Success Stories

BNP Paribas Insurance For several years BNP Paribas Insurance had deployed infrastructure for its applications but it was becoming more and more difficult to evolve its framework. The need for a mapping tool between Java objects and relational tables was raised very early, because previous testing was unsatisfactory. “After using our in-house solution for two years, object modeling created new requirements for our mapping framework,” relates Richard Thibault (Internet Development Manager). “We were looking for a better solution and the decision to replace our internally developed framework was taken.” BNP Paribas Insurance was looking for a transparent approach where the data access solution would not impose specific constraints to the object models. The product had to be reliable, easy to use and they wanted it to deliver the highest possible performance. Xcalia delivered this capability with XIC. BNP Paribas Insurance has now deployed XIC on 40 different Insurance applications. “Xcalia reacted promptly to our requests. The product was found to be very reliable and it performed well. We found that there was a real advantage in using XIC, confirmed by the stability of the applications we built with it,” states Richard. “XIC over-achieved on our expectations and is now used in all new developments. Performances were very significantly improved and complex operations are now performed in less than 2 or 3 seconds instead of 20.”
Conselleria de Sanitat de Valencia La Conselleria de Sanitat de la Generalitat Valenciana (Conselleria de Sanitat) is one of the most forward-thinking health care providers in Europe, serving more than five million residents through 28 hospitals and 600 primary care centers in the valencia region of Spain. As part of it s ongoing commitment to best serve its patients, Conselleria de Sanitat created the Orion Project, a four-year strategic IT initiative to update its hospital administration systems, and meanwhile re-engineer its heterogeneous business applications and data management infrastructure. “While it made sense for Conselleria de Sanitat to deploy packaged applications for its hospital administration group at headquarters, our team determined that it needed to create its own Java-based application infrastructure to support the clinical group,” “Because the next-generation data management piece of the Orion Project was so strategic to our organization, we needed to have the most advanced technology available, and Xcalia proved itself to be the clear best choice. We were so pleased with the speed and ease of implementation of Xcalia Intermediation Core on our first project that we’ve since decided to implement the platform at 27 more hospitals.” said Ricardo Garcia Mataix. Technical Coordinator, Orion Project, Conselleria de sanitat. Ricardo Garcia Mataix added, “Xcalia Intermediation Core is a very powerful, strategic solution that helped us reach our goals and the support we received was beyond expectation; it has been a very positive experience. Even though Xcalia is in France and we are in Spain, we feel that we have a very close technology partnership.” ++ Read the Case Study ++ Understand Xcalia's vision and technology leveraging the SDO standard Ask Xcalia how they can help deliver today the foundation of SOA in your enterprise through universal Data Access.
Generali Generali provides employee benefit based insurance services to companies operating across international borders and their internationally mobile employees. The insurance applications that Generali used Xcalia for include car, multiple risk, salary coverage, labor accident coverage, and corporate coverage. Generali needed to upgrade its previous persistence solution that had been internally developed because it could not scale to keep up with the growing business demands. It was not based on industry standards and was too expensive to maintain, so the decision was made to replace it with Xcalia. The solution needed to work seamlessly with other infrastructure components, namely IBM WebSphere and Oracle which Xcalia does. Xcalia was the ideal solution and by the end of 2006, 85% of Generali Insurance Branches and 25% of the insurance contracts will be managed through XIC. All other contracts will be migrated in 2007. “We are really happy with Xcalia. The product functionality and the performance benefits are great and the team was so responsive; I have never seen anything like it before! Xcalia has shortened the deployment timeframe and significant improvements have been made in application and data speed. Specifically, data read performance was improved by 40 percent, and for batch programs the run time was decreased by a factor of seven." said Marc Abbt, CIO of Generali Switzerland. “As we continue with new SOA-based initiatives, Xcalia Intermediation will help us improve our business intelligence and compliance management systems and better integrate redundant processes and systems globally. We can keep our legacy applications but use common services to pull together the important data from different systems as new composite applications. We are migrating our mainframes to distributed applications and Xcalia will help us easily access and reuse these valuable assets.” ++ Read the Case Study ++ Understand Xcalia's vision and technology leveraging the SDO standard Ask Xcalia how they can help deliver today the foundation of SOA in your enterprise through universal Data Access.
Thales Thales is a leader in aerospace and defense. They occupy either first or second position within virtually every sector in which they are present and they are the only aerospace and defense player that has complete vertical integration. The company employs over 65.000 people the world over and over 60% of their workforce can be described as "knowledge workers". To serve this community Thales built a knowledge management portal designed to help employees share experience across organizational and geographic boundaries. The portal was successful from a business perspective but could not handle current and future scalability requirements. Thales' R&D team wanted to reduce the charge on the database to speed up response times and receive more simultaneous connections to improve performance. They also wanted to find a solution that could provide a framework for heterogeneous data access. “We needed a new framework for database access and Xcalia (with JDO) promised fully transparent persistence that would ensure high performance of our Knowledge Management Portal. This approach would allow our development teams to focus on the business object model so that business concerns could be fully taken into account. We believed that this would also help us to reduce the development effort and improve the quality of the final application.” Daniel Anglade Knowledge Management Portal Project Member – Thales Thales enjoyed several benefits as a result of implementing Xcalia as its data access solution. Development teams noticed that their job was much simpler with XIC's dynamic mapping feature. They were able to concentrate on developing business functionality without having to worry about manual resource mapping. This allowed them to work more quickly and more effectively. The benefits of XIC did not stop with development. Runtime teams noticed significant performance improvements. Now the platform can handle five times more simultaneous connections and response time is 4 times faster. As a bonus unscheduled downtime was eliminated. ++ Read the Case Study ++ Understand Xcalia's vision and technology leveraging the SDO standard Ask Xcalia how they can help deliver today the foundation of SOA in your enterprise through universal Data Access.
Conforama Conforama needed to supply 180 stores with real time marketing information and sales promotion programs so that their profitability would improve and they would be able to make a stronger contribution to the group. Previous manual handling did not let the stores implement the marketing decisions and sales promotions on time and accurately, resulting in lost revenue. When designing a new application the development team needed to guarantee data would be accessed with optimal performance by isolating this process and being able to tune it independently. Xcalia provided that capability with XIC. As a result the client can now adjust the marketing and sales programs every two hours instead of daily so that stores can implement just-on-time promotions that have been designed to maximize revenues. ++ Understand Xcalia's vision and technology leveraging the SDO standard Ask Xcalia how they can help deliver today the foundation of SOA in your enterprise through universal Data Access.
Logement Français Logement Français wanted to reduce vacancy periods between rentals, minimize administrative costs and eliminate invoice processing. Most of their information was stored on legacy systems that could not be easily "re engineered" to meet these 3 business goals. They wanted to develop a new Internet application that could provide real time data issued from the legacy systems to end-users. Xcalia provided that capability with LiDO. The client was able to reduce the average vacancy period from 4 weeks to 1 week in the first year and eliminate all administrative costs associated with the 40 000 invoices. ++ Understand Xcalia's vision and technology leveraging the SDO standard Ask Xcalia how they can help deliver today the foundation of SOA in your enterprise through universal Data Access.