Providing strategic advice to manage the long-term constraints of a legacy system, while implementing short-term measures to improve its performance

Frustrated that change requests were taking too long to be implemented and made live, our commodities client acquired the trading platform that they had previously leased from a third-party vendor.

BJSS was engaged to maintain and enhance this 30-year old VB6 platform on a non-relational database, deploy new projects and components, and customise it to meet the client’s own specific needs.

We started by working closely with our clients and their previous vendor to understand the system's complexities

As the platform comprised a legacy platform of older technologies, it struggled to maintain the amount of data and records it was transacting, so our initial focus team was to improve its performance. At the same time, BJSS provided strategic advice, helping the client to consider the long-term constraints of the system while implementing short-term measures to improve its performance. For example, a custom-built archiving tool was developed to migrate old contracts, data and trades that were no longer required in the live transactional database and were slowing the system down.

BJSS also played a key role in improving the way that our client delivered releases, making the process quicker, easier and less risky. Recognising the old architecture, and the way that VB6 works, a project was initiated to split the platform’s code so that separate parts of the business would have different components, making it easier to release components without affecting and requiring downtime of the entire global system. This enhancement allowed our client to move from a release cycle of two to three months, which required a full global downtime of the system, to being able to deliver new software versions every two weeks with minimal impact to users.

A new delivery model created by BJSS enables our client to achieve substantial performance improvements

Our client received new processes and tools for archiving its trading platform so that all the data was moved out of the live database into an archive. This, in tandem with a new delivery model created by BJSS, enabled the client to achieve substantial performance improvements across its platform and to deploy new versions on a fortnightly basis. Our delivery also enabled them to deliver hotfixes for any P1 / Severity 1 issues – an outcome they had not previously been able to achieve.