Facilitating a Smooth TIBCO 6.4 to 6.9 Upgrade for an Arts and Crafts Retailer

Organization

Our client is a well-renowned arts and crafts retailer with over 1,250 stores across North America, fostering artistic expression for all. Their diverse family of brands caters to every creative whim, from seasoned artists to budding enthusiasts. Dedicated teams exceeding 50,000 strong empower customers through expertise, workshops, and an online haven. This dedication to quality, innovation, and inspiration ignites possibilities, transcending generations.

Challenge

Our client needed to upgrade their existing TIBCO BW 6.4 environment to BW 6.9, for which XTIVIA was chosen as the implementation partner. Upgrading from TIBCO BW 6.4 to 6.9 presents a unique set of challenges. Upgrading to 6.9 is not straightforward, as applications need to be upgraded to 6.7 first and then to 6.9. XTIVIA meticulously planned the upgrade, addressing key hurdles like TIBCO BW 6.9 environment upgrade, compatibility testing, code upgrade, and code repository setup.

Due to complex interdependencies, upgrading the existing mission-critical system powering the business was a high-risk effort.

Solution

XTIVIA brings its rich experience of business continuity and reliability engineering in infrastructure upgrades. The client had a unique set of constraints, for example, sticking to legacy RHEL 6. Hence, we had to work around this by evaluating each product’s latest version for compatibility with RHEL 6 and the latest versions of various dependent TIBCO products. Business continuity and minimal upstream/ downstream application impact were seamlessly handled by:

• Creating a new TIBCO environment (TIBCO Home) to install BW 6.9 alongside the existing BW 6.4 folders, thus creating a logical separation between the old and latest version.
• Co-existence of old and new TIBCO home on the same server ensured a rolling deployment of applications without needing client applications to change any Host or IP.
• The firewall rules also did not need to be changed.
• Refactored the code to BW 6.7 and tested it in the local environment.
• Refactored 6.7 code to 6.9 and again tested in the local environment.
• EAR comparison between 6.4 and 6.9 code was completed to ensure no business-related changes were introduced accidentally.
• Followed industry best practices in code maintenance and security.
• Provided extensive documentation to the client for future reference.
• Completed knowledge transfer to the client’s technical team was provided.

BUSINESS RESULT

With XTIVIA’s profound knowledge and experience in TIBCO BW systems, our client was able to see the smooth transition to 6.9 version usage by end users. In addition to code upgrades, XTIVIA provided guidelines to maintain application code and infrastructure.

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