Middleware Success Stories

SITUATION:
A Senior VP at a Fortune 500 Information Management company, tasked with integrating several new WEB based applications with dozens of legacy and external applications. Additionally tasked with creating a commercial WEB presence to generate sales of information to the public.

CRITICAL ISSUE:
Dozens of heterogeneous applications that were never designed to communicate with each other. Some of the legacy applications were external to the company, such as the DMV for all fifty US states. Eliminate manual processes and consolidate user interaction into a single front-end application.

REASONS:
Reduce time to process user requests. Increase market share.

CAPABILITIES NEEDED:
A system that enables existing and new applications to seamlessly communicate, that can handle tens of thousands of users concurrently, and that will enable the company to launch new public offerings via the WEB. The time required to "hook-up" a new application must be less than one to two weeks of effort.

PROVIDED:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. consultants conducted analysis, design and development of the middle tier Application Portal and the supporting database systems. The Application Portal is easy to configure/manage via a GUI. New WEB applications "hook" into it using standardized APIs, providing them access to all other applications and data.

RESULT:
Application Portal that allows easy integration (1 week or less) of new applications to existing legacy and external applications. The customer is able to integrate a new WEB application within 1 week.

SITUATION:
A new IT Manager at a major US Airline became responsible for a n-tier project.

CRITICAL ISSUE:
The IT Manager was unfamiliar with the existing IT staff. Also unfamiliar with the concepts and tools used in a distributed, high volume, transaction processing application.

CAPABILITIES NEEDED:
The IT Manager and the Corporate Architect desired an unbiased review of the architecture and the application design to ensure they meet the company's requirements and industry-standard "Best Practices".

PROVIDED:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided a Principal Consultant on-site to conduct interviews and review existing documentation and code.

RESULT:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided an assessment report that identified two critical issues. One critical issue was the sole reliance on a single employee for all middleware knowledge and direction. The other critical issue was a design flaw that severely limited application scalability. It is not known whether or not the company took steps to correct these two issues.

SITUATION:
A $500 Million health benefits company is developing an n-tier project with Tuxedo and needs guidance on the many stages of development. The company’s experience with Tuxedo was short and limited.

CRITICAL ISSUE:
The IT Manager was particularly interested in the configuration and performance tuning/stress testing aspects. And also training of employees.

REASONS:
The IT Manager wanted to make sure that all applications meet the company's requirements and that employees can manage the system once the consultants leave.

CAPABILITIES NEEDED:
The IT Manager wanted to centralize the administration of the many domains involved in the development and testing process. He also wanted to automate many of the repetitive tasks. The IT Manager wanted to have a stress testing strategy.

PROVIDED:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided a Principal Consultant on-site for three months to configure the centralized development/testing environments and to automate many of the administrative tasks. Several programs were provided to aid in the profiling of the application’s performance. Several venders were looked at, but Rational Software was brought in for a stress test demo.

RESULT:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided an assessment report that identified several critical issues. One critical issue was a design flaw that severely limited the application scalability. A workaround solution was provided. It is not known whether or not the company implemented the workaround. It is also not known where or not the company purchased Rational Software’s Performance Studio suite.

SITUATION:
IT Manager of a Fortune 500 was tasked with completing a government project with his current staff.

CRITICAL ISSUE:
The project required the sending and receiving of millions of images to multiple locations across the country upon request. Due to this requirement, BEA Tuxedo was chosen as the middleware/enabler.

REASONS:
The existing staff was not skilled in n-tier application development nor were they experienced using BEA Tuxedo.

CAPABILITIES NEEDED:
The staff had to be able to perform full development life-cycle activities using BEA Tuxedo, including developing and implementing test suites.

PROVIDED:
Multiple on-site, customized, training sessions with hands-on lab exercises and personal one-on-one mentoring sessions. Provided expertise in Best-Practices and real world scenarios.

RESULT:
The existing staff was able to complete the project on time and without additional outside resources.

SITUATION:
A production application was not running optimally.

CRITICAL ISSUE:
The IT staff was familiar with the concepts and tools in a distributed transaction processing application. However, they lacked knowledge in high volume processing.

REASONS:
The IT staff needed a subject matter expert to fine-tune the system.

CAPABILITIES NEEDED:
The IT staff desired a review of the Tuxedo system and operating system kernel parameters.

PROVIDED:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided a Principal Consultant on-site to reconfigure and tune the system. A report was written to document the changes and to identify other potential areas of improvement.

RESULT:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided an assessment report that identified the configuration issues. The system now outputs the expected throughput.

SITUATION:
An IT Manager was tasked with developing a mission critical application that integrates with existing legacy mainframe applications.

CRITICAL ISSUE:
BEA Tuxedo chosen as the middleware tool, however n-Tier concepts and Tuxedo were new to the existing IT staff. BEA Connect/TCP (part of eLink) was chosen to "connect" the Tuxedo application to legacy mainframes.

REASONS:
The application was meant to increase CSR productivity by centralizing access to company data that resides on many heterogeneous platforms.

CAPABILITIES NEEDED:
The IT Manager required that his staff be mentored through the entire SDLS to correctly develop this project and future projects.

PROVIDED:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided a Principal Consultant for the duration of the initial project. The consultant provided training/mentoring to the IT staff, and ensured that "Best Practices" for a distributed, scalable, and highly available application were observed.

RESULT:
The application moved into production on time, and the IT staff was able to use the lessons learned in future n-tier projects.

SITUATION:
Customer needed to implement an active-X layer to provide the interface from Visual Basic(VB) clients to the backend servers on a High Availability (HA) Tuxedo environment.

CRITICAL ISSUE:
Customer was familiar with the concepts and tools in a distributed, high volume, transaction-processing application. However, the customer lacked Tuxedo expertise that was required to implement the API that would run on the HA environment.

REASONS:
Customer lacked training in Tuxedo.

CAPABILITIES NEEDED:
The customer needed some active-X enabled Tuxedo clients that would shield their VB / C developers from having to know the intricacies of Tuxedo (memory management, error handling, etc.)

PROVIDED:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided a Principal Consultant on-site to implement the API and train developers on their use. Since a HA environment is administered differently from a non-HA environment, the code had to be written to handle the nuances that occur on start-up, shutdowns and failovers.

RESULT:
Aurora Information Systems, Inc. provided code and documentation.

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