Java Development

Top Television Network

Technology Service: Performance Engineering, and Flex Development

Gorilla Logic engaged with this client 4 years ago and continues to be engaged today. At one point, Gorilla Logic had 10 people working on various projects, many positioned in technical leadership roles. These projects included Video Players, Publishing Experience (CMS), Social Media, Advanced TV Services, Site UI and Design Services. The Social Media Application had to be built to dynamically scale to handle significant spikes in load with throughput up to 3Gbps. They needed the ability to spin up and ramp down as demand fluctuated. Therefore as part of this effort, GL also designed and deployed a private cloud for this client. The custom Video Distribution and Content Player were built with the ability to facilitate ad insertion and interfacing with the ad inventory system. Additional features included viewer tracking and timing. This effort included backend transcoding, work flow and approval processes.

Worldwide Leader In Unified Communication and Collaboration

Technology Service: FlexMonkey Quick Start Engagement

Gorilla Logic engaged with this high definition telepresence, video and voice company to assist their development and quality assurance teams in gaining an in depth knowledge and productivity with FlexMonkey, a functional testing tool. By providing 10 days of on-site implementation consulting services for FlexMonkey, the engagement resulted in customizations to the tool to fit their business needs, continuous integration, and test suites. Gorilla Logic was able to ensure that FlexMonkey worked seamlessly with the customer’s unique Flex application. A dedicated FlexMonkey expert trained and supported the company’s internal QA and development team, allowing them to address their unique testing concerns and challenges.
ROI: The Quick Start engagement increased productivity, established a Continuous Integration environment, enhanced the quality of the code being produced, and reduced time spent on manual testing. The client said they received efficiency and monetary ROI’s, but had the unexpected outcome of the QA and development teams beginning to work more collaboratively. Employees felt their efforts were more valuable because they were not spending so much time doing manual testing.

National Health Insurance Provider

Technology Service: Identity Management Application w/ HIPAA Compliance

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield (BCBS) is a national federation of 39 independent, community- based and locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies. They provide millions of families with top-quality, affordable health insurance. Gorilla Logic, working together with Sun Microsystems, implemented a portal for the State of Michigan providing self service to BCBS customers, care providers, and insurance agents. Because the portal offered access to private medical information, it had to be highly secure and HIPAA compliant. The portal provided content management and integrated access to what had previously been disparate applications. Identity information was managed via LDAP directories with multi-master replication.

Government Entity

Technology Service: Complete Application Build and Implementation of a Tax Collection and Apportionment System

Gorilla Logic engaged with this client 4 years ago, and continues to be engaged with multiple software engineers today. This government entity needed Gorilla Logic to help implement an updated platform and database to modernized their Tax Collection and Apportionment System to better serve their expanding constituents. Experiencing rapid amounts of growth, the legacy system was no longer capable of performing basic functions. After a number of failed attempts at fixing this 40-year old mainframe, this client decided it was time to bring in the consulting and engineering expertise of Gorilla Logic to build a scalable, efficient new system. Using technologies such as J2EE, and Oracle Database, Gorilla Logic worked in close collaboration with this client, to have success at creating a dependable, complex, and streamlined system to reduce risk of uncollected tax revenue, and enhance support and customer service to all taxpayers in their jurisdiction.

Healthcare Administration

Technology Service: Java Training and Center of Excellence

Engaged via a major partner, Gorilla Logic was asked to do a complete Java rewrite of a critical health application for an infectious disease and educate the in-house development team on how to support the application, as Java was a new coding language to them. The application was rewritten from the ground up using Java to ensure scalability, redundancy and robustness. With Java being a new technology and unfamiliar to existing IT personal, a massive training campaign was launched to educate and implement change management and support. The existing IT team would be supporting the application going forward so the campaign had to be a success. The solution was the Java Center of Excellence for the Veteran’s Health Administration, supporting over 500 people. The JCE included a community portal, training classes, and courses on best practice methodologies. The JCE was complete with an advisory council made up of participants, and it’s own internal marketing infrastructure. One of the most creative and beneficial creations of Gorilla Logic as part of the JCE design, was the Council of Architects.

