Case Study

Amentra Facilitates Pharmaceutical Company Upgrade to WebLogic 8.1 and Increases Performance and Stability of Clinical Data Submission and Error Remediation System

Service:
Systems Development, Enterprise Integration Services
Industry:
Pharmaceutical
Engagement:
Application Server Upgrade & Mentoring
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Quickly deploy future updates and significantly reduce maintenance and complexity

Before Amentra

A large pharmaceutical company had a data submission and error remediation system that was not being leveraged to its full potential. The system was running on an outdated JVM as well as an older version of WebLogic. These older technologies prevented the application from taking full advantage of language performance improvements, as well as improved clustering and failover for distributed messaging systems and an enhanced workflow creation and management engine within the newer version of WebLogic. Additionally, the newer version of WebLogic included enhanced data transformation capabilities, needed for supporting some of the more complex data types and transformations required for agreements with external data providers. Finally, the pharmaceutical company's application deployment team lacked the necessary experience to efficiently deploy and maintain applications in a WebLogic 8.1 environment.

After Amentra

  • Application stability and manageability was significantly increased.
  • The pharmaceutical company's application support team is able to quickly deploy future application upgrades to the new WebLogic platform.
  • Application workflow complexity and maintenance was significantly reduced.
  • Transformation capabilities were greatly improved.
  • Compliance with the pharmaceutical company's server platform requirements of SuSE Linux(r) Enterprise Server 8 was met.
  • The pharmaceutical company's team received training in WebLogic 8.1 concepts and development processes.

Evolution of the business process

Amentra was able to leverage extensive knowledge in the pharmaceutical space as well as prior experience with the error remediation system in completing the WebLogic and application upgrade. In addition to upgrading the server platform and application, a number of common shared services were being utilized by the application. Thorough analysis of the impact of each service and constant team communication were needed to assure a successful upgrade. The upgraded platform and training of supporting personnel will ensure the ability to migrate all remaining applications to the new platform quickly and efficiently.

Applied technologies and expertise

Amentra's expertise with WLI in both WebLogic 7.0 and WebLogic 8.1 allowed for a seamless migration of the workflows between versions, as well as the handling of other technical.htmlects of the application. During the upgrade process, a complete overhaul of the WLI workflows was performed to increase stability and decrease maintenance and complexity. In addition, Amentra was able to use and improve upon many of the common services used by not only the error remediation application, but many other corporate applications to be upgraded in the near future.

In upgrading this application to the corporate-mandated platform and providing mentoring to application support team, Amentra paved the way for the pharmaceutical company to upgrade all remaining applications to this platform. Many of the common shared services have been upgraded and optimized, a standard process of upgrading applications from WebLogic 7.0 to 8.1 was developed, and the skill sets to support the new platform now exist. With quality analysis, industry experience, and technical expertise, the end result was a more flexible and stable system residing on the corporate mandated platform deployed by a trained application support team.

Technologies used

  • Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4 and JRockit
  • WebLogic 8.1 Platform (including WebLogic Integration)
  • Oracle 9i
  • Informatica 6.2
  • Linux
  • J2EE