Case Study

Data Virtualization at Northern Trust: A Case Study

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 06:30:00 EST

Northern Trust is a leading provider of innovative fiduciary, investment management, private banking, wealth management and worldwide trust and custody services. Clients include corporations, institutions, families and individuals in more than 40 countries. Based in Chicago, Illinois, the company has over 13,000 employees. At the end of 2010, the company had assets under custody of $4.1 trillion, assets under management of $643.6 billion and banking assets of $83.8 billion. Annual revenues in 2010 were almost $3.7 billion. For this case study, we interviewed Leonard J. Hardy, Senior Vice President, Operations and Technology. Hardy is a member of Northern Trust’s Rapid Solutions group, which provides a solution architecture and consulting facility to other Northern Trust application development groups. Hardy also manages the company’s Integration Competency Center (ICC), which helps other application areas figure out the best way to integrate data. The ICC supports several tools for this, including data virtualization, ETL and data integration best practices. Hardy participated in this case study project in his ICC role.

Case Study: Cloud Success Precipitates an Upgrade

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:30:00 EST

Before it started asking vendors its questions about how to upgrade to support rapid growth in customer cloud-bandwidth demands, Global Net Access (GNAX) spent a lot of time and effort on finding its own answers. The investment in homework paid off. Today, GNAX has a very scalable and flexible connectivity solution between its 70,000-square-foot Atlanta data center and a nearby Telx interconnection facility. The upgrade allows the provider of data center services, colocation, cloud computing and managed hosting to offer its varied customers bandwidth access reaching 160 gigabytes and low-latency links to potentially hundreds of U.S. and international carriers, financial exchanges and media application providers.

Case Study: Standardizing a Cloud Environment for Game Development

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:30:00 EST

SEGA Europe is standardizing its cloud infrastructure across its on-premises operations, as well as with a public cloud provider. The result is a managed and orchestrated hybrid environment to test and develop multimedia games. Typically, in the early stages of development, there is a fair amount of testing going on, and it tends to be quite small -- the number of staff involved in it and the number of build iterations. Going on, when the game reaches to the end of its product life-cycle, we’re talking multiple game iterations a day and the game size has gotten very large at that point. The number of people involved in the testing to meet the deadlines and get the game shipped on date is into the hundreds and hundreds of staff.

Data Virtualization at Pfizer: A Case Study

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 09:30:00 EST

Pfizer Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures and markets medicines for both humans and animals. As the world’s largest drug manufacturer, Pfizer operates globally with 111,500 employees and a presence in over 100 countries. Worldwide Pharmaceutical Sciences (PharmSci) is a group of scientists responsible for enabling what drugs Pfizer will bring to market. This group designs, synthesizes and manufactures all drugs that are part of clinical trials and toxicology testing within Pfizer. For this case study, we interviewed Dr. Michael C. Linhares, Ph.D and Research Fellow. Linhares heads up the Business Information Systems (BIS) team within PharmSci. BIS is responsible for portfolio and resource management across all of PharmSci’s projects. This involves designing, building and supporting systems that deliver data to executive teams and staff to help them make decisions regarding how to allocate available resources – both people and dollars – across the overall portfolio of over 100 projects annually.

Case Study: Vodafone Ireland IT Group Sees Huge ROI

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 08:45:00 EST

This case study interview highlights how a shift from a technology emphasis to a business services delivery emphasis has created significant improvements for a large telecommunications provider, Vodafone. Back in the summer of 2010, when we looked at the business perception of the quality of service received from IT, the confidence was lower than we’d like in terms of predictable and optimal service quality being provided. There was a lack of transparency. Business owners didn’t fully understand what quality was being received and they didn’t have simple meaningful language that they were receiving from IT operations in terms of understanding service quality: good, bad, or indifferent. Within IT operations, as a function, we also had our own challenges. We were struggling to control our services. We were under the usual pressure that many of our counterparts face in terms of having to do more with less, and downward pressure on cost and headcount. We were growing a dynamic complex IT estate, plus customers are naturally becoming ever more discerning in terms of their expectations of IT. So with that backdrop, we knew we needed to take some radical steps to really drive our business forward.