The Council of Architects was made up of engineers that graduated from JCE after 6 months of intense education. These engineers would then be seeded within existing teams for technology transfer and team support. The seeding among groups created a shared sense of ownership. These engineers would then bring back to the JCE valuable input on the challenges being experienced from working within the teams. This feedback would be addressed and a solution would be folded into processes moving forward for a clearinghouse of best practices.

The JCE created a repository of custom training, and available reuse of existing code between groups. These numerous taxonomies of information provided a plethora of information that naturally formed four tracks for engineers to choose from;
a) Architectural Design b) Analytics c) Development and d) QA and Testing Services. The engagement expanded over a year.

Primary Online Retailer

Technology Service: Performance Engineering

Gorilla Logic initially engaged with this client 3 years ago, and continues to be an integral part of their team today. Among the many services provided for this major online retailer, Gorilla Logic conducts Performance Analysis and Acute Tuning for a variety of complex retail and customer facing applications within the organization, including the ever critical main website. Projects include customer rewards program as well as interactive applications to assist the customer in their purchase decisions. With major releases of these applications, the behavior of the Java Virtual Machines (JVM) can change, latency can be introduced and anomalies can occur. Part of Gorilla Logic’s job is to foresee these changes and plan accordingly.

Global GIS Provider

Technology Service: Java Development, Fortify, and Platform Migration

Gorilla Logic engaged with this client a year ago and continues to be engaged with them today. With a recent federal win of funds to enhance an existing product providing satellite image delivery, this client found they faced a significant amount of work to be completed on a stringent timeline. Their product would need to be migrated to a new platform with a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA); code would need to be updated and harden to a single, updated revision; and strict security elements would need to be integrated throughout. This security remediation was done using Fortify Software Security Assurance (SSA), a well known security product often used for government products. With frequent government audits, mandated milestones every quarter, and an aggressive 18-month deadline, their engineering team brought in the Gorillas to ensure success.

The work continues and has expanded into a second project to migrate a storage application from standard Solaris to a Linux OS environment. The existing GUI will be ported and functioning Solaris commands will also need to be ported to be Linux compliant. Technologies include Spring, Struts, Eclipse, Maven, Hudson, Junit.

International Financial Authority: On-line News Site

Technology Service: Architectural Assessment, Performance Engineering and Code/System Modernization to Achieve Unprecedented Scale.

Gorilla Logic engaged with this client for 2 years beginning in 2007. The summer of 2007, during one of the largest financial crashes in United States history, this client, that provides real-time financial information, had their website traffic increase by a factor of 4. The client’s website had an average of 5-million hits a day. However, when the stock market had one of its worst reportings on a Friday at close of business, investors became desperate for financial information as they contemplated what to do with their investments. Traffic jumped to 20-million that following Monday.

Gorilla Logic was called in with urgency to revamp the website and backend systems to support this added demand for information. Gorilla Logic brought in an experienced team of lead architects to redesign and enhance the performance across the clients web distribution systems for their .com site. This client had numerous complex systems including a content side, publication side and content management system (CMS) side. The vast amount of content came from 3 sources: editorial content, market information such as quotes, and syndicated financial news such as stock picking. All of this content was delivered via end user applications with heavy Java backends.

In addition to the vast amount of numerical and text data, there was also a significant video component that needed to be created, cut, and syndicated to be delivered to the website along with meta data. A separate stream was used for this high volume video that was delivered and cached via Akami worldwide Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Gorilla Logic’s roll was to lead the strategy to improve delivery of all of this content through their .com website. This work included solving garbage collection in Java Virtual Machines (JVM) servers, caching, building new indexing capabilities, and fine-tuning databases for optimum performance. Gorilla Logic was responsible for the performance engineering from the quality of the lowest levels of code to the data infrastructure. This work had a specific focus on market and end user data including authentication and all things related to subscribers. The technologies included Java, J2EE, Drupal, and PHP. Client-side technologies included HTML5, Java Script, Flash, and JQuery. The CMS was Microsofts proprietary solution. Gorilla Logic was also in charge of the historical pricing databases. Initially, these systems only handled US quotes, but as part of this effort, they were expanded to handle the International quoting system as well.

