CGI banks on VERITAS Software for J2EE application performance management.

VERITAS Software Corporation (Nasdaq:VRTS) recently announced that CGI Group, Canada's largest independent IT services firm, has helped one of its leading banking clients cut response time in half for a Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE)-based online banking application by using VERITAS Indepth for J2EE and VERITAS Insight application performance management (APM) software.

CGI's client, a major Quebec-based bank, was growing increasingly frustrated with slow and inconsistent response times for its Web-based banking system--especially from "burst loads" during its peak business seasons. The bank engaged CGI to ensure that its systems and applications could perform at an optimal level and scale to meet user demand. Faster application response times mean faster communications among the bank's branches and translate to more productive employees and more satisfied customers.

"We deploy integrated VERITAS solutions to manage application performance end-to-end to ensure that our clients' J2EE-based Web applications run at peak performance," said Sebastien Vignal, systems administrator, CGI Group, Inc. "VERITAS' J2EE-based Web application performance management solutions exceed our expectations as well as those of our clients. Other companies we looked at could not deliver such a comprehensive solution."

Using the VERITAS APM software's drilldown and analysis capabilities in both quality assurance and production environments, CGI analyzed the performance of the bank's 32 BEA WebLogic Servers running Sun Solaris 8 to create a comprehensive view of application activity. A slight tuning problem within a Java Virtual Machine was quickly identified to be causing a steady increase in memory consumption. Correcting the problem improved application performance and nearly doubled processing speed.

In addition, CGI applied the automatic Adaptive Instrumentation capability introduced by VERITAS earlier this year (See related news release, "VERITAS Raises the Bar for J2EE Application Performance Management," issued March 2, 2004) to significantly reduce the time it takes to isolate J2EE performance issues and increase server availability.

"Through Adaptive Instrumentation, we can tag potential performance issues and automatically activate VERITAS Indepth for J2EE's instrumentation only when a real problem occurs," explained Vignal. "This capability saves the hassle of having to take the application offline by stopping and restarting the server when a problem occurs. Now, I can run the instrumentation automatically without affecting application performance or losing valuable information."

CGI combines the power of the VERITAS and BEA alliance to deliver utility computing solutions that are designed to enhance application availability, manageability and performance and proved a significant factor in CGI's selecting VERITAS to help optimize its customers' Web-based applications. The two companies have integrated VERITAS Indepth for J2EE software with BEA WebLogic Server to help optimize the performance of WebLogic-based applications, helping customers achieve maximum productivity by proactively managing the performance of their applications--from development to production deployment.