Case Studies

From Milan to Dublin in Milliseconds on
a New Application Platform

With more than 44 billion Euros of total managed assets, MontePaschi Asset Management (MPAM), a company of Monte Paschi Group (MPSG), is an established leader in the European fund management market. In 2006, the company banked on the GigaSpaces XAP scale-out application server to deliver the integration capabilities and improved performance required to support growing transaction volumes between its Italian and Irish IT systems.

The new pricing system delivers extreme performance and includes a statistical "cockpit" that provides managers with the status of the company's performance, profitability, risk, and volumes, and easily elaborates 10,000 quotes realtime. ROI has been equally extreme-the simplicity of the development and testing phase allowed MontePaschi to achieve 100% return on its investment in GigaSpaces XAP before even going into production.

Answering the Call of Growing Demand with a Space-Based Service-Oriented Architecture

Since its launch in 1999, Virgin Mobile UK has attracted more than four million customers and established itself as the leading mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in the United Kingdom. When Virgin Mobile UK faced the welcome challenge of skyrocketing growth, it quickly learned the hard way that a traditional server-based architecture that relied on tight coupling of services could not help them meet it. During critical sales periods, such as the run up to Christmas, even short system outages could prove costly and potentially tarnish the company's great reputation for customer service. As part of a corporate strategy to grow its online capability, the company sought a new solution that would provide both the scalability to accomodate rapid, unpredictable changes in demand and the fault tolerance required to maintain continuous availability.

Today, the new system, powered by the underlying GigaSpaces scale-out application server, has proven resiliency and dynamicly scalable Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), despite the failure of some legacy components, and even when core direct sales increased by more than 300 percent.

When it comes to financial service investments and their high-performance computing (HPC) platforms, speed is king. Analyze larger volumes of data faster and with greater subtlety, you can make smarter, faster trade and credit decisions, reduce investment and operational risk, and improve profitability. A top-tier, US-based bank had adopted grid computing to scale its HPC resources. Now, it wanted to optimize application performance on the grid and use its grid resources for new classes of computing challenges, including transaction processing, databases and applications where memory latency and data persistence are crucial. It turned to Intel, IBM and GigaSpaces Technologies to prove the scalability of an innovative solution that would take its grid to the next level.

When BAT tried to replace its monolithic field order management system with one based on a three-tier relational model, it found the costs prohibitive. So the company switched to grid computing utilizing the GigaSpaces platform. Now 15 entry-level servers do the same work as the much larger computers they replaced – for the same capital investment – but twelve times faster!

British American Tobacco is the world’s second largest quoted tobacco group. With more than 300 brands in the portfolio, BAT makes the cigarette chosen by one in seven of the world’s one billion adult smokers. BAT has leadership in more than 50 of the 180 markets where it does business. The Group has 81 cigarette factories in 64 countries and employs more than 90,000 people worldwide.