How do you lower application development time and cost in a rapidly growing work environment?
Our Client
Since 1937, our client has provided electricity and related products and services including billing services to the North Metropolitan area of Minneapolis/ St. Paul. It is one of the largest and one of the fastest growing electric distribution cooperatives in Minnesota, serving the energy needs of our customers across portions of Anoka, Chisago, Hennepin, Isanti, Ramsey, Sherburne, and Washington counties.
Our Client’s Challenge
In today’s rapid response environment, their new application development time was almost 18 months. And because of that, application development costs were through the roof.
Part of the challenge was that they were working across multiple platforms. Because of interdependencies, it had become impossible to upgrade one patform without adversely affecting the others.
In other words, they were suffering from undocumented, very rigid, non-systemic connections. They needed to remove the interdependencies so they could integrate their applications, enable more efficient communications between them, and create the ability to switch between applications efficiently. So they contacted Midwave.
Midwave’s Rapid Response Solution
At their request, Midwave did an audit of the current situation. Specifically, they wanted an inventory of their requirements and their different applications. They also wanted to look at available tools amongst the three leaders in this space; IBM, Oracle and Cisco.
Following the inventory, Midwave did a very thorough evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the tools available from the three leaders and how they measured up in reference to the specific needs of the client.
Through the evaluation period, Midwave determined that Oracle’s SOA Suite (Service Oriented Architecture) was the best fit because of three major factors:
- Oracle's application capabilities
- Client's application development team was already familiar with other Oracle tools and management
- And Oracle was a good match with the developer’s skill sets
From there, Midwave began installation and implementation. However, moving beyond simple integration, Midwave’s team built interfaces for the company’s five existing applications so they could talk back to the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language tools) process managers.
Results
The new platform and application tools created flexibility and extensibility that the team had never experienced before. And the operations and application development cost savings were huge.
The new flexibility has allowed them to re-purpose money from an operating budget to growth and expansion. With the new cash flow available, they are now able to provide new IT services for their clients to generate new revenue streams.