eCommerce Business Impact of Third-Party Address Validation Service

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 11:30:00 EST

Are you running an eCommerce site that relies on Third-Party Services such as Address-Validation, Credit Card Authorization or Mapping Services? Do you know how fast, reliable and accurate these service calls (free or charged) are for your web site? Do you know whether it has an impact on your end users in case one of these services is not available or returns wrong data? In last week's webinar Daniel Schrammel, IT System Manager at Leder und Schuh (responsible for sites such as www.shoemanic.com or www.jelloshoecompany.com), told his story on the impact of third-party online services to their business. One specific problem they had was with a service that validates shipping address information. If the entered shipping address is valid, users can opt for a "cash on delivery" option that is highly popular in the markets they sell to. If the address can't be validated or the service is unreachable, this convenient way of payment is not available and users have to go with credit card payment. As the eCommerce platform used to run their online stores also comes from a third-party provider, the Leder und Schuh IT team has no visibility into these third-party online service calls, whether they succeed and how that impacts end-user behavior.

Case Study: Fairfield Uses Virtualization to Deliver Crucial City Services

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EDT

This VMware case study interview focuses on the City of Fairfield, California, and how the IT organization there has leveraged virtualization and cloud-delivered applications to provide new levels of service in an increasingly efficient manner. First of all, it’s always been challenging in disaster recovery and business continuity. Keeping those things in mind, our CAD/RMS systems for the police center and also our fire staffing system were high on the list for protecting. Those are Tier 1 applications that we want to be able to recover very quickly. We thought the best way to do that was to virtualize them and set us up for future business continuity and true failover and disaster recovery. So I put it to my CIO, and he okayed it. We went forward with VMware, because we saw they had the best, most robust, and mature applications to support us. Seeing that our back-end was SQL for those two systems, and seeing that we were just going to embark on a brand-new upgrading of our CAD/RMS system, this was a prime time to jump on the bandwagon and do it.

CharterCARE Health Partners Leverages Cloud and VDI

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:30:00 EDT

Our next VMworld case study interview takes the pulse of CharterCARE Health Partners, and examines how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements. We learn how Rhode Island-based CharterCARE has embraced private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to support its distributed, 579-bed community-based health system. The organization operates the Roger Williams Medical Center, Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, and several other caregiver facilities.

Case Study: Tampa Bay Rays Hit Home Run with Virtualization

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

The Tampa Bay Rays' IT department has just started bringing more of their applications, data, and processes out to the mobile tier using virtualization and thin-client approaches to make the tablet super powerful for them. Back in 2007 when we first looked out at virtualization, we had a lot of issues. Our main data center was located at our stadium in Saint Petersburg, Fla. We were actually running out of space. Electricity was a huge problem. We kept hearing from our operations department that our data centers and our equipment were just consuming too much energy. We had to come up with a new data center. We needed to build something else, because we were just basically outgrowing it. We needed a plan to say, "You know what, this is going to be our new data center. We're going to be there 5 to 10 years," without going back and requesting additional space or consuming more electricity.

Project Management Software Project Insight Chosen by Flare Industries

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:30:00 EDT

Project management software provider, Project Insight, announces its selection by Flare Industries for its project management needs in pollution control product design and implementation. Since 1984, Flare Industries has been an industry leader, providing quality flare systems, thermal oxidizers and ignition systems that help to control pollution. The innovative equipment the company manufactures provides optimum performance in meeting local environmental regulations or protecting a company’s plant operations. Project Insight, online project management software, supports Flare Industries’ Project Controls Manager in implementing the design and production of the company’s equipment.

ADP Dealer Services Benefits from VMware View in Desktop Virtualization

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

This case study interview takes aim at ADP Dealer Services and details how they're benefiting from expanding use of desktop virtualization. We'll learn about how ADP Dealer Services is enjoying increased security, better management, and higher productivity benefits as they leverage desktop virtualization across their applications development activities. Naughton: We had an interesting problem to solve. The first issue was developer productivity, which is very important to us, because we do have a big software development engineering house that needs to be productive. And we had issues where our traditional approach of putting them on the user based plan was not giving them the creativity, flexibility, and productivity they needed to spin up new environments, to have a free workspace so they could do what they needed to create products. So we thought that a VDI solution, combined with a quick provisioning and deprovisioning for development environments, would make them more productive and protect their normal day-to-day use of email, ERPF, Salesforce automation apps that they might need on the traditional production environment.

