Case Study

Amentra Increases Customer Load Capabilities with New On-Line Registration System for DSL

Service:
Systems Development
Industry:
Telecom
Engagement:
Full Lifecycle & Mentoring
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Improving system reliability and increasing volume to several thousand users/day

Before Amentra

The DSL group's on-line registration system was not reliable, scalable and had major performance issues. Due to the legacy architecture and lack of documentation, the system was very cost prohibitive and maintenance and extensibility had become a daunting task. This was a mission-critical, customer-facing application that was in need of a redesign / re-architecture. The client's developers were C and Perl developers with little to no background with object oriented technologies or processes.

After Amentra

  • Client's DSL registration system now accepts thousands of users per day.
  • Customer registration requests are no longer dropped under high load.
  • Client's development staff understands and supports J2EE application development.
  • Client utilizes open source tooling eliminating thousands of dollars in license fees.

Evolution of the business process

Amentra implemented the registration system providing a robust solution that is incredibly extensible and maintainable utilizing a service-based approach. The system scales to thousands of users per day and has no dropped registrations and system down time issues that plagued the old system. The maintenance team shrunk and anyone on the development team can maintain the application with little effort. Amentra created a development environment that saved the company many thousands of dollars in software licensing costs.

Applied technologies and expertise

Since the DSL Registration system was a CGI / Perl based application with many modules written in the C language, the client's developers required retooling. A great challenge with this system was the lack of documentation and the age of the system that made business requirements and the migration of technologies even more challenging. The client's developers and business people were utilized for their historical knowledge of the system and its business requirements. Amentra used its Signature Mentoring Approach to develop a mentoring and project implementation plan to migrate the application and the developers to the J2EE platform utilizing BEA WebLogic server.

This system has created numerous reusable components that are utilized in the auto-registration systems and other disparate systems that need provisioning services, credit card authorization, billing authorizations and other registration specific business logic. The design of this application is utilized by the customer as a framework for current and future development and allows for ease of extensibility to other business requirements.

Technologies used

  • J2EE
  • EJB
  • Servlet
  • JSP
  • JDBC
  • JNDI
  • Java
  • XML
  • BEA WebLogic
  • Apache Web Server
  • Ant
  • Log4J
  • Cisco Local Director
  • Sun Solaris
  • PVCS
  • JBuilder