Joint JBoss/Red Hat Deployment

Winner - CompuCredit Corporation

Submitters: Guido F. Sacchi, CIO and SVP, Corporate Strategies, Cindy Hayden, Manager of Real-Time Integration
Vertical: Financial services
Location: Atlanta, GA

JBoss Business Process Innovation:

Used JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to construct an XML Gateway that serves as the company’s main real-time transaction hub—enabling rapid growth, increased productivity, faster service, and millions of dollars in cost-savings.

Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

CompuCredit Corporation is a leading provider of credit and related financial services and products for the underserved consumer credit market. Offering branded credit cards and other fee-based products, the company’s strategic competitive advantage lies in its ability to serve creditworthy consumers in a market segment often bypassed by traditional financial institution. For the year ended December 31, 2006, the company had over 4.3 million customer accounts with an aggregate managed portfolio of $2.81 billion in receivables.

Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

In 2006, CompuCredit was facing two challenges: one business related and the other technical. From the business point of view, our traditional method of using a direct mail campaign of pre-approved credit cards to attract customers had dried up, and we needed to exploit innovative new sales channels such as Internet-based marketing and real-time telemarketing. The ITA (Invitation to Apply) sales channel had a much more significant potential for growth, but required a platform where information was instantaneously available in real-time in order to effectively turn qualified leads into real customers.

Our second challenge was the real-time interoperability of many fragmented applications that existed in our organization. The applications ranged from “Fat Client” type to web-browser based, and were written in a variety of languages such as C, Java, Python, VB, and .net. Our ultimate goal was to create a seamless experience for users and customers (at the presentation or application layer), despite the fragmentation of the application and data sources.

What was the desired solution?

We wanted to create a solution that would quickly obtain data from different areas of CompuCredit, as well as systems outside of the company, and aggregate that data into a single view for the many different business units. It needed to provide interfaces for a variety of applications, such as Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM), credit card acquisition, on-line services, and even IVR (Interactive Voice Response). The solution also needed to have scalable, reusable components that could be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit.

Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss in the end.

In the past, CompuCredit had been primarily a Solaris™ shop. We had been running Apache but had to eliminate it since it only provided pure web services. When we started with the project, we looked at the available solutions for Electronic Services Busses (ESB), but couldn’t find anything in the marketplace that met our needs at the time.

We originally became aware of the JBoss solutions by reading press reports. We had previous experience with BAE’s WebLogic™ and IBM’s WebSphere™, but getting JBoss up and running was much simpler. These proprietary (non-open source) programs took a lot of configuration to get them working the first time. JBoss worked right out of the box, although we have done some configuration over time to streamline and optimize the system. Plus, we liked the concept of having a "one stop shop" for support of both Red Hat and JBoss solutions.

The last, and possibly most important factor, was that JBoss was open source. We like open source products for their ease of use and the availability of the open-source developer community. While we have not yet had the need to modify the source code, knowing that we can if we need to tweak something is a big plus. This is especially important for innovative projects, such as the new application and frameworks that we are building.

Describe the application you built using JBoss. What role did JBoss and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

The XML Gateway is a platform that uses all open-source applications with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the core. We were able to create a system that fulfilled our vision for the seamless provisioning of real-time information. The system now masks the complexity and fragmentation of data sources and applications. The XML Gateway was developed in conjunction with a network of partners that each brought their individual expertise to the project, but CompuCredit was the driver in the project.

The CompuCredit web framework relies on the XML gateway as one of the main transaction processing engines for all of our real-time services. The solution we created is similar to a home-made ESB that is focused particularly on real-time and web services. We believe that this is a very innovative approach to solving our problems. In the future, we want to look into leveraging JBoss solutions, not just for the XML Gateway, but for a wide range of applications within the company.

What value did you gain from implementing JBoss solutions and how did this impact your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

• The XML Gateway was a key factor in our continued growth. In absolute terms, we have doubled the number of accounts we service in just two years.
• We have also seen tremendous business benefits. Just the improvement in productivity in handling collection and customer service calls saved us between $2 and $4 million per year, and we have seen similar benefits across the entire organization.
• Having reusable components that can be used by all of the different business units at CompuCredit saved us considerable development effort. There are services that are used by all of the different applications, including customer service, telemarketing, collections, online services, customer acquisition via Real-Time Telemarketing (RTTM).
• The time that it takes to process a transaction reduced from minutes or seconds to milliseconds, resulting in increased productivity and greater customer satisfaction.
• The project was easy to implement, taking only eight months from beginning to end and involving the efforts of only four people: one full-time developer and three contractors.

Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (I.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)

The XML Gateway is a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) platform that uses all open-source applications, such as JBoss. It consists of three hefty Dell appliances running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server, Sun JDK 1.5, and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform We use Oracle as the primary database, but with some SQL Server. Each server runs two real-time incidences of JBoss and two hot-failover instances should they be needed.

Our application is meta-data driven. We built a large-scale User Interface (UI) for testing and configuration that allowed us to exercise the web services before exposing them to the customer. Then we were able to easily modify that UI to meet the needs of the individual users.

Our platform serviced 100,000 transactions on the first day, and is currently serving 4 million transactions per day. The average transaction time is only a few hundred milliseconds, and the performance continues to improve over time as pieces are honed and hardware improved.

Did you leverage JBoss support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

We have had several people on our team participate in JBoss training and plan to send more in the future. We are willing to make a commitment in training our own people so we can become proficient in developing and maintaining systems of this complexity. We feel that it is a good investment to have this capability in-house. We also used some of Red Hat’s consultants to help us “tune” our environment for peak performance.

We have been a support customer since 2005 and currently have a 24x7 Premium support subscription. We are pleased with our support experience. Everytime we have had to use it, the answers are good and quick.

Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

We are firm believers in open source. The common myth about open source is that it is harder to get up and running. We have found that the truth is quite the opposite.

You also need to take risks and work through the initial investment, which pays off in the long run. Writing the first web service is a lot of work, but once that is done, each additional service is easy.