The ClientA leading global provider of re-insurance carrier. The company is headquartered in Hartford, Connecticut and has sales offices in North America and Europe.
The ProblemThere were numerous problems with the Customer’s in-house grown data warehousing product. The company did not possess sufficient resources to develop a new version of software, the internal resources were busy with ongoing projects, while the market situation did not permit them to spend time on setting up a new R&D team. The performance and flexibility of the product was insufficient in many cases, especially on large scale data.
The ENoptions Solution
- Technical Solutions - ENoptions proposed, designed, and implemented a highly modular, distributed system. This solution assured a scalable, high-performance system.
- Architecture - ENoptions researched and evaluated a number of alternatives for the architecture of the version of Data warehousing system. These included a pure Active Server Pages/Microsoft IIS solution, Oracle object model database, pure EJB solution, and a CORBA distributed architecture. As a result, a heterogeneous architecture was chosen. Finally the entire application was rewritten using combination of technologies ranging from Oracle Database, ASP, Informatica and SQL server and oracle.
- UI Prototyping - New web based UI developed for customer interface points.
- Optimization for Performance - During implementation, ENoptions paid much attention to the code quality, which avoided unnecessary remote calls and database transitions. When appropriate, caching results of slow operations was implemented. The web front-end of the system was developed on different platforms, including high-performance UNIX. Product testing was provided for Windows NT, 2000 and IBM AIX.
- Localization - ENoptions applied its vast experience in product localization to internationalize the product, which was very important for the Customer’s multi-national business. The ENoptions coding and designing standards were applied to make product localization as easy as possible.
Managerial Services
- Communication - Much effort was invested into building good working relationships with the customer. While most of the communication was conducted via e-mail, weekly conference calls and phone conversations were also used. Face-to face meetings with ENoptions on-site staff were also of great importance.
- Project Team - ENoptions provided both on-site and off-site workers for the project. The on-site ENoptions staff participated in requirements gathering and design approval processes. The team size varied in a cost-effective manner to achieve the shortest possible time-to-market for the product. On peak workload, ENoptions assigned more than 20 employees for the project, including on-site and off-site personnel. Later, the team size was reduced to the 4 employees off-site, which continue to maintain the product for a long period of time.
- ENoptions Quality Assurance - The Quality Assurance in ENoptions was organized independent of the development team, so that the customer could be sure that the product was tested according to the requirements. This enabled Customer Financials to pay more attention to its business operations, while having confidence in the work of ENoptions.
The Result
ENoptions efforts totaled more than 17,000 work hours during the last 16 months. ENoptions maintains a current version of data warehousing system and assists in the development of forthcoming versions.
The Benefits
ENoptions’s solution allowed this customer to obtain the following benefits:
- Customer was able to concentrate its people on more important business tasks, while ENoptions provided the R&D department service. Actually, the project required less involvement of Customer’s staff: only one person carried out Acceptance Testing.
- Customer saved time and money necessary to extend its own R&D department
- Reduced time-to-market through shorter development time
- Reduction of development costs by outsourcing to a proven and tested supplier: the Customer saved almost $400,000 in anticipated R&D spending expenditures through deferred IT costs.
The Customer obtained a high-quality, award-winning data warehousing product for its customers which enable them to have better competitive position on the market.
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