix of direct Lucene “low level” and Hibernate Search for other functions. We had to code direct index access to tweak the most complex queries and be able to search on structured objects, as these features are now available through Hibernate but were not at the time of release. You can take a look at the system at: http://opac.provincia.bergamo.it.

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.)

We began developing in October 2006 and released the final version in May 2007; now in October 2007 the customer has had some time to verify the value of the new product; we can summarize their satisfaction in the next points:

• Fast real time information sharing between all business units: some libraries are in remote mountain districts but are now served as well as in the biggest cities.
• Substantial ICT maintenance cost reduction. Better “time to user” in assistance and bug fixing (As it is a public service we wouldn’t call it “time to market”).
• Library loans increased of +25%; we believe this to be a good index to evaluate the final users satisfaction in the library system’s core mission, and a benchmark for usability.
• Inter-Library-Loans increased of +30%; This means the different libraries use available books more efficiently, reducing book-buying costs and final user’s wait queue.
• 24/7 service.

It is difficult to compare other indexes such as delivery delays to the older system as information is incomplete on the previous system, but even so the public administration and library operators agree that general efficiency has greatly improved. They are now so satisfied that they asked us to develop many more features; the JBoss technology we are using empowers us to provide the new features and functionalities at a competitive budget comparing to other solutions. Seam helped to integrate all different technologies in a clean design so that it is now easy to extend the current features: after having overcome the difficulties in using a young technology, Seam left us now in a win-win situation.

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

The service is made up of two dedicated servers, an application server and a database server. Backup services and network management are provided by the hosting company. Application Server: 1 HP DL360 G5 (2x Xeon 5160 with 8GB RAM) OS: Fedora Linux 6 / 64bit JBoss 4.05 (now upgrading to 4.2.2) Database Server: 1 HP DL380/1 (1x Xeon 2.8 GHz with 2GB RAM) OS: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 on Windows Server 2003 A single JBoss on a single JVM (v.6u3) is currently enough to satisfy the performance demand; It supports clustering so we are going to add a second machine to support failover, but the provided uptime is excellent even now. A custom JSF component has been built to page through search results, linked to a special type of beans to control all our different kinds of searches: implementing new query flavors became flexible, independent from the technology used to retrieve the data: by using plain Hibernate, Hibernate Search, direct Lucene, native SQL, by external web services, by remote legacy or standard library protocols. We are considering the possibility to give this code back to the community as it demonstrates very fast Hibernate queries but this will need some code polishing; a full-text query is done on average in less than 16ms, testing under high load. A custom high speed Lucene indexer was built, we’d love to give more details for this too but think it could be far too complex for a generic simple application; we are now able to index 4 Million structured documents (each being represented by a dozen of linked entities) in less than 20 minutes. During day CPU’s usage doesn’t go higher than 30%; at night some background jobs are started by quartz to build usage reports, DB cleanup, Lucene’s indexes optimization. The back office management in the library system is very extended, there are currently 15 different user roles defined to protect 330+ views, only 10 of these are public, brought to life by 760+ beans.

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

During first beta releases of Seam nobody knew how to develop with it; also books were not yet available: best practices were unknown, nobody knew how to get things working. So we had to learn how to interact with the JBoss Community, asking for help, submitting bug reports, sharing the little we had learnt. This was a new experience for all of us, but revealed very interesting: we finally understood the full power of open source communities, discovering that the people that works behind these technologies were incredibly helpful and skilled. Also when no other seemed to know the answer, we got help directly from Gavin King and Pete Muir, who resolved our issues very fast. In the past we were not quite interested in the possibility to give something back to the community, now is this same possibility regarded as a very high achievement. We found almost all knowledge we needed to develop this system on jboss.org’s wiki pages, documentation or forums, or looking to examples and to the source code of libraries themselves.

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

We will definitely use the same technologies again, both for simpler projects and for larger systems. We had some difficulties in the first months because of lack of competence, so we would recommend other companies to make use from the JBoss support services as in home training resulted very costly both in terms of time and of developer’s exhaustion; also we still would have many questions even now it is working quite well. We had to use a legacy database with very new technologies because of client’s desire; I would advice not to mix old and new and say a firm “No” to the client next time, as it is difficult to find other people with the same configuration to learn from and often these combinations are not tested as well; we are actually going to try java DB just to see how it performs, and eventually switch database technology. We would also recommend to participate in the communities both by forums and by code, as this revealed a very useful, clarifying and a fast road to solutions. Now that we have some skilled developers we are successfully using JBoss’s technologies on all starting projects.

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.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Download JBoss World Las Vegas Presentation

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.

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: Core Infrastructure

Winner: Cendant Distribution Travel Services Group, Inc

Submitted by: Bryan Harwood & Chuck Clark

Industry: Travel

Geography: Chicago, IL

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss AS and its JMX capabilities as the foundation for their services container that allows them to provision core travel services more quickly and efficiently to a number of leading travel sites including Orbitz.com and Cheaptickets.com.

---

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission

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

Orbitz was founded in 2000 by five leading airlines. The orbitz.com site launched in 2001 and has become one of the top 3 travel sites. Orbitz was purchased by Cendant Corporation in November 2004.