Construction Company Makes Zetta Data Protect Its Home in the Clouds

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:30:00 EDT

Robert Bogucki, IT manager at Skender Construction, researched multiple solutions when he started the disaster recovery project at Skender. Then he found Zetta. Zetta has a much more reasonable cost model with no charge for the ZettaMirror agent software, no matter how many copies are installed. Skender Construction's almost four terabytes of data are now backed up in the cloud with Zetta Data ProtectTM. "Cost was an important factor, and paying $1.40 to $1.60 per gigabyte just didn't make sense after finding Zetta," said Bogucki. He installed the lightweight ZettaMirrorTM agent on two local backup servers, as well as the file server, to create and maintain nightly offsite copies of the locally backed-up data. "Zetta was up and replicating in a matter of minutes," said Bogucki. "It was very simple to implement and use."

Case Study: Channel IQ Tackles Online Retail Intelligence . . .

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:45:00 EDT

As a provider of online retail intelligence solutions for manufacturers, distributors and retailers, Channel IQ strives to give customers the real-time pricing and promotion information online so they can profitably handle channel issues and competitive situations. Channel IQ’s mission is to provide the easiest access to the best online product data. As a result, we decided to look for an on-demand cloud delivery model in order to make our services more accessible and affordable. We knew that transforming our SaaS software offering into a cloud-based solution for our customers would help us accomplish this.

Case Study: MSP InTechnology Improves Network Services

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 09:30:00 EDT

This discussion focuses on a UK-based managed service provider’s journey to provide better information and services for its network, voice, VoIP, data, and storage customers. The network management and productivity benefits have come from an alignment of many service management products into an automated lifecycle approach to overall network operations. We explore here how InTechnology has implemented a coordinated, end-to-end solution using HP solutions that actually determine the health of its networks by aligning their tools to ITIL methods. And, by using their system-of-record approach with a configuration management database, InTechnology is better serving its customers with lean resources by leveraging systems over manual processes.

Case Study: T-Mobile's Massive Data Center Transformation Journey

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:00:00 EDT

This enterprise case study discussion focuses on an award-winning applications migration and transformation -- and a grand-scale data center transition, too -- for T-Mobile. I was really impressed with the scope and size -- and the amount of time, in terms of being short -- for this award-winning project set. We're here with two IT executives to learn more about what T-Mobile has done to set up two data centers, and how in the process they have improved their application quality and the processes using advanced application lifecycle management (ALM): Michael Cooper, Senior Director of Enterprise IT Quality Assurance at T-Mobile, and Kirthy Chennaian, Director Enterprise IT Quality Management at T-Mobile.

Case Study: How Cardinal Health Uses SaaS Tools to Improve ALM

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:30:00 EDT

This enterprise case study discussion focuses on how software as a service (SaaS) is impacting the application lifecycle through the experience of Cardinal Health. SaaS is a service offering, not just for testing and for development, but as a simple service offering, that allows us to focus on our primary core competencies and on what our clients and customers need, rather than focusing on trying to learn how to handle this particular application that we may have purchased from a vendor like HP. So, we can really focus on those core competencies.

Case Study: Using HP Tools to Improve Applications Management and Costs

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:45:00 EDT

A case study on how Genworth Financial uses HP tools to improve application delivery, performance testing, and operational integrity. We're going to focus on Genworth Financial, and talk about a number of different products used to improve application delivery, performance testing, and also operational integrity. Then, we'll look at the transition to a more comprehensive role for those tools, working in concert, and eventually with the opportunity to have an Executive Scorecard view into operations vis-à-vis these products and solutions.

Sysmex America Achieves 99.999% Availability for Exchange Server with F5

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:55:00 EDT

Sysmex America develops clinical testing devices for the healthcare industry. To ensure business continuity and seamless communication among customers, partners, and employees, Sysmex must keep email systems highly available. The company employed the Application Ready Solution for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 from F5 Networks and as a result, has surpassed 99.999 percent email uptime. To ensure that the implementation followed best practices, Sysmex’s IT department used F5 deployment guidance, jointly developed with Microsoft, and has enjoyed superior support from F5 engineers. The solution provides Sysmex with cost-effective, centralized management and a flexible platform that it will expand to support other key systems.

