4.7. Current Results

The HomeSide on-line mortgage system has been phased in, going live for the call-center staff in September 2000, followed by the release of the new external Web site, in December. “Our goal was a system that would be truly self-reliant,” says Higdon. By taking the phased approach, the HomeSide development team was able to evaluate ease of use, scalability, and performance, before opening it to direct customer access on the Web.

By all measures, the initial shakedown was successful. Since going live, the application based on BEA WebLogic Server has successfully handled a daily average of one million to two million database hits, and 6,000 to 7,000 XML business-to-business transactions. When this account was written, the public Web site had not been open long enough to provide meaningful figures. However, based on three months of results from the call-center, the new application has improved call-center productivity by 60 percent alone, an indication of the site's potential ease of user for customers accessing directly over the Web.

Significantly, the system has plenty of room for growth. The development team embraced component-based development approaches, based on J2EE-compliant technology. This enables HomeSide's application to expand, through redeployment, into more-scalable distributed configurations, without rewriting the application. Aside from modifying deployment targets, the only noticeable changes will involve migration to BEA WebLogic 6.0, which supports the EJB 2.0 draft standard. The team expects those changes to be minor.