REVIEWER: Srinivasan Sethuraman, solutions architect, Wyndham Vacation Ownership.
BACKGROUND: Wyndham Vacation Ownership, a subsidiary of Wyndham Worldwide, is the world's largest vacation ownership business by number of resorts, units and interests. Wyndham Vacation Ownership includes sales, marketing, property management and consumer financing for hotels, resorts, timeshares and a property owners' association as well as the development and acquisition of vacation resorts. Through its three primary consumer brands - Wyndham Vacation Resorts, WorldMark by Wyndham and Wyndham Vacation Resorts Asia Pacific - Wyndham Vacation Ownership has developed or acquired more than 150 vacation ownership resorts throughout North America and the South Pacific. These resorts represent more than 20,000 hotel or resort units and more than 800,000 owners of timeshares and other real estate. Wyndham Vacation Ownership is headquartered in Orlando, Florida, and is supported by more than 16,000 employees globally.
PLATFORMS: We use IBM WebSphere for our Application Server and Web Server, a Linux operating system and an Oracle database.
PROBLEM SOLVED: Wyndham Vacation Ownership maintains a complex mixed-technology IT environment to support the company's three consumer brands and their online processes. Most of our applications are more than 10 years old. Historically, we've maintained a mix of Java and COBOL applications with some running on WebLogic and others running on WebSphere. Our primary integration challenge is to orchestrate services from different systems like WebSphere and .NET and expose them as a shared service at the enterprise service bus layer. This is not a technical challenge in nature, but sprouts from lack of reusable, shared services across different vertical domains like sales and marketing. Maintaining ten-year-old legacy applications had become increasingly difficult because the developers who built and maintained the application have left the company. The applications were poorly maintained, and business rules needed to be revised in software code in three or more places. Legacy applications lacked flexibility. We are an IBM shop, largely because of our COBOL code, but relying on IBM WebSphere has made our modernization efforts go a long way. Today, about 90 percent of our applications run on WebSphere. WebSphere has helped us more easily maintain our applications, while enhancing our flexibility and modernization efforts.
PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY: We use IBM WebSphere 7.0 as our application server. Within WebSphere we have decision services for contract processing rules that determine when to charge fees and how much.
STRENGTHS: The main strengths of the product are its flexibility, performance, and integration abilities.
WEAKNESSES: For support, ILOG's professional services offered us more than what we think we needed at the time. The company's support responses could have been quicker, but when they did respond, they provided a lot of information.
SELECTION CRITERIA: We have been an IBM shop since before I joined the company, so WebSphere has been a natural part of our IT environment.
DELIVERABLES: Through ILOG's JRules, we receive reports on static rule analysis and a summary of rule projects to easily validate the rules.
VENDOR SUPPORT: I've never really had much interaction with IBM's support because I haven't needed it.
DOCUMENTATION: The documentation is very thorough, though again, I haven't had a need for it.
IBM WebSphere & ILOG JRules
ILOG
1195 West Fremont Ave.
Sunnyvale, CA 94087
(408) 991-7000
Product reviews are customer testimonials. We thank the author of this review for taking the time to share his or her expertise.
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