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DDJ: With us today is Alex Libis, Information and Data Security Manager of Opal Future Technologies. Alex, can you share with us a brief overview of Opal, particularly in terms of platforms and related issues?
AL: Opal Future Technologies was founded in 2005 to provide IT infrastructure for eight pension funds that are regulated by the Israeli government. The funds have over 3 million participants and more than $20 billion US in assets.

Our primary responsibility was to support eight separate legacy systems, which are running on a variety of systems ranging from Mainframe, UNIX/AIX, AS400 to Microsoft servers, and using various Databse systems including DB2, Informix, SQL400 and SQL server.

To reduce operating costs and eliminate redundant support services, the government tasked us with consolidating the eight pension funds' information management systems -- including customer relationship management, data mining, investments management, help desk, suppliers' management and a few dozen other services -- into unified system services, together with a central pension fund calculation engine and more than 30 terabytes of data.

DDJ: What kind of challenges did you face in implementing the system?
AL: We evaluated several commercially available portal servers to deliver the user interface. We selected IBM WebSphere Portal 6 because it offers secure, roles-based access to an integrated, user-centric environment. WebSphere Portal also integrates easily with our existing IBM DB2 Content Manager archiving system.

Once we made the decision to go with WebSphere Portal 6, we had less than four months to complete Phase 1, which was to deliver an intranet site that enables pension fund managers to administer the funds using a uniform set of applications.

The main challenge we faced is that several of our support applications are written in .NET, and we have limited access to in-house Java developers. We looked into rewriting the .NET applications in Java, but the process was too time-consuming. It took our Java developers two weeks to rewrite a sample .NET application in Java. At this rate, we figured we'd need about 18 months to integrate our .NET services.

DDJ: How did you tackle these challenges?
AL: We decided to pilot Mainsoft's Visual MainWin for J2EE, Portal Edition. The software plugs into Visual Studio and cross-compiles .NET code into JSR 168 compliant portlets, which run locally on WebSphere Portal.

For the proof of concept, we chose our largest and most logically complex .NET application. Within three days, our .NET developers integrated the application natively into the Portal and were able to extend WebSphere Portal's role-based personalized interfaces, single sign-on, unified navigation, inter-portlet communications, and other portal services to the .NET applications.

We were very happy with these results, and we purchased Mainsoft's Portal Edition to deploy the remaining .NET applications on the portal.

Today, we have Java developers and .NET developers working side by side in the Portal environment. Both groups can access the same Java classes/JSF objects to deliver Java deployments. Most importantly, Mainsoft's Portal Edition has given us the flexibility to rapidly design and implement the system without worrying about the language in which the components are written.

DDJ: How did it all turn out?
AL: Our team of .NET and Java developers integrated 6 .NET applications and more than 30 Java services into WebSphere Portal and, and we deployed the intranet site for employees right on schedule. In the process, our .NET team changed less than one-half of one percent of the .NET code base, so we avoided the risks associated with a rewrite.

We're well on our way to completing the next phase, which will incorporate 15 additional .NET applications and give accountholders online access to their account information.

DDJ: Is there a web site that you can direct readers to for more information?
AL: Our Hebrew-language web site is www.opaltech.co.il. You can also check out the project in English at www.mainsoft.com/ and www.ibm.com.

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