VISION

The vision was to re-gain control of the production environment by creating an early warning system that would engage all the stakeholders.  Provide the same visibility for all teams to lever so each team could understand how they contributed to the overall system stability.  Eliminate the blame game by having all stakeholders on the same team.

PROBLEM

A Fortune 100 Company and one of the leaders in the telecom recently experienced a rapid J2EE system growth. Their e-Business was 30-35% of their revenue and it depended on centralized IT infrastructure and support for J2EE systems.  Customers demanded high level service and new features and e-Business was always on the cutting. Their centralized infrastructure and support was not used to customers pushing the limits of the system and expecting high levels in short order.

BEA WebLogic was the foundation of high volume, high availability, and customer facing applications.  e-Business has several internal development teams and several offshore teams producing business applications 24/7.  There are a dozen different development teams working all around the world continuously challenging IT management to release new applications.  The number of applications deployed to production increased and the infrastructure became increasingly difficult to manage.  With increasing pressure for rapid development and slipping SLA’s, IT managers realized a new management philosophy needed to be employed.

SOLUTION 

This organization has to bring in external resources to help get their IT Infrastructure under control.  An e-Business Deployment Team was formed.  One J2EE architect and two experienced engineers were accountable for the system architecture, deployment process and over all system stability.  This highly skilled Deployment Team used the tools supplied by IT management and visibility to ultimately fix the problem.  A partnership with Wily Technology provided common visibility and a monitoring solution that became the backbone of the turn around.

BENEFITS

The IT management team regained control of their J2EE systems. Issues were proactively solved and IT management was able to focus on strategic initiatives.  Projects accelerated through their development life cycle into production on schedule and with higher quality.  Restoration of confidence in the IT organization facilitated a stronger relationship with both the business teams and external customers.  e-Business managers were promoted.

Streamlining the support team allowed for a 65% reduction in support staff.  The support staff regained control of their schedule and worked less hours.  With less people and system issues to manage, IT management again was able to focus on strategic plans to support the business instead of crisis management and 36 hour shifts.

CHALLENGES 

Creating a blame free environment was very difficult.  Stakeholders were in all corners of the country with very different organizational structures.  The leaders were not accustomed to working without barriers and some groups were not accustomed to other teams having low-level visibility. 

TECHNICAL PROCESS

The deployment team brought Introscope into the development process, the test cycle, and production without exception.  Applications were instrumented by universal metrics.  The business team validated the speed of the system before it was shipped to production. The deployment team could review the scalability of the application without opening the code.  Detailed Transaction Tracers were delivered to the developers for feedback when performance issues were identified in the test cycles.  Developers were able to focus on specific code because they knew what the business demanded and exactly where to look. The deployment team got to see new applications in test cycles long before the applications were in production.  Performance metrics were captured during test cycles for iterative performance gains before the applications were ever deployed to production.

RESULT

Selected e-Business IT managers were promoted to lead all of this organizations sectors.  Projects moved through development cycles faster and faulty code was stopped before it hit production.