Wily Technology has announced that Maritime Cargo Processing Plc., the UK's leading specialist in Port Community Systems, has chosen its Introscope product to help Port Community Systems across the UK, to improve processing and logistics capabilities. The Decision to use Wily, taken by Colin Potter, Project Manager at MCP, follows the replacement of MCP's previous system, Felixstowe Cargo Processing System (FCPS) to Destin8.

Wily will provide reliability, performance and visibility of Destine8, a specialist system which helps increase the flow of information along the logistics chain - speeding up the movement of cargo in the process. By utilising Introscope to monitor and improve the performance of its application, MCP will have a single 360º view of its applications providing flexible management capabilities to ensure superior performance.

MCP was set up by the Felixstowe maritime port community, made up of port health, customs and the port authority, to develop, run and manage FCPS, responsible for improving operational efficiency and to reduce the costs involved in the trading and transportation of cargo through ports in the UK. Since 1984, FCPS has been running on various generations of the Honeywell/Bull platform as a COBOL application in a mainframe environment.

Historically, the application was reliable and responsive, forming a major revenue stream, while supporting 630 corporate organisations, with more than 2,500 users in over 18 geographical locations within the UK, but it was clear the system couldn't be relied upon to provide MCP with the additional capabilities needed for future requirements and growth.

"The real driver for change was really the need to lower the cost of ownership of the platform and products," commented Colin Potter. "By this time Honeywell/Bull had stopped any active product development and so we couldn't rely on our current environment to support any new technical capabilities. We were looking to update the system using an open environment using Java and DB2 on an IBM Websphere platform."

In January 2003, MCP embarked on the proof of concept testing phase and had started to research Application Performance Management (APM) solutions that were available, including Wily's Introscope product in order to monitor and pre-empt any technical issues. After rigorous evaluation of competing products, MCP selected Introscope.

"The Wily product was selected due to its ease of installation, which for a development team of ten people, is paramount," commented Peter Inman, Technical Team Leader, MCP Plc. "After three proofs of concept, Introscope showed clear and superior functionality. J2EE monitoring capabilities and the accurate dashboard views were invaluable while performing constant load balancing on the test environment."

The challenges that faced MCP such as the issue of being able to clearly aggregate statistics with WebLogic tools on WebLogic servers, was addressed with Introscope. The application could be tested before going live and after several repeatable loads successfully running in the test environment, Colin, Peter, and the team are confident that Wily was the right choice.

"Introscope has ensured that we have a system that can sustain and quickly react to the demands being placed on it and yet, can still grow with us to ensure we don't need to replace infrastructure in the future," noted Potter. "We can now see exactly what is happening and can prevent issues occurring, improving all aspects of the system."

MCP is yet to go live with its new Destin8 application but following the rigorous testing process, MCP expect to see a significant improvement in the performance of its application, to reduce the time it takes to rectify and identify any issues with performance, and to better serve the 2,500 users of the system all around the country.

Mike Fisher, UK Sales Director at Wily Technology, said, "MCP's decision to use Introscope demonstrates the superior functionality of the product and its ability to deliver increased performance and viability. MCP is such an interesting deployment and we look forward to continuing to work them as they bring the application into full production."