The Client

Since inception in 1980, the client has provided sports and entertainment venues with the software needed to facilitate automated ticketing. Today, client is the market leading venue-enabler providing a wholly integrated infrastructure that puts venues in direct control of their customer relationships, brand and revenue potential.

The Challenge

The major challenges involve moving client's software infrastructure—a 20+ year old character-based product—running on IBM's Unix operating system, AIX to Sun Microsystems J2EE Web-based platform running on Linux, using IBM's WebSphere as the application server and DB2 as the database. Client also faced staffing challenges, as the competitive labor market in the region made it difficult to attract and retain qualified software engineers to maintain the existing system and/ or transition to a much needed new technology platform. Competitive solutions were moving ahead making it difficult for the client to stay "in the game."

The Solution

Objectiva's extensive knowledge and experience leading re-architecture utilizing J2EE technology helped develop a management process unifying both teams methods. This process was based on Agile techniques, but included several modifications to meet the needs of client's business users.

Objectiva augmented client's existing team to increase product support capabilities, improve escalation response time, and reduce the number of field issues. To ensure successful management and communication with the offshore team, Objectiva permanently placed the lead software engineer onsite at the clients development center. Objectiva scaled a team of twelve software engineers within one month after the initial pilot phase completion. This team was established with long-term staff stability in mind, to ensure the team could acquire and maintain the necessary business knowledge critical to success in client's environment. Given the extensive business knowledge encapsulated within the existing ticketing system, the knowledge transfer was critical to ensure the offshore team could function at full capacity. The process included predefined training sessions and staff rotations through the clients development center to build collaboration and further facilitate informal knowledge transfer.

The goal is to have a cross-functional, cross-continent team that best utilizes what each organization has to offer.

Technologies Used:

• Languages: J2EE, Java
• Operating Systems: Linux and AIX
• Application Servers: WebSphere