Overview

A large multinational corporation achieved a successful exit from its legacy TIBCO environment and gained greater efficiency, flexibility and resilience by migrating to a modern Solace hybrid cloud messaging solution. 

The Challenge

For the past 15 years, the client’s TIBCO environment provided millions of messages per day to over 50 unique applications. Middleware messaging is a vital function of the firm’s business operations and the legacy technology was facing the following challenges:

• Inefficient publishing and subscribing methodology.
• Major software overhead for intercommunications.
• Writing brand new adaptors for enterprise software.
• Lack of in-house expertise to migrate to a new middleware solution.

The firm was looking for a new solution which could:

• Optimise the use of computing resources to reduce cost.
• Provide immediate data-driven decision-making.
• Utilise machine learning and predictive analytics.
• Enable a hybrid of on-premise and Azure Cloud for total resiliency and disaster recovery.
• Capture and use all in-house generated data to improve customer service.

The Solution

The migration of middleware is a complex challenge that requires support from software vendors and solution providers like CJC who have decades of design, build and operations experience with critical message delivery platforms. Moving from a legacy system such as TIBCO to Solace can significantly increase the workload for in-house teams. Not only are teams required to support the legacy and target system in parallel, but they must also manage the added demands of the migration such as project management, training, software development and out-of-hours migration.

CJC’s Solace Managed Service supported this integration project by providing innovative expertise, monitoring and tooling. Our mature and powerful IT monitoring provided the client with over 60 bespoke hardware and application-specific plugins, complete with automated detect and fix options, all of which automatically report into CJC’s ITSM platform.

Our subject matter experts worked closely with the vendor and client development teams to resolve any issues such as performance or latency on the target platform. CJC also managed workload and quality control during parallel testing of the TIBCO and Solace systems. Dell Boomi was implemented to limit the need for API code changes and accelerate the testing and migration process. Once application testing was complete, CJC helped the application owners confidently cutover to production publishing on the new Solace platform.

CJC’s team was tightly integrated with the client’s upgrade schedules to maintain 5x9’s operations across the full-lifecycle software process from development to QA and production environments, complete with backup and disaster recovery.

A critical element of CJC’s Managed Service is the use of our IT Analytics tool, mosaicOA. Our powerful front-end visualisation platform facilitates strategic capacity management by providing our Engineers with detailed views of system activity to support rapid root cause detection and help clients significantly reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR).

As shown below, the CJC team detected and reported a NAB Buffer Load Factor had caused the CPU utilisation on a production Solace appliance to spike to 89.6% on Aug 18th from 18:07 to 18:22 EST. Further analysis determined that the client was unable to handle the rate of traffic being offered by the message broker. Providing this analysis and reporting to business stakeholders is vital to their operational performance and capacity planning. If the condition persists, we consult with the Application Developers regarding their data requirements and engineer an updated Solace configuration to address the issue.

The Result

Even with the onset of Covid-19, by engaging CJC’s Solace Managed Service, the client was able to complete their EAI project within a targeted timeframe. CJC’s subject matter experts leveraged global expertise to help the client gain a deeper understanding of the new technology while maintaining focus on integral business projects. Ultimately, the client was able to break tight couplings to legacy applications and migrate to a modern hybrid cloud messaging solution, providing greater efficiency, flexibility, resiliency and the ability to power new solutions.

Why CJC - Our People, Our Expertise, Our Toolset

CJC is a specialist provider of managed services, with over 20 years of experience supporting data distribution platforms for enterprise firms in the capital markets and beyond. Uniquely positioned to understand the importance of mission-critical market data and message delivery systems, CJC supports thousands of servers, for hundreds of clients, in over 22 geographical locations.

As we continue to advance our expertise in leading platforms including Solace, TREP, Bloomberg, Exegy and Kafka, firms continue to leverage our holistic skillsets and tooling to migrate firms to new market data platforms and cloud technologies.

Our skills are underpinned by our partnerships with leading cloud providers such as Google Cloud (GCP) and our advanced knowledge of mainstream tooling such as Dell Boomi. Our monitoring tooling is constantly refined and improved, with almost 1000 internally developed plugins into leading systems. Additionally, our IT analytics system is enabled with machine learning-based anomaly detection, ensuring that we know about issues before they happen. All of this combined, provides the critical service of effective platform migration.

About CJC:

CJC is the leading market data technology consultancy and service provider for global financial markets. CJC provides multi-award-winning consultancy, managed services, cloud solutions, observability, and professional commercial management services for mission-critical market data systems. CJC is ISO 27001 certified, enabling CJC’s partners the freedom to focus on their core business. 

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