Case Study: Andera
| Company | Andera |  ”We are particularly impressed with the performance and scalability.” Alex Abramov Engineering Director Andera |
| Application | Account provisioning for financial services. | |
| Server configuration | ScaleOut StateServer runs over 4 hosts and 12 remote clients. | |
| Reason for deployment | Needed to build out existing ColdFusion applications using .NET. Distributed caching was a requirement. | |
| Results | Functional requirements were met with acceptable performance and stability characteristics. |
Background
Andera provides online account opening and funding solutions for hundreds of U.S. financial institution clients in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. The platform must be highly scalable and available 24x7. Andera adopted ScaleOut StateServer® at the onset of a project to build out its existing services using the .NET Framework.
Challenges
The question of scalability cropped up immediately when Andera began to build its .NET platform. Clients redirect their customers to Andera's Web applications to open a bank account online, placing intermittent and heavy demand upon its servers. Volume is highly variable; clients range in size from "top 20" financial institutions to local credit unions.
Andera's SaaS platform must interoperate with third party services to qualify customers for bank services. That information is processed and run against applicable business rules to qualify customers for each bank's products and services.
Results
Alex Abramov
Engineering Director
ScaleOut StateServer was preferred because of its widespread market adoption in the financial services industry and attractive pricing structure, said Alex Abramov, engineering director at Andera. "The product works for companies similar to ours; people there trust it."
ScaleOut StateServer met Andera's rigorous requirements for scalability and uptime. It has also delivered robust performance. "We are getting distributed caching at almost no [performance] cost compared to single server caching," Abramov noted.
Deployment Details
Andera's development and QA teams used a two-node test environment to white-box test and stress test ScaleOut StateServer. After successfully completing testing, Andera rolled out ScaleOut StateServer in conjunction with its regular software release over a 3-4 month period. Andera initially developed a single service using ScaleOut StateServer and soon began entrusting it to more of its mission-critical services, as it proved to be highly dependable.
ScaleOut StateServer is used for Andera's backend services as a logical cache, as well as in its applications services stack. Andera has employed the product for two primary uses: caching the configuration information for each bank and caching session information for applicants. Multiple versions of business rules may be active in the cache, providing versioning control.
About Andera
Andera is the #1 provider of online customer acquisition solutions in the U.S. It pioneered online account opening with the first real-time account opening transaction in 2001. Since that time, Andera has evolved its platform to automate the customer acquisition process throughout a financial institution's various delivery channels, including their branches, call centers, and Web sites. Its SaaS platform provides easy development, high scalability, extreme reliability, and streamlined integration.
For further information visit: www.andera.com
