An on-line information system to support brokers and consumers of Internet services

Challenge

Create a Web-based information system for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide on-line access to brokers that sell their communications and Internet-related services and subscribers that sign up for these services

Background

Web hosting brokerages help large Internet Service Providers (ISP) communicate their product to the full spectrum of potential customers, offer better customer service and sell Internet-related services more successfully bringing an increase in revenue to the large ISPs and better level of satisfaction to small Internet service consumers. ISPs that adopt this brokerage-type model need an advanced information system to provide their brokers (resellers) and their subscribers with a convenient Web based tool for managing accounts, signing up for and cancelling services, communicating with each other, and reporting problems. Japan based Customer engaged Artezio in development and support of a second release of such information system.

Artezio software engineers joined an international team directed by the client’s project managers in Japan. Albeit skilled in various Java technologies, Artezio specialists still needed additional ramp up on JDO and JNDI technologies. User interfaces for brokers and their subscribers had to be bi-lingual (English/ Japanese) with a prospect to become multilingual in the future adding complexity to GUI-related development.

Solution

Customer opted for participating actively in screening members for their dedicated Artezio-based team to make sure technical and communication skills of Artezio software engineers matched the stringent requirements set forth for their own on-site project team members. As architecture and business logic of the future application seemed to be fairly complicated, those who joined the team thoroughly studied the technical design specification. Typical workflow scenario for Customer was to lay out tasks and forward them to Artezio for execution. During the project, dozens of tasks have been sent down and accomplished by Artezio coders. On average, a task required two and a half business days to deliver. The vast majority of tasks were accomplished in less then five days. Artezio was responsible for unit testing, while on-site customer specialists performed functional testing.

Result

The project was delivered in 7 months.

Engaging Artezio at the very beginning of the project helped Customer stay on the preapproved schedule. The customer acknowledged the quality of the codes delivered by Artezio and was impressed by the quick task turnaround time.

Technologies applied

Java Servlets, JNDI, JDO, Apache Ant 1.5.3, JavaScript, HTML, Jakarta Velocity Template Engine 1.3.1, Struts, Caucho Resin XML Application Server, LDAP, Oracle 8i, MySQL, JDK 1.4.2, Red Hat Linux 7.3, CVS