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Case Study: Lovells - Billing System

Assignment

Formerly Lovell White Durrant. Lovells is one of the largest international law firms with more than 2,500 people worldwide, including 257 partners and 1,200 lawyers in total. They operate worldwide with offices from Alicante to Beijing.

Their core billing and charging system is a customised solution based on the industry standard Elite software suite. This application runs on servers located at the London HQ and supports Lovells' offices worldwide. As such the system is required to be highly available and stable: problems with this system have immediate worldwide impact. There are approximately 200 users of the system.

The core Elite package is based on an Informix Dynamic Server DBMS running on HP HPUX servers for central storage of billing information. This information is maintained and retrieved via a suite of applications based on a combination of Informix 4GL, Microsoft Visual Basic and web technologies. The database consists of more than 200 tables and is accessed via a suite of menu-driven functions and reports. The web interface serves as a user reporting function to the core information.In addition to the live database server there are test and reporting servers based on the same set of technologies.

Why was JADe handed the assignment ? What were the problems they were having with the environment ?

Solution

JADe had responsibility for the support and maintenance of the overall HPUX and Informix environment. Support was provided in a number of ways.

Firstly, Lovells had an annual service level agreement (SLA) with JADe to provide second and third line support covering technical issues with the environment. The SLA provided the following services:

• Telephone helpdesk and email support during normal office hours
• Continuous statistics gathering and monitoring on the database server
• On-site visits and health-check reports
  
  Secondly, JADe provides consultancy within this environment on system administration projects such as disaster recovery, capacity planning, security audits, performance tuning, amongst other projects.
  
  Finally, JADe continues to supply bespoke development effort on demand for enhancement projects that fall outside the scope of the SLA.

Result

The continuing relationship with JADe means that Lovells retain access to the knowledge base responsible for the support & maintenance of the environment. This enables Lovells to maximise the return on its investment: even though the system is mature in IT terms, it can continue to be enhanced rather than be replaced.

During 2000 JADe had been responsible for enhancing the life expectancy of the core database server by at least 12 months by reconfiguring the Informix storage structure and thereby improving system performance by a factor of 2. This meant that the purchase of a new HP server, costing approximately £300K, could be delayed for at least 1 year.

Key Technologies

HP HPUX, Informix IDS & 4GL, Elite, Apache