Cendant Distribution Travel Services Group, Inc. (“TDS”), the entity that oversees Orbitz and the other travel distribution companies at Cendant, is the official support customer for JBoss. TDS made the strategic decision to roll JBoss across all of its platforms, which supports the following websites:

• Orbitz.com
• Cheaptickets.com
• Travelport.com
• Lodging.com
• Orbitzforbusiness.com
• Parts of American Airlines’ website
• Parts of United Airlines’ website
• Parts of Northwest Airlines’ website
• A number of other third-party ‘white label’ sites

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

Over the past six years, TDS has developed hundreds of custom, scalable, Jini applications that ran within a home grown service container that allowed them to monitor and provision new instances as necessary. These services spanned a number of travel booking needs including rate, re-price, and availability requests as well as the actual booking transactions themselves. The collective services ran across a large farm of several hundred servers.

When Orbitz became part of the TDS business in 2004, TDS determined that it would need to expand the number of travel websites in deployment. The existing home grown services container could not handle the additional complexity so TDS began searching for a new services platform for hosting the growing number of applications. For external-facing services, the TDS team also identified a need to expose these applications as Web services.

From a technical perspective, TDS was primarily interested in a modular container that could expose services with Jini and managed via JMX and that could deploy their SARs easily. This allows TDS to minimize the complexity and manpower needed to run our Network Operations Center. This was a very important point for TDS – the need to run dozens of websites consisting of hundreds of travel services, across a massive server farm, which could be provisioned quickly and easily as needed, without requiring much, if any, manual intervention from the Operations staff.

3. What was the desired solution?

TDS chose JBoss Application Server for its JMX capabilities first and foremost. Because most of the applications are Jini-based, there wasn’t a strong need for a Servlet / EJB / JSP container. Instead, we were primarily interested in a lightweight JMX-based container. The innovative capability for the JBoss AS container to deploy SARs was also a major selling point and will have a major impact on the future management costs associated with the services.

Unlike before when the Orbitz home grown container was in use, TDS can now rely on JBoss for any and all bug fixes associated with the container. Previously. our developers were primarily focused on creating new business-critical services and the core platform container was often neglected. As a JBoss Subscription customer, TDS can now focus all of its attention on building new services and rely on JBoss to continue to innovate and support the core container. This has a positive impact on the business.

The open source nature of JBoss AS also means that our developers get direct access to the code. This is extremely important. It means that a TDS developer can read the source code, understand the inner workings of the container, and correct any application flaws in much less time compared to using a closed source platform. It’s not unusual for a TDS developer to get a call at 3AM if a service is down and the ability for this developer to have access to both the source code and to the technical experts at JBoss has proven to be invaluable.

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

Open source software has played an important role in the ability of Orbitz to compete successfully with entrenched companies that are much larger and much better funded. When reviewing application servers, an open source solution was a priority. When comparing the contenders, Orbitz liked the following attributes of the JBoss Application Sever resulting in their JBoss selection:

Technology – Wanted a JMX-based container, ability to deploy SARs easily, and needed the container to run on JDK 1.5, which was uncommon at this particular time.

Support – As one of the leading travel sites of they world, Orbitz understands extremely well the cost of service downtime. As such, developers will be paged if a flaw is discovered – whether that be during normal business operations or at 3AM. It is important to Orbitz that these developers have access to the source code, a large web-based knowledgebase, and direct access to the real experts behind the code.

Financial – In a notoriously competitive market with thin margins already, cost savings was a major factor when selecting an application server. Considering that the Orbitz Web and Middle-tier consists of hundreds of dual-processor servers running multiple JVMs and instances of their services means that open source has saved Orbitz an extremely large amount of money in software licenses.

Open Source Community Involvement – with a unique deployment they wanted to ensure the roadmap fit with their direction. They wanted to us an open source product where they had the opportunity to contribute and influence the future of a project by interacting with project owners and ability to submit feedback.

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

See section 3 for more details on the role of JBoss Application Server. Hibernate is also used for persistence.

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

TDS has noticed ROI in operational efficiencies. JBoss AS has allowed TDS to provision services very quickly and efficiently and allows TDS to manage a large Web and Middleware farm consisting of several hundred servers running several hundred services with only a very small Network Operations Center staff. As the TDS business has grown and technical complexity has increased, TDS has not had to increase the operations management staff and costs accordingly.

Thereare also major cost savings associated with eliminating all Middleware software licenses for this large server farm. TDS does not make public specific financial savings however.

Additionally, the open source nature of JBoss AS means that TDS developers have the chance to read the source code and understand the true reasons for any application performance issues. This has allowed TDS to dramatically reduce downtime compared to using a closed source, commercial product.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The cost savings that came from eliminating software licenses have made an impact to TDS’s bottom line. Additionally, by eliminating the need to further build out and maintain the core platform, TDS can now focus more of its application development team on creating new business-relevant services.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
Servers: Rackable hardware, mostly X86 with dual AMD processors each running multiple JVMs
OS: Linux (Red Hat 3.0) throughout
Database: Primarily Oracle but also some MySQL and Postgres
Application Server: JBoss AS
See the JBoss Innovation Award Submission for a diagram

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

TDS is an Enterprise Support Customer. TDS’s experience with JBoss support has been positive thus far. Early interaction was important with JBoss Sales Manager and consultants because of their atypical Jini deployment.

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

JBoss has proven to be a solid technology solution at TDS and we believe open source solutions such as JBoss have contributed to our success in the technology sector. Companies need to realize the tremendous advantage open source can contribute, such as reduced licensing cost and access to source code. Our advice is to not be tentative and “embrace open source.”

]]>