Case Study: When High Availability Is a Need - Not an Option

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:57:00 EST

The Springfield, MA, public school district views itself as a partnership between parents and the community all working toward the common goal of “a culture of educational excellence for our children.” To that end, technology plays a critical role in that mission and the district is considered a leader in information technology. The school offers students the ability to explore and gather information through its website and the Internet; teachers use data tools to manage grading and curriculum; and parents and students can access critical information on school events over the Web. For the new 2010-2011 school year, the district implemented PowerSchool Management, the school’s first web-based student information system. PowerSchool allows Springfield to store all student records, grades and attendance data for all 26,000 students for use by approximately 4,400 staff members, including about 2,500 teachers and paraprofessionals. With PowerSchool, all files are stored in a centralized database with appropriate security governing access.

Using Application Ratings to Foster DevOps

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 08:51:57 EDT

Last week I had the opportunity to have a hallway conversation with a CTO of a large software company about how the interactions between development and operations teams are changing. I asked his opinion on measuring the benefit of that collaboration. He noted while they did not have direct metrics for their teams, they found that having a rating system for applications under development did effect how developers approached their projects. Their rating system incorporated the expected operational characteristics of an application. For example, applications that must be as resilient as possible had a different set of ratings than applications with asynchronous or long running transactions. He said that once their developers understood the rating system, operational requirements were considered more throughly during the design phase. Additionally, they were more receptive to using existing operational knowledge as they were building the application. The system helped operations teams because it clearly prioritized the business importance of specific operational characteristics, which enabled better proactive problem analysis and prevention.

DECA Financial Services Cuts Infrastructure Costs in the BlueLock Cloud

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:15:00 EDT

Founded in 2009, DECA Financial Services is an accounts receivable management (ARM) agency experienced in collecting debt of any type. After experiencing tremendous capital expenditures on technology infrastructure and personnel at a prior employer, the DECA founders searched for a cloud hosting provider that offered ease-of-use and scalability to host their technology platform. Being a technology-driven agency, DECA needed a robust infrastructure platform to run all of its processes, while not having to deal with the IT resources, people and costs associated with owning the infrastructure hardware.

SANpulse Saves the Day During Major Data Center Consolidation Project

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:09:46 EDT

SANlogics’ unmatched flexibility and performance enables a client migration record of 257 hosts with 104 TB of storage spanning six data centers in two weekend migration windows. Challenge: Market volatility led to the cancellation of a migration event and with a hard time line to exit two existing data centers, this SANpulse customer more than doubled the host counts for the next two migration events.

Infrastructure Assets: Bringing Clarity to a Cloudy Situation

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:15:00 EDT

Enterprises understand the economic value of creating disciplines needed to properly move IT resources and applications into the cloud; however, initiatives are unlikely to get funded if they fail to meet enterprise expectations for the security, performance and control that they’ve come to expect from traditional methods. While new cloud services get most of the attention, the bigger story is how to leverage existing and future network infrastructure to remove barriers that are keeping enterprises from adopting cloud computing. The real-world example of NTT America’s partnership with their customer OpSource Inc., a provider of cloud operations, illustrates optimal network architecture for enterprise cloud computing success. In addition, it exemplifies the critical role that high performance IP networks play in maximizing the value of cloud computing, connecting users to the cloud and delivering dynamic, on-demand services and applications to a diverse set of users. The relationship also underscores the five network infrastructure assets (reliability, scalability, speed, security and quality) that are essential for the delivery of cloud services.

SOA Survey Under Way

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:26:00 EDT

Forgive my harping on this, but I keep hearing about how powerful social media is for gathering insights from the IT communities and users. Yet I rarely see actual market research conducted via the social media milieu. So now's the time to fully test the process. I'm hoping that you users and specifiers of enterprise software middleware, SOA infrastructure, integration middleware, and enterprise service buses (ESBs) will take 5 minutes and fill out my BriefingsDirect survey. We'll share the results via this blog in a few weeks.

Using Mule as the Foundation for New SOA Infrastructure

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:45:00 EST

Over the course of the past few decades, the consumer media industry has evolved from a slow-moving oligopoly dominated by a handful of vertically integrated networks to a highly fragmented and competitive marketplace of content creation, publication, and distribution players. This disaggregation of the industry value chain, in combination with the proliferation of content sources, channels, and media formats has created a daunting logistical challenge for anyone attempting to deliver content to the consumer in the right format, at the right time.

