The Client
One of the nation's leading providers of health, dental, group, life, disability and long-term care benefits.

Services Provided
Architecture Audit Performance and Scalability Optimization Architecture Roadmap

The Business Situation
Focused on providing the best consumer experience and cost-effective benefits programs, the company responded to changing customer needs by embracing a strategy to offer tailored, "built-to-spec" products through sophisticated web-based channels. The client had developed a next-generation enterprise quoting application whose successful deployment was critical to the business strategy. Post design and development, the application failed to meet critical performance and scalability requirements, threatening the very deployment of the application. 

Our Work
A SWAT Team of X by 2 application architects helped get the overall application strategy back on track. They carried out a successful application architecture audit and improved the performance and scalability of the application. Our architects first created a logical view, and from knowledge of typical application architecture patterns and best practices, identified potential performance and scalability problem areas. They then carried out in-depth measurement and analysis of these trouble spots and achieved immediate improvements by optimizing memory management, eliminating redundancies in the business logic layer, and fine tuning the database. Finally, our architects created a roadmap for the long-term viability of the application. The roadmap addressed critical areas of creating an infrastructure for continuous measurement and monitoring, developing reusable test harnesses, database tuning, and application caching and logging.

Business Benefits Realized

• Application was put back on track with a viable plan for deployment
• Automate key processes to increase integrity and quality of customer service
• With minimal investments, improved application performance by 300% while achieving a 20-fold improvement in scalability

The Technology Landscape
A highly diverse technology environment with the following technologies and products: Selectica a quoting, configuration and pricing engine, custom quoting application built on WebSphere running on Solaris with SQL Server DB, proposal and plan data on mainframe DB2 interface via MQ Series, VB/Sybase census application, and iPlanet web server.

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