The results were improved inbound and outbound syndication from 25-minute latency to 3 minutes from when a story was received, repackaged and sent out. In order to reach this performance, on-line news databases had to be rebuilt along with the finely tuned search engines. The meta-data taxotomy for categorizing was also enhanced. Video CMS and search capabilities expanded full-text searches of not only text tracks, but to video and audio transcription as well. Video syndication was improved through a modernized platform, and integration of CMS out to Akamai. Lastly, Gorilla Logic reviewed and made architectural recommendations on their video flash player to accommodate ad insertion.

Fortune 100 International Financial Services Group

Technology Service: Design, Integration and Modernization of Rich Internet Application using leading edge UI technology, JavaFX

Gorilla Logic engaged with this leading Global Financial Services Group in 2008 and continues to do work for them today. Gorilla Logic, with extensive experience in the financial space, was brought in to modernize a Financial Analysis Tool. The UI of the application would be given a face-lift, leaving legacy UI technology of Java Swing for the modern technology of JavaFX. In addition, Gorilla Logic was asked to design and build additional features to enhance the functionality of the tool. The application uses equity derivatives to quickly calculate financial data and allow traders and financial analysts to run numerous investment scenarios, create charts, and execute data reports. With this highly capable research tool, the traders can feel confident when making a decision to execute a critical real-time trade. This application was once an exclusive internal tool, but has been expanded to allow portions to be available for external clients via a web-enabled portal.

A World Leading Fixed Income Management and Investment Services Company

Technology Service: Security Clearance System, Flex and Java Development

Gorilla Logic initially engaged with this client in 2009, and continues to be an integral part of their development team today. With over 5 engineers working simultaneously on different key projects at this leading investment firm, Gorilla Logic is one of the company’s most trusted vendors. With a compelling Flex front end, and a robust Java back end, Gorilla Logic built the internal system for managing all securities and clearance information and the exchanging of this data between disparate systems. This data share function has become an integral part of the client’s business. Gorilla Logic understands the complexities of the financial industry having come from that space, and has the strong technical background to provide end-to-end financial solutions.

Major Online Auction and Shopping Website

Technology Service: Performance Engineering

Gorilla Logic competed with a multinational technology and consulting firm to win the work for a large-scale performance enhancement project. As the winner, Gorilla Logic was chosen to complete the assignment for this Fortune 100 Company. Using technologies such as Java, Tomcat, and Linux, Gorilla Logic performed load and performance engineering to ensure max performance and scalability for the complicated search engine. The engagement also included an implementation of a new hardware in order to achieve the desired results. This website continues to receive massively high numbers of simultaneous users, and the work that Gorilla Logic performed continues to pay off as users are able to quickly buy and sell merchandise via this trusted on-line exchange provider. The project was completed on time with the targeted deliverables met.

Nationwide Hobby Retailer

Technology Service: Architectural Assessment, Performance Engineering and Code/System Re-Write to Achieve Scale

Gorilla Logic engaged with this client 6 months ago and continues to be engaged with them today. This significant hobby retailer had inherited an on-line scrapbooking application with a recent company purchase. Moving into the digital age, this application soon began to take on a higher priority with Digital Sales becoming a growing market. Working under a stringent deadline, Gorilla Logic was first engaged to perform load testing with the goal of supporting hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. While doing this work, it became clear that the application underpinnings were not optimal and the application had some scalability challenges. Gorilla Logic was then engaged to perform an Architectural Assessment and Performance Engineering Analysis. After this 4-week engagement, Gorilla Logic was contracted to implement their 9 critical findings to make the application robust, scalable, and reliable to support the valued and loyal customers of this retailer. Gorilla Logic continues to be engaged today doing enhancement work and now adding more engineers to an already significantly sized team to develop additional functionality for this feature rich internet application. The project was completed on time with the targeted deliverables met.