Vitria Case Study

Vitria Technology, Inc. is a leading provider of business process integration products and solutions for telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and other industries. Vitria provides specialized products for implementing Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and resolving business process exceptions.

Challenge

To simplify the number of installs for multiple operating system implementations, and reduce the number of software bugs introduced by custom coding.

Solution

Using InstallAnywhere, Vitria now simplifies the process of creating installers for its software products.

Benefits

Reduced time spent creating an installer by 75 percent, thereby creating a simpler process that decreased time to market, overall maintenance, overhead cost, and resources spent on coding.

VITRIA ENHANCES THE USER EXPERIENCE STARTING WITH THE INSTALLATION PROCESS

Vitria, a California-based company founded in 1994, provides business process integration software for a wide range of companies in telecommunications, manufacturing, healthcare, insurance, financial services, and other industries.

Vitria’s software products help companies integrate disparate applications and data sources to support complex high value business processes like managing and fulfilling orders, processing insurance claims, orchestrating supply chain interactions, and coordinating financial transactions. Vitria also provides specialized products for service oriented architecture (SOA) implementation and resolving process exceptions.

SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT INSTALLATION PROGRAMMING PROCESS

During the development of Vitria’s product, Business Accelerator™, the company re-examined its approach to installers and concluded that significant changes were needed. Historically, Vitria custom-programmed an installer for each of its combination of products for each supported operating system (typically four to seven variants of Windows, UNIX, and Linux). Creating a new product architecture for Business Accelerator was a great opportunity to switch to an industry standardized approach for developing installers and leverage the expertise of a specialized vendor in this area.

In addition, the custom-built installers required significant engineering resources to maintain after Vitria products were released. Each product’s custom installer for each operating system was a separate code base requiring separate modifications for post-release bug fixes and enhancements. Vitria recognized that a better approach to developing installers would free up development resources to work on other aspects of its new products in the long term.

“We needed an installer tool that could provide all the required functionality but eliminate the hassle of creating multiple versions and then fixing each version individually,” said, Ken McKnight, Sr. Staff Release Engineer at Vitria.

We could have done it through writing our own Java code, but InstallAnywhere supported the platforms that we needed. The uniform look and feel has made the process of installing our products a much better experience and product for our customers. We’re happy we chose InstallAnywhere.”

KEN MCKNIGHT SSR. STAFF RELEASE ENGINEER, VITRIA

INSTALLANYWHERE FITS THE BILL

With customer satisfaction and productivity at stake, Vitria selected a more universal install structure that would simplify the installer programming process. Their charter was clear: adopt a single source installer to reduce programming effort and minimize costs while delivering a better product to their customers.

Vitria began by evaluating various third party products against its previous installer tool set, despite some initial concerns about changing to an unfamiliar tool. Would the programming be more difficult? Would it introduce more bugs? Would it support all the platforms they needed? Would it work with their pre-existing build system for their products? After assessing several alternatives, Vitria selected Software InstallAnywhere for detailed testing. Vitria’s plan was to determine how fast they could implement the Software installer product into its software and conduct a side by side comparison to its existing installer tool. Vitria created a prototype and performed tests on the new installer.

The tests were completed quickly and the results were positive. According to Vitria, InstallAnywhere proved to be more proficient and easier to work with than Vitria’s previous installer tool set. The prototype installer they created with InstallAnywhere had 80 percent of the features that Vitria wanted out of the box and fewer overall bugs.

“InstallAnywhere is a world class set of installer tools that gave us exactly what we needed to create a proficient installer that we could base our customized product on. We had the flexibility to program the installer how we wanted it, without having to write any special or custom Java code,” expressed McKnight.

VITRIA BENEFITS FROM REDUCED DEVELOPMENT TIME

According to Vitria, InstallAnywhere reduced Vitria’s development time and effort spent on programming installers by 75 percent. The new programmed installers are productive and reduce user installation time and effort by 15 to 25 percent. Additionally, the overall quality of the installer was significantly enhanced.

For Vitria, the increased efficiency in programming the installer benefited the entire product development and delivery process. As with most software vendors, creating the installer was usually one of the last steps in product development. Unexpected delays would have delayed product availability. Instead, InstallAnywhere introduced an automated, efficient process that removed the installation process as a roadblock to getting Vitria’s new products to its customers.

With the installation process no longer a labor intensive process or a potential roadblock, Vitria views their experience with InstallAnywhere as a great success. InstallAnywhere gave the company the tool that they needed to move toward a singlesource architecture and simplify the installer process in a little amount of time.

Next Steps

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