SOA Innovation Applied

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:15:00 EST

Are you a victim of outdated call center design syndrome? Symptoms include chaotic agent desktops, frustrated agents, miserable first-contact resolution rates, and angry customers calling back again and again. If you recognize these symptoms, then you're most likely a victim. This article will offer a service-oriented architecture (SOA)-based cure for outdated call center syndrome.

A Bright SOA IDEA: The Road Map for Service-Oriented Success

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:30:00 EST

Information always has and always will be the lifeblood of a company. But globalization has profoundly changed how a business collects and exchanges data, and with whom an organization shares that information. In today's sprawling digital enterprise, operations are no longer contained to a single floor, building, or even one campus, country, or continent. Additionally, the outsourcing and offshoring of many basic operations mean the accounts payable office that used to be down the hall may now be in Poland. This complicates transaction processing as more third-parties need to access corporate data stores to support operational functions.

SOA to the Rescue, When Drug Discovery Needs Data Fast!

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 18:30:00 EST

As the demand for new medicines grows, so does the need for better information to manage and execute the R&D processes. There is huge pressure to make informed decisions, especially during the project's early stages when the risk is high and before downstream costs are added. Pfizer spends billions on research projects annually. At Pfizer Global R&D where the company's drug discovery takes place, research scientists and managers require vast amounts of up-to-the-minute information on lab results, submission status, and project schedules to move new research forward quickly.

SOA Case Study: Leveraging SOA in Business Processes

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 13:30:00 EST

Covergence is the creator of Eclipse, an award-winning series of next-generation session border control solutions. Recently, the company unveiled the Covergence Policy Manager, a policy enforcement solution for real-time applications. Using Policy Manager, organizations can now build session policy enforcement into applications that include VoIP, video, IM, presence, conferencing, shared workspaces, and other forms of real-time communications.

Solving Real-World Business Problems with SOA: Case Study

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:15:00 EST

The financial services industry is well suited to application solutions based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) due to the heterogeneity across front-, mid-, and back-office systems and different business lines. Many financial services firms, particularly those that have undergone mergers or acquisitions, can benefit from SOA as they are burdened with legacy data silos, redundant applications, overlapping functionality, brittle proprietary systems, and steep integration costs.

Inside IBM: SOA-Enabled Business Transformation

Wed, 09 May 2007 16:30:00 EDT

Like many other enterprises, IBM is transforming itself in response to fierce global competition and partnering, real security threats, the plethora of regulatory requirements, and demands for more flexibility and agility. Service-oriented thinking and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) play an important role in this transformation.

SOA with MDA

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:15:00 EDT

For the past six years I've been engaged in a project to re-engineer a legacy enterprise IT system of a large international bank. The company still had applications with host terminal emulation that were to be replaced with Windows- and Web-based client applications. The host system was completed based on legacy applications that evolved since the 1970s. Any new applications had to interoperate with the existing legacy applications. A strategy to replace difficult-to-maintain legacy applications with new applications was implemented.

BPEL & B2B Synergies Reduce Supplier Enablement Costs

Fri, 05 Jan 2007 09:00:00 EST

Although organizations use multiple technologies to solve myriad business problems, integrating two or more of these technologies to derive new business benefits presents additional challenges. This is especially true when the collaboration extends beyond an organization's own systems to include those of its business partners.

ChoicePay: Rising above the SOA Testing Challenge

Thu, 19 Oct 2006 12:00:00 EDT

ChoicePay has embarked on a strategic Web Services-based SOA initiative as part of its ongoing effort to improve customer and partner service. To meet its service improvement objectives, ChoicePay builds reliable and robust Web Services. It continues to enhance its service objectives without compromising overall quality through short, iterative, and demanding Web Services testing cycles.

MedicAlert Embraces SOA To Drive Business Agility

Tue, 25 Jul 2006 16:15:00 EDT

At MedicAlert we have vividly seen how a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) can enable business agility and elevate the value of the IT organization's work. Since we launched our SOA initiative two years ago, we have laid the foundation for vital new forms of collaboration with partners and accelerated the introduction of new products and services that can strengthen the business.