The
business case
The client, a worldwide investment bank, wanted
to create a web portal to its financial services. It
had already started a pilot project by the time NT/e became involved.
The portal was a highly-visible strategic development for the client.
The
technical case
The pilot project was initially being
implemented on a platform other than BEA WebLogic and utilised the vendor's
development resources. The client perceived the pilot to be proceeding
slowly and producing unsatisfactory initial results, casting doubt on
a successful outcome on a timely basis. The client decided to set up a
parallel project to re-implement the portal on BEA WebLogic Server using
a development team with a successful track record in that product.
Our
input
BEA were asked to supply key architectural consultancy to ensure
the implementation adopted best practice solutions. NT/e had already been
involved on an earlier WebLogic project for the same client and the client
specifically requested the same NT/e consultant be part of BEA's resource
on this project.
NT/e provided
the architectural lead to the client's developers, particularly with regard
to Java Enterprise design patterns and UNIX/Solaris. This was initially
on a part-time basis.
After three
months, the client's perception of the ease of development and stability
of the BEA WebLogic PoC was highly favourable. The client increased the
WebLogic development team by a factor of ten and curtailed the original
pilot. Our consultant worked on the project full-time. The role of the
BEA and NT/e consultants changed from tutorial and mentoring to active
development. In particular, our involvement focussed on deploying and
testing the application to Solaris and scaling the deployment to clusters
of eight or ten servers, to prove the behavior of the application in a
resilient clustered environment.
As
the portal neared completion and the client's developers became more competent
and confident in the project, our involvement was scaled down to three
man-days per week until shortly after live deployment. The total elapsed
period of NT/e's involvement with this client extended to approximately
ten months.
Results/benefits |
1 |
Effective
large-scale deployment delivered to client's satisfaction. |
2 |
Substantial
transfer of skills/experience to client's staff. |
|