When Ravi Kumar, WebLogic Server Engineer at Qpass, went to BEAWorld in San Francisco in early September of last year, he had no idea he was going to find a solution that would revolutionize his test environment. But that is just what happened. What Kumar found there has helped Qpass to completely avoid many support cases.  In fact, according to BEA’s statistics, the number of Qpass support cases dropped from 13 to just 2 in a period of 3 months.

What is the secret to this radical change? Pre-emptive support. Ravi Kumar had gone to BEA World on the look out for reliable, scalable ways to increase the efficiency of his test and applications environments, so his interest was immediately captured when he saw a demo of BEA Guardian in action.

What interested him right away, he says, was “how [BEA Guardian] can identify existing and future problems not just in one domain but in multiple domains, and provide remedies that can help us fix potential issues and prevent a customer-impacting failure.”  Availability, he explains, is not only critical to selling the Qpass solution, availability is the solution.

Qpass, the Digital Commerce Division of Amdocs, drives the world’s digital commerce by enabling the selling of any product or service over any network, using any device, supporting any commerce model. Qpass works with leading providers such as Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile International, Alltel, MetroPCS, and Amp’d Mobile, so uptime and availability are especially important. That means finding products and services that allow the company and its clients to move more quickly, improve maintenance, and troubleshoot potential problems before they happen.

Kumar was immediately excited by the possibilities of BEA Guardian, so, when they were offered the opportunity to evaluate the product in a beta study, Kumar and Qpass jumped eagerly at the chance.

Kumar had reason to expect great things from BEA, because Amdocs and BEA have been longtime partners. The company uses BEA WebLogic Server® 8.1 Sp4 in its Qpass solution, which facilitates the growth of digital commerce by helping service providers and media companies realize new revenue.  Its relationship with BEA allows an incremental, low-risk transformation path to next-generation communications products and services.

BEA is the world leader in enterprise infrastructure, partnering with the world’s leading system integration, software vendor, and applications service provider companies. The company’s products, such as WebLogic®, Tuxedo® and AquaLogic®, are centered around helping customers to reduce their IT complexity, successfully deploy SOA and improve business agility and efficiency.

BEA Guardian, as the company’s innovative new support offering, moves from traditional support models to embrace a pre-emptive support paradigm. Focused on preventative troubleshooting and problem avoidance, pre-emptive support seeks to entirely avoid situations that might lead to downtime. In contrast, traditional support systems have tended to focus mainly on swift resolution and escalation. This allows BEA Guardian to prevent outages, optimize applications and anticipate and plug security holes in a minimally invasive manner similar to that of a virus protection program.

BEA Guardian has enjoyed tremendous success since its introduction in February, 2007, with its beta program encompassing 46% of BEA’s global and enterprise customers. Positioned as a value-add technology-based service, it was designed to improve both revenue-associated top line and the bottom line ROI for BEA and its customers, as well as improving customer experience and allowing companies to focus on value-add services without adding to headcount.

Guardian has already prevented 3,844 issues in customers' environments, and reduced average case closure times from a 28-days to 5-days—an improvement of 80%. Guardian has also eliminated one-third of backline cases, as it directly helps to prevent severe problems.  The program manages this by automatically gathering all the requisite files needed to rectify a potential problem, automatically opening a case, and sending the files to the customer support engineer, who can immediately start working on the case.  This avoids lengthy back and forth calls from the customer support engineer to the customer as well as the need to procure additional files or information. This automated process saves much time in resolving a problem and closing the case.

Preventing problems from impacting customers is key to business at Qpass. By managing the entire digital commerce lifecycle, Qpass allows companies to deliver a personalized, intentional, and innovative customer experience—but in doing so, it also takes on a serious responsibility to maintain reliable services. Once Kumar signed Qpass up for the beta project, Qpass put BEA Guardian to work in its performance-test environment and began to evaluate it.

