iGATE Powers Its Mission-Critical ManageMe Application on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

iGATE Corporation, a global IT company, provides niche IT Services in enterprise solutions, business intelligence and data warehousing, application development and maintenance, infrastructure management and consulting services in IT strategy, enterprise performance management, business intelligence and analytics and process outsourcing services. The company specializes in business data processing and uses a structure known as iTOPS (integrated Technology and Operations Systems) to meet customer demands.

The company focuses more on productivity, quality, and knowledge management. Customers have benefited from the synergy between investment strategy, technology and business outsourcing provided by iGATE. By 2012, the company wants to be a billion-dollar organization associating itself with 100 of the global 1000 clients.

As a business that prides itself on customer service, iGATE needed to give its developers the right tools to ensure that they could service customers both quickly and efficiently. The company decided that it was necessary to replace its outdated Project Management tool, iQuest, due to performance issues. These issues were impacting multiple business functions, including operations, the organization excellence group, finance, human relations, and training.

“There were frequent server shutdowns leading to only 80 percent uptime of the system,” said Sandeep Digambar, group project manager, iGATE. As a result, a new mission-critical project management tool that would alleviate these problems was planned for in-house development under the project name ManageMe.

The cost of acquisition for the new application, ManageMe, and the cost of maintenance for iQuest was also a major concern. “We didn’t want to spend too much on the procurement of the proprietary licenses for building the new system,” said Digambar. “Additionally, the current iQuest system was also utilizing dedicated hardware servers, which translated into added cost for the organization.” iGATE wanted to build a system that could rely on a commodity hardware stack, which could be shared between multiple applications.

To achieve optimal performance from the system, it was also essential for iGATE’s internal IT team to customize the new system. “We wanted to build the system on an open architecture with no vendor lock-in so that we could customize the system to fit our needs,” said Digambar.

As a tracking application, ManageMe requires managing workflows. “It is cumbersome, but the requirement is common with most of the tracking applications,” said Digambar. “Instead of writing our own workflow engine, we decided to use a commercial Business Process Management (BPM) tool.” iGATE’s internal IT team set out to evaluate the right BPM tool for the system requirements from various proprietary and open source options.

SOLUTION

iGATE’s internal IT team decided to adopt open source solutions for its infrastructure due to the high availability, performance, and reliability features of open source, as well as for their lower cost compared to proprietary competitors. After evaluating various enterprise-class solutions, iGATE adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform because the solutions not only met the organization’s criteria, but also provided huge cost benefits. In addition, it allowed iGATE to take advantage of the rapid innovation from the open source community and avoid proprietary lock-in.

“We devised a plan to use supported open source solutions to build the new management tool because Red Hat does not have a complex licensing structure and the entire product set, along with Red Hat’s reliable support, is provided as one single package through the company’s subscription model,” said Digambar. iGATE’s internal IT team then evaluated various Business Process Management tools including proprietary ones such as OpenLogic and BEPL from Oracle, and open source solutions such as JBoss jBPM. These tools were tested thoroughly on parameters such as application redundancy, clustering, high availability, performance, fault tolerant behavior, and capability of session replication.

“We tested JBoss in the Proof of Concept (POC) for features and performance. The results were encouraging. The cost benefit offered by JBoss jBPM made our decision easy,” said Deepu George, divisional head, iGATE.

“Implementation of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux was one of the key milestones in our internal IT deployments as it was the first time iGATE was implementing Red Hat’s open source solution internally,” said Digambar.

ManageMe is a Java-based application running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle 10g as the database server, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the base operating system. It took just six months for developing the system. “The system has been tested with 250 GB and 600 concurrent users and there was no noticeable drop in performance,” said Digambar. Current database size is approximately 30 GB, but the IT team hopes it plans to increase the usage to 120 GB in a year’s time.

The JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss jBPM helped iGATE tremendously in reducing its development and training costs. “JBoss jBPM is less complicated with a visual designer to model the workflow, which means there is much less overhead on our team in terms of its learning and usage,” said Digambar.

iGATE is pleased with the ease of deployment and reliability of the Red Hat-based solution in its production environment. “The deployment went smoothly and the performance of the system is top-class with no downtime. The system has performed exceedingly well in production on parameters such as robustness, stability, reliability, and performance,” said Amit Shekhar, Project Lead, iGATE.

iGATE’s internal IT team has also used the power of virtualization provided as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform. With Red Hat virtualization technology, iGATE is able to use the same host hardware for running various operating systems, which enables the organization to reduce costs and optimize resources.

iGATE’s IT team is highly satisfied with the performance of the whole system. “We now have an IT policy that supports the usage of enterprise open source software wherever possible,” said Digambar.

iGATE’s IT team is investigating the opportunity to migrate more of its web-based applications to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. The first application that is currently planned for migration is its Internal Audit Tracker application, which the IT team is planning to migrate from TomCat to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. “We intend to move all applications developed and managed by Information systems from proprietary systems to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform,” said Amit Goyal, Divisional Head, Information Systems, iGATE. “We are treating the ManageMe project as a pilot to showcase the power of open source solutions to our end-user customers and proposing its use in their respective projects,” Digambar added.

BENEFITS

“With JBoss Enterprise Middleware, we were able to extract tremendous value from our systems and applications,” said Digambar. “JBoss platforms deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux freed iGATE from vendor lock-in, and enabled the organization to choose hardware platforms that delivered flexibility and high performance.”

Usage of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform for ManageMe has provided a stable system and iGATE is experiencing fewer errors, easier ongoing maintenance, and reduced support costs. “The cost savings by our adoption of Red Hat solutions are significant as compared to proprietary available options and this came without compromising performance, scalability, or other features,” said Amit Goyal.

Red Hat solutions helped iGATE not only with lower IT costs, but also with simplified management, reduced systems maintenance, and increased scalability and performance from the combination of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. “Red Hat’s expanding presence in the market is proof of its reliability, and we know that Red Hat solutions are viable for a long lifecycle,” said Digambar.

The Red Hat platform and middleware solution has also given a huge boost to the overall productivity of the iGATE workforce. “With the implementation of this tool, we are expecting to free the efforts of our employees by 400-500 thousand hours annually,” said Digambar.

IT costs have also been reduced significantly. The software licensing costs have been reduced significantly due to the open source nature of the Red Hat solutions. Apart from the lower cost of acquisition, the other reason for lowered software costs is due to the reduced number of application server instances needed for ManageMe, as compared to iQuest.

“The application server instances needed to run the system have been reduced significantly from six IBM WebSphere 6.0 instances to only two JBoss Enterprise Application Platform instances,” said Digambar. Additionally the hardware requirement has also come down significantly. “Our hardware requirements have come down by 50 percent as compared to the old iQuest application,” said Digambar.

In addition, iGate benefits from Red Hat’s reliable subscription model. “Updates can be obtained very easily with our Red Hat subscription and through the Red Hat Network management solution. With Red Hat, we created a more flexible, reliable environment that is easy to maintain. This leaves us free to concentrate on new projects. We’re very happy with the flexibility and reliability we’ve achieved with Red Hat,” said Chella Namasivayam M., chief information officer, iGATE.

Today, given the successful proof of concept that iGATE completed with Red Hat, in addition to the organization’s ability to resolve its development and production problems through open source solutions, senior management has begun to understand and support open source as a development concept for iGATE’s strategic needs. “We are showcasing the success of the project to our end customers and urging them to migrate from a proprietary software stack to a Red Hat open source software stack,” said Digambar.

In summary, Red Hat provided iGATE with enterprise-class solutions at an affordable price and without any compromise on performance to ensure 100 percent availability. “The success of this initiative has helped us to innovate further and choose the most appropriate set of technologies for our business needs. Open source solutions in general, and Red Hat in particular, will now be adopted as the foundation of our long-term IT strategy. We are confident that Red Hat solutions will enable us to serve our customers effectively every day,” said Namasivayam.

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This entry was posted under Geography, Red Hat + JBoss Solutions, JBoss Enterprise Middleware, JBoss Enterprise Platforms, JBoss on RHEL, APAC, HP, IBM WebSphere to JBoss, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Enterprise Frameworks, JBoss jBPM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform.

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