Insurance Company #1

The Client

With nearly 100,000 employees or agents working in approximately one thousand offices in North America, this insurance company provides insurance for individuals, including health and accident coverage, life insurance, annuities, personal disability coverage, pension plans and brokerage services, mutual funds, and a wide range of employee benefit products and services. Agents must be able to securely access the system to provide quotes and manage services for existing accounts as well as support nearly $5 billion in annual sales.

The Engagement

The client ran up against a mysterious performance issue that was impacting a critical business system. The cause had eluded both the client and other project vendors. Before the problem could be solved, however, it had to be located. The possible sources of the problem were many, including the network, database, and/or application code, to name a few.

Critical Services Delivered

Encode determined that the problem was within the Java JVM (Java Virtual Machine) coding, especially in the complex portions of multi-threaded code. The coding issues in turn led to a problem with Java Server Pages (JSP). Additionally, certain necessary WebSphere patches had not been applied.

Encode corrected the JVM and threads coding and applied the patches. In testing, Encode replaced Sun hprofs with a more flexible, open systems version. These changes brought performance up to expected levels.

Encode also mentored the client's staff in key areas such as monitoring JVM performance via IBM Performance Analyzer, and other WebSphere tools. This training led to the creation of a fifty page custom document on tuning JVM, especially the JVM heap size (a critical, memory related parameter).

• Architecture Design and Development
• Diagnostics
• Performance and Tuning
• Problem Resolution
• Custom JVM Coding
• "Best Practices" Mentoring

Technology Used

IBM WebSphere Application Server was selected because it "is available on the broadest number of platforms and provides a robust, proven environment for Java applications. IBM WebSphere Application Server provides a comprehensive set of software tools supporting the full application development lifecycle for traditional mainframe, Java and composite applications with sophisticated connector technology allowing for rapid implementation of innovative on demand applications speeding delivery of new business value." (IBM*)

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