Perfecting application performance

A benefits payment provider builds its business on 100% uptime.

To manage application performance, Evolution Benefits starts right at the source, the code itself. "We sell our performance and uptime," explains Sean Erwin, vice president of application development for the Avon, Conn., company.

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Network Management Enterprise All-Stars

Guide to the '06 All-Stars Winners alphabetical listing WINNERS BY TECHNOLOGY Applications | LANs & Routers | Network Management | OS, Servers & Data Center | Security | Storage | WAN, VoIP & Convergence | Wireless & Mobility WINNERS BY INDUSTRY Construction | Education | Financial Services | Government | Healthcare | Manufacturing | Media | Retail | Travel/Transportation | Utilities Vendors to the All-Stars

To manage application performance, Evolution Benefits starts right at the source, the code itself. "We sell our performance and uptime," explains Sean Erwin, vice president of application development for the Avon, Conn., company.

Evolution Benefits sells a prepaid benefits card, called Benny, for employers to offer as part of their benefits programs. When employees sign up for a Flexible Spending Account or some other tax-favored benefit, they can use Benny to pay for eligible out-of-pocket and other expenses. The card payment system debits the payment from the appropriate accounts. "Employees no longer must pay for services, submit claims, and then wait for reimbursement," he describes.

As part of this process, a company's benefits administrators must be able to access at will the back-end application - a .Net/Web services-based Web portal called Benny Central. "Performance and uptime are key drivers in enabling benefits administrators to support employees," he says.

Via Benny Central, benefits administrators can use various tools to set up the prepaid cards for employees, provide customer service and automatically substantiate transactions per Internal Revenue Service guidelines, he says. Monitoring application performance at the code level was the only way to guarantee uninterrupted, real-time access to Benny Central.

The company gets our nod as a 2006 Enterprise All-Star for going above and beyond on application performance. Because this platform wrapped up in late 2005, application downtime has been eliminated while management-related costs are down by one-third. "Our app has to be up 100% of the time," Erwin says. "We needed a tool that could monitor performance and identify problems quickly - and not just the problem, but what the user was doing when it occurred. We needed to put the problem in context."

“We sell our performance and uptime.” — Sean Erwin, vice president of application development, Evolution Benefits

Evolution Benefits turned to AVIcode's Intercept Studio, a specialized .Net application-monitoring tool. Intercept Studio agents, installed on machines running .Net applications, monitor the applications for performance degradations, code failures, and security and connectivity problems. AVIcode's .Net Management Pack software sends exceptions from Intercept Studio into Evolution Benefits' Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) system. From MOM, it gets a view of all exceptions, including those not generated from the application, Erwin says. It receives alerts through MOM, then uses AVIcode's Intercept SEViewer to work the issue in real time, he adds.