Customer Success: Case Studies
Today’s IT decision makers are confronted with many kinds of tactical dilemmas. Spanning a diverse spectrum of industries, decision makers may be called upon to employ the following strategies:
- developing middleware strategies to accommodate the past without compromising the future,
- how to decouple applications from the distributed technology being used so that changes in the future can be adapted one service at a time as desired,
- decoupling applications from their data sources,
- how to leverage multiple technologies such as Java, .NET, Web Services and other newcomers,
- how to leverage cost effective, standards-based, open source products,
- how to meet aggressive project schedules as development teams acquire expertise in new technologies,
- and how to fully test applications before their release into production environments.
The following is a sample of recent projects and typical engagements that briefly summarize industry- specific problems and the solutions proposed by OCI:
Communications
Infrastructure Software for a Global Cellular Phone System: Designed, developed, and established a repository of common/shared, standards-based components for the first global cellular phone system.
Third Generation (3G) wireless telephone (call processing) project: This project called for off-the-shelf software, open source platforms and software, linked many call placement, billing and management systems. The framework provided a common environment and domain-specific set of APIs for developers to use when assembling their telecommunications-specific applications.
Telephony Switch Configuration Management: OCI provided high-level architecture support and assisted with implementing a web-enabled remote switch configuration management system. Technologies employed were Java, Swing and RMI.
Defense
Airborne Systems: Provided mentoring, architectural and implementation support for the development of a scalable avionic system framework for use across multiple weapon systems using off-the-shelf real-time CORBA middleware, and real-time operating systems. Provided tools for debugging distributed applications and performing RACE condition analysis.
Radar Systems, Defensive and Offensive: Provided a real-time CORBA framework for ship-board and ground-based detection systems. Architecture included high-availability (HA), fault tolerance (FT), and load balancing characteristics.
Software Defined Radio Framework: This framework was designed to support multiple real-time operating systems and employed real-time CORBA, C++, and Java for management services. It was designed to fulfill the requirements of the next generation programmable radios for the military. The core framework is reusable across multiple waveforms and includes security features for encrypted message traffic.
Wireless PDA: This application provides infantry with the capability to send and receive information to battlefield management information systems using a secure, lightweight, rugged PDA employing a specialized communication protocol.
Satellite Management Services Framework: This C++ CORBA framework was developed to enable the client to manage the multiplicity of both new and legacy ground systems, in the more demanding environment of low earth orbit maneuverable satellite constellation. The distribution of information amongst systems had to have high bandwidth and low latency. Legacy systems required subtantial performance improvements (100X to 1000X). OCI also developed new components to satisfy new functional needs.
TACAN Software: OCI embedded systems developers provided code implementation reviews, and did subsequent porting and testing of on-board navigational software to a DSP. The development host and target had significant differences requiring careful management to esnure consistent behavior across platforms.
Legacy C Software Integration: OCI developed a code generator to enable the wrapping of legacy C applications so that they could be integrated into a real-time CORBA based weapon systems.
Submarine Combat Systems: OCI provided on-site mentoring and migration support with its open source products to help a client move their combat systems from a closed, proprietary architecture to an open extensible system.
Entertainment
An Internet-based game system: A provider of interactive subscription based games required a framework to provide high performance, secure, highly scaleable platforms for their applications. The system will be required to support thousands of users concurrently and run with the highest degree of reliability. OCI designed and implemented the framework using ACE, an open source, high performance tool, which provides portability.
Financial
Financial Services, agent and client system: This access framework replaced dial up point-to-point access with Internet or web enabled access so that agents working with their clients could view their portfolios and make selections and alterations. It involved development of Java based connections to many existing procedural systems and mainframe environments.
Financial Services Framework: An major electronic stock exchange required an intermediate server system for its dealers that expanded its performance envelope significantly. OCI architected and built such a system, incorporating legacy connections, as well as offering new features and open system's characteristics. This highly portable system was designed using ACE.
Market Data Distribution Framework: A financial services company required a system that would receive large volumes of financial market data through a fat pipe, transform and republish their data as a subscription based service. OCI architected, designed and developed a fault-tolerant (FT), high availability (HA), deterministic framework using C++, CORBA, ACE, TAO, Java, XML technologies.
Order Execution: A financial services company required systems that could ensure order execution and settlement among diverse internal systems. OCI designed and implemented an XML based flow of information to drive the process.
Exchange Simulator: A proprietary trading company required a simulator to take market data feeds, to analyse them and make simulated trades, so that the trading strategies could be compared against the real market. Once the simulator was honed it would be able to support decision making on trades. The simulation frame time had to be faster than the market data feeds and trading cycle times. It easily kept up with the content data rates and trades, and thus was able to support the traders in their real-time decision making.
FIX adapters: A proprietary trading company was switching to FIX as its basic trading protocol. However it found that FIX had many "flavors" according to how the exchanges had interpretd the spec. Rather than hardwiring a solution, OCI was tasked with masking the implementation flavors from the core trading systems which had used a more rigorous interpretation of the standard. OCI analyzed several exchanges and found patterns around the variations from the spec. OCI then designed a FIX exchange adapter that encapsulated each exchange's variations by means of strategies. The strategies could be modified if over time the exchanges changed their interpretation. Subsequent additions of new exchanges to the trading system became trivial events. OCI has now used this approach successfully when connecting dozens of exchanges.
Healthcare
Pharmacy Benefit Management framework for a pharmacy insurance services company: This framework was designed to enable web access by patients and pharmacists, who could re-order prescriptions, check insurance plan coverage, and eventually purchase other medical products. The framework -- using CORBA, C++, and Java -- connected to many diverse systems that had been acquired during the company's expansion.
Drug Design: OCI provided architecture and implementation support for a commercial drug design product for pharmaceutical companies. The application assists chemists who deal with vast quantities of information and chemical combinations involved in molecular modeling.
Enterprise Application Integration: For a leading pharmaceutical benefits management firm, provided high level architecture, mentoring, and implementation support using J2EE and CORBA technologies to integrate disparate procedural and client-server systems.
Intranet Patient Information System: A network of hospitals and physicians required access to multiple legacy systems. OCI designed and implemented a common web-based user interface solution to provide easy access to information.
Human Resources
Employee Benefits Systems: A large company obtained significant reduction in costs and improved user satisfaction by switching its benefits enrollment to "on-line". OCI architected a solution involving Java and Web based technologies.
Supply Chain Management
Framework for a beverage company: This project enabled suppliers and distributors to balance inventories, shipping resources, forecasts and manufacturing product lines in a much more automated manner than the previous (manual) methods. Heuristics link the systems and rapidly optimize across the board as information in any one area changes.