Services - Examples

Here are some examples of the sort of work that we've undertaken in the past.

Technical Consultant : Online Infrastructure

We led a review of the online infrastructure used to deliver two large media websites operated by a global news corporation. The review included an assessment of the performance, scalability, capacity and resilience of the entire infrastructure stack from the Internet facing connections and boundary firewalls through to the reverse proxies and origin servers. The final report included recommendations on scaling out the architecture internally and externally (e.g. content delivery networks) as well as people, process and governance.

Architect : Future State E-Commerce Architecture

We helped a team within a tier 2 investment bank define and prototype components for their future state e-commerce architecture. In addition to reviewing and advising on all parts of the architecture, we also prototyped real-time data distribution over the web (Lightstreamer and Comet) and high availability (JGroups).

Technical Consultant : FX Trading System

We led an exercise to test the performance and scalability of a third-party FX trading system that allows customers of a tier 2 investment bank to trade on executable streaming rates via their web browser. We developed Apache JMeter test scripts to simulate hundreds of concurrent users using the Java/AJAX based website and helped the software vendor tune the system to meet the “real-time” non-functional requirements. As a related engagement, we’ve also provided this bank with consultancy focussing on the suitability, resilience and availability of their e-commerce architectures.

Architect : Equity Derivatives Credit Risk System

We were responsible for defining and delivering a new credit risk system to support the introduction of equity derivatives trading for a tier 2 investment bank. The timescales for this project were highly compressed, with just six weeks being available for the scoping, prioritisation and development of the system. Given this constraint, we took a pragmatic approach to scoping the functional and non-functional requirements, opting for a lightweight Java EE architecture built using Spring, Apache Tomcat and Sybase. The system went live as scheduled.

Architect : Life Cycle Manager for Interest Rate Derivative Swaps

We were brought in to this tier 1 investment bank to architect one the bank’s core components in its vision of defining a future state architecture for the end-to-end management of interest rate derivatives. We took the team’s existing logical architecture and made it a reality by undertaking technology selection, architecture definition, design, development, automated unit/integration testing and quality assurance. The core architecture was based around a number of Java 5 standalone processes that communicated via messaging (XML over TIBCO EMS) and persisted data in an Oracle database. Spring was a key part of the design; being used its for dependency injection, JDBC templates and transactional proxy facilities. Each standalone process was instrumented with JMX to provide comprehensive monitoring and management features, with the architecture making it possible to dynamically reconfigure the topology of the system at runtime. Other parts of the architecture included an operations/support GUI built in C#.NET, AXIS web services running in Apache Tomcat, a Java EE management dashboard and a market data feed from Reuters.

Architect : E-commerce Website and Service-Oriented Architecture

We provided consultancy and mentoring for a rewrite and consolidation of several e-commerce websites for a major travel company. The single new site was the first step in a roadmap to completely migrate off legacy VMS systems to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The first phase saw the creation of a Spring based Java EE web application communicating with legacy backend systems via a collection of web services deployed on the CapeClear enterprise service bus (ESB). We were involved in all aspects of the project; including the provision of technical support to the development team, mentoring to the technical architects and software development process recommendations (an agile/RUP mix) to the programme board.

Architect : E-commerce Website

We undertook the technical architect role for a major enhancement to an existing high visibility e-commerce website. This was a full lifecycle project to migrate complex undocumented business logic from a legacy FORTRAN/VMS environment to a Java EE application server (Oracle 10g AS) in order to improve performance and scalability. We defined, helped deliver and had responsibility for assuring the quality of the solution.

Selected, smaller consulting engagements

• Architecture, design and code review of a new Java EE affiliate marketing system that was being developed offshore.
• Definition of a technology training plan for new staff acquired by a London underwriting business so that they could become productive with the Java EE technologies being used in-house.
• Technical due diligence for a venture capital company looking to acquire an established European loyalty card business. The review covered people, process and technology.
• Technology and architecture consulting around the use of Tangosol (now Oracle) Coherence to cache large quantities of trade data to support a new trade capture system for a tier 1 investment bank.
• Due diligence for the senior management of a business process outsourcing company on technology (Java EE), process (Scrum and XP, partially off-shore) and the effectiveness of their in-house development team.
• Technical due diligence on an existing e-commerce website to investigate errors that customers were experiencing. The resulting report included detailed diagnostics and recommendations covering systems architecture, design, use of Java EE, performance, scalability, quality practices and development processes.
• Proof of concept project to look at replacing an existing C++ equities trading system with a version based upon IBM WebSphere, MQ and Oracle.

Please contact us for more information.