who we are client success stories

Client: Global shoe and sportswear company

The issues: This client’s e-commerce sites, deployed in a multitude of countries and languages, are truly state-of-the-art in the way they embrace viral media and the concept of consumer-as-creator. Visitors are rewarded with rich media and an array of features that includes the ability to customize personal gear with colors and slogans, to create a unified look for a whole team (whether the literal kind or a merely a group of friends), and to store designs in virtual lockers for later use.

However, while these sites were excelling in presentation, they were failing in performance. When invoked by users, many features returned unacceptably slow response times, which interfered with inventory optimization, dampened the very user experiences the company was trying to create, and resulted in abandoned shopping carts and unfulfilled orders.

The company’s development processes didn’t help—many were largely manual with a high degree of exposure to errors. This client asked Clarity to come aboard to diagnose the performance problems with its e-commerce sites and to examine its development methodology.

Clarity solution: Based on this client’s challenges, environment, and technologies, Clarity selected a solutions architect and developer for the e-commerce evaluation and improvement initiative. The Clarity team delivered information management strategy services as well as application development services, and within a 12-week project timeframe, completed the following activities alongside the client’s development team:


  • Evaluated several e-commerce sites for the client's different lines of business in the Americas and the EMEA regions.


  • Monitored and ran test scenarios on several customer-facing and internal online processes, including View Product, Wish List, Add to Cart, Send to Friend, Store in Locker, Checkout, Credit Card Authorization, View Order History, service calls, and database calls.


  • Performed a current state assessment and gap analysis of the client’s architectural and development environment.


  • Performed a gap analysis between the client’s online product catalog system, which ran on an older version of the ATG platform, and the new ATG merchandising system.


  • Documented and presented all findings and recommendations to project stakeholders.

Results: The Clarity team diagnosed, documented, and eliminated several causes of performance bottlenecks to improve site efficiency and thus improve the customer experience.

The bottlenecks included:


  • Inadequate caching for frequently called items.


  • Misplaced caching at the server for transactional data, which changes continually at run time.


  • Synchronous order management messages, which required wait times for responses, rather than asynchronous messages that allowed for unpredictable or high volume orders.


  • A single database schema for both static data (in the catalog) and transactional data (orders).


  • Inefficient communication and inventory management processes when a single transaction included products from multiple e-commerce sites.



Clarity also implemented an automated configuration management process into this client’s development environment. Previously, developers manually checked their source code into a drop box file, and the configuration manager manually checked them out and compiled them. Clarity established a source control system that automates code checkout, builds executable files, and deploys them into production.

Finally, Clarity made many formal recommendations for enhancing this client’s e-commerce site performance and its development environment. These recommendations included:


  • Upgrading to the most recent version of ATG, primarily to migrate from the client’s direct attached storage (DAS) application server, an inefficient technology, to either a JBOSS (Java based) or BEA WebLogic (online transaction processing, or OLTP, based) application server.


  • Shifting from a global class path and global configuration path to a modular application deployment process to minimize system resource conflicts, reduce dependencies, simplify maintenance, and promote code reusability.


  • Developing, documenting, and distributing to the development team common framework codes and libraries.


  • Implementing session backup servers consistently across all e-commerce sites. In the existing environment, some sites used backup servers while others did not.

Technologies used: ATG Commerce 7.0 , DAS 6.3 , Eclipse 3.2 , Flash , J2EE , Java , JBOSS , JMS , JSP , Oracle 10g , Servlet , XML , YourKit Profiler