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Case Study: Avasta
(Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) version 
612k PDF)
Leading Application Management Firm, Avasta, Integrates
Reactor 5 Workflow Engine in 30 Days
The Challenge
As one of the leading providers of enterprise application management,
Avasta offers more than just simple system monitoring, but rather, total
technology-enabled process support for 24/7, mission critical enterprise
solutions. Avasta’s ability to automatically sense, diagnose and repair
application issues clearly differentiates them from other application
support organizations. As such, they knew that a robust workflow solution
could help them bring even greater efficiencies to their clients’ operations
– as well as, of course - to their own.
The question was whether they could find that solution. Although Avasta
was aware of the many workflow options on the market, they realized their
perfect solution would not only have to address every item in their long
list of needs – but be deployable almost immediately, so as to allow them
to get to market quickly and maintain their competitive edge.
Third Party Vendor Options
Avasta began by evaluating a wide range of workflow software options.
The firm quickly determined, however, that none of these was sufficient
to meet their unique needs. Although this evaluation included some of
the most well-known and popular products on the market, all were eventually
rejected for one or more of the follow reasons:
- Too expensive
- Overly loaded with unnecessary functionality
- Limited to working on a single, inflexible platform
- Poorly designed
- Insufficiently focused on the business process
Internal Development Options
Unable to find a third-party product to their liking, Avasta briefly considered
building a solution in-house. After analyzing the project, however, they
concluded it would take more than six months to develop an initial version
that would have only barely met their most basic needs.
Unfortunately, this meant Avasta was still without a solution that was
up to their standards. That’s when they learned about Reactor 5 from Oak
Grove Systems.
The Reactor 5 Solution
After a thorough analysis of Reactor’s capabilities, Avasta determined
that the product fit its needs better than any other on the market. In
particular, Avasta was impressed with Reactor’s:
o Elegant, low-impact architecture
o Pure Java technology
o Flexible “stateless session beans”
o XML-based messaging
o Flexible and extensible Reactor Studio process design module
o Scripting support using Bean scripting framework
The ability to license the Reactor source code was also very attractive
to Avasta. ”Although we almost certainly would have bought a commercial
version of Reactor 5,” reports Vince Sheffer, chief architect of Avasta,
“Its availability as source code put it over the top. Having the source
code gives us complete knowledge, confidence and control.”
The Final Results
As it addressed one of its primary concerns, Avasta was delighted by Reactor’s
ease – and speed - of integration. In fact, the firm was able to both
learn the software and integrate it completely into a number of its most
important applications in less than 30 days – a far cry from the more
than six months it would have taken to develop a substantially less acceptable
version in-house.
Indeed, Reactor already serves as the critical component in the core technology
orchestrating Avasta AutoAssist technology, which automates the repair
of repetitive failure patterns and other known application bugs.
Reactor’s flexibility will also allow Avasta to develop a series of generic
and custom products they plan to sell to clients in the future. In the
future, these applications will allow business processes to be dynamically
adjusted to fit individual client needs. This type of custom client level
automation control would simply not have been possible before Avasta’s
implementation of Reactor 5.
“After evaluating over 15 different workflow engines, Reactor 5 was our
clear choice to embed into Avasta’s groundbreaking Application Management
Suite,” said Scott Hanham, Avasta, CTO & Vice President of Engineering,
“in fact, we plan on embedding Reactor 5 into future applications as well.”
Providing the functionality they desired, and the speed to market they
had to have, Reactor 5 turned out to be exactly what Avasta was looking
for – the perfect workflow fit.
About Avasta (www.avasta.net)
Avasta provides automated and proactive enterprise application management
by embedding best practices into a proprietary technology platform. Avasta
relieves customers of day-to-day application operations burdens so they
can focus on core business, gain operational efficiencies, enhance end
user experiences and create new revenue streams. Avasta’s automated application
management platform and services deliver proactive 24x7 support for maximum
uptime across the application ecosystem. The company is based in San Francisco,
and its customers include Accenture, Documentum, MarketFirst, Sybase and
Toshiba America.
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