Benefits and Payroll Services Provider

The Client

With 500,000 clients, this benefits and payroll services company provides employee-related processing, data management, and administrative services in more than 25 countries. It also provides high-volume customer care and specialized services to financial institutions. Many services require secure online systems for client access.

The Engagement

Encode conducted a pre-deployment analysis of the client's application architecture and identified a number of design, development and performance issues that needed to be corrected.

Critical Services Delivered

Encode's cross-brand expertise led to a near immediate identification of design related issues which were corrected while mentoring both the design and development teams as to "Best Practices".

Encode identified and resolved multiple system and application level problems that did not require the purchase of any additional hardware. An alternate vendor proposed a solution that required a very large increase in the number of host servers at considerable time and expense for the client.

After a thorough analysis of all aspects of the client system (applications, database, tools, hardware, storage, networks, etc.), Encode determined that one of the major issues effecting performance was a database connection problem. Due to the large number of users, the previous design decisions that were made, and the client's method of implementation, the system was running out of resources. The problem was resolved through the use of IBM WebSphere Connection Pooling. Subsequent tests after installation of Connection Pooling showed significant increases in performance.

Encode's solution eliminated the need for the client to purchase additional servers, which not only saved the cost of equipment and software, but also the time required for installation, testing and maintenance.

• Analyze Application Infrastructure
• Performance Tuning
• Problem Resolution
• IBM WebSphere Pooling Implementation
• "Best Practices" Mentoring

Technology Used

IBM WebSphere Connection Pooling. "WebSphere Application Server enables administrators to establish a pool of database connections that can be shared by applications on an application server. Connection pooling spreads the connection overhead across several user requests, thereby conserving resources for future requests. Connection pooling can improve the response time of any application that requires connections, especially Web-based applications." (IBM*)

*Copy which describes IBM products is adapted from the copy provided on the IBM website. Consult www.ibm.com for further information.