Case Study

Amentra Helps Large Pharmaceutical Company Address Needs for High Availability and Global Consolidation

Service:
Business Process Management
Industry:
Pharmaceutical
Engagement:
High Availability Infrastructure and Applications Assessment
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Client has company-wide guidelines, standards and migration plan

Before Amentra

A large pharmaceutical company has numerous mission-critical client-server legacy applications replicated in many countries throughout the world. Hardware and software redundancy and support costs were very high, and data consolidation was not real-time. Availability metrics were not acceptable or easily accessible. The company's strategic technical direction was not inline with their in-house development and support staff. The client had no development standards or guidelines to follow while developing or critiquing new application development.

After Amentra

  • Client has a clear understanding of availability needs across all applications within the organization
  • Client has a reusable component-based framework for developing all future applications
  • Client has company-wide system development guidelines and standards based on industry standard best practices
  • Client has a migration plan for building all applications to meet application and infrastructure availability requirements

Evolution of the business process

The large pharmaceutical company had many applications developed using different technologies, standards and methodologies. For numerous reasons, the applications were not highly available, didn't meet the demands of the users and were extremely expensive to support. Amentra assessed all of the client's current applications from both a technical and availability perspective. Amentra also categorized the availability requirements of each application from a business perspective. Based on these assessments, Amentra developed an application and infrastructure migration strategy so that the applications could meet the technical and business requirements. All new applications and application upgrades will be developed using Amentra's J2EE Application Development Framework and Application Development Guidelines. Depending on the availability requirements, application development will remain consistent and infrastructure and process will dictate availability.

Applied technologies and expertise

Amentra was aware of the company's technical direction to move to a component-based J2EE environment to consolidate all applications to a single web-based infrastructure that was accessible to its user base around the world. Amentra assessed the technical and availability requirements all of the client's applications and developed a reusable framework in which to migrate these applications. The client's current infrastructure was assessed and recommendations were made to support the availability requirements of each application. Amentra used its expertise in enterprise component-based architecture to develop the Application Development Guidelines by which all new in-house and outsourced application development would be judged.

Technologies used

  • Java
  • J2EE
  • EJB
  • DAO
  • Ant
  • Log4J
  • Eclipse