Not only is Amdocs a BEA user and user of Guardian, but BEA technology is also a key enabler for many Amdocs customers through the long-standing partnership between the two companies. Amdocs 7, the latest release of the standards-based, industry-leading BSS-OSS suite designed for convergence, supports BEA middleware platforms, including BEA WebLogic Server and BEA Tuxedo®. This allows Amdocs customers to leverage their existing investments in BEA technology while pursuing the incremental, low-risk transformation path to next-generation communications products and services. Amdocs Integration Framework, the standards-based infrastructure for internal and external integration introduced with Amdocs 7 in January 2007, is interoperable with the BEA AquaLogic® Messaging product family via widely adopted industry standards such as WSDL, JMS, and SOAP.

Qpass has been using BEA Guardian actively in its performance-test environment since it enrolled in the BEA Guardian Beta project in September 2006. There, the program scans for potential compatibility issues and helps the team quickly isolate potential issues, find solutions, and pre-emptively eliminate problems.

The Qpass environment uses multiple tiers based on SOA design principles and a full J2EE application.  A Services Tier exposes SOAP & REST web services to enable integration with external partners and other remote systems. An Integration Tier leverages services exposed by other systems to provide real-time data for domains owned by those systems within the enterprise, such as Customer Management, Billing, Financial Authorization, etc.  The architecture emphasizes scalability and availability. Each tier, including the DB via Oracle RAC, is horizontally scalable, and both the Business & Integration Tiers are stateless, clustered and redundant, to provide uptime security.

Once Qpass began to plug BEA Guardian into its environment, several of the tool’s features stood out to Kumar as particularly unique and important: “The security advisories and warnings of potential Denial of Service attacks, potential bugs, or loopholes are all extremely valuable,” he says, adding his belief that their value will continue to increase as the Signature Pattern library grows and adapts over time. In addition, he says the ability of BEA Guardian to identify any performance-related configuration issue saves a great deal of time and effort.

Support and fast case resolution are also high in Kumar’s mind as he evaluates a tool like this, and so he was pleased at how easy BEA Guardian made his interactions with BEA Support, assembling just the right information for him to present to BEA and helping them come to a swift case resolution.

Security is also a top concern at Qpass, so Kumar was pleased to find that BEA Guardian is also a highly secure tool that will not compromise his environment or cause any stress. “Before we saw it in action, we would have been worried about technology like this being insecure or intrusive,” he says, “but BEA Guardian has no security risks. It doesn’t need a live connection, so we gather information when we want, and can transfer just the information we want back to BEA.” BEA Guardian technology, he says, is confined to a single PC, which eliminates any possibility of it bogging his systems down with additional traffic.

All this combined makes Kumar very excited about the potential BEA Guardian has in his environment, since he can see the cost savings it offers in terms of increased manpower and more streamlined problem resolution. “BEA Guardian is an ROI tool that is basically required to identify and resolve future issues before they can impact you,” he comments. For Qpass, the proof has been clear.

About Todd Chipman…………………………………………………………

Todd Chipman is the Senior Director of Worldwide Services for BEA Systems, Inc. Under his leadership, BEA Support has introduced innovative industry recognized offerings like BEA Guardian, Mission Critical Support Continuum, and Customer First which have dramatically increased support revenue, customer satisfaction, and loyalty.

Prior to joining BEA, Chipman held executive roles as SVP of Marketing at Allied Telesyn, VP of Product Management at CenterBeam, and VP of Research at Giga Information Group. Chipman graduated from the University of Idaho with a Bachelor’s of Science Degree in Computer Science and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

About Ravi Kumar……………………………………………………………

Ravi Kumar serves as a WebLogic Server Engineer in the Technical Operations Performance and Stability team for Qpass, Amdocs’ Digital Commerce Division. He is the division’s primary technical resource providing leadership and hands-on work for tuning, troubleshooting of performance and stability issues, as well as design and maintenance of growth/scaling plans. Additionally, Mr. Kumar oversees the design and implementation of monitoring systems to improve technical operations capabilities to manage, grow, tune and operate production instances.

Prior to joining Qpass, Mr. Kumar spent more than eight years with various major telecommunications, financial, healthcare and consulting firms such as Verizon, AT&T, Morgan Stanley, and KPMG Consulting. Mr. Kumar holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from the Regional Engineering College Warangal (RECW), recently renamed as the National Institute of Technology Warangal (NITW).