SEATTLE – November 17, 2008 – Attachmate Corporation today announced that the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) in New York City is using Verastream® Host Integrator software to enhance the reliability and scalability of its online student registration and information system. Faced with a growing number of complaints about the slow and frustrating online registration process, BMCC turned to Attachmate’s Verastream Host Integrator software to create an easy-to-use Web-based application that provides students with faster and more reliable access to registration information.
BMCC, which enrolls nearly 22,000 students in various degree and continuing education programs, continuously seeks ways to streamline the distribution of information to its growing student population. In the late 90’s, the BMCC College Computing Center developed Panther, a mainframe-based student information and registration system to provide online access to schedule, grade and financial aid information, as well as the ability to add, change or drop courses. While the system simplified the once-manual registration process, BMCC soon learned that Panther lacked the scalability and speed needed to handle large numbers of concurrent information requests.
“Our old system frustrated a lot of students. After waiting anywhere from 20 to 30 seconds to connect to the mainframe after logging in, students’ sessions would often freeze in the middle of registration, leaving them confused about whether they had successfully registered for classes,” said Ethan Dumeyer, information systems assistant at BMCC. “The problem was magnified during peak usage times – such as once a semester during registration – because Panther would ‘burn out’ if too many users were logged on at the same time. It simply couldn’t scale to handle the increased demand of students accessing the system during that critical registration period.”
BMCC turned to Verastream Host Integrator to create a scalable, reliable online interface with load balancing and session pooling to help eliminate the impact on the mainframe, web server and network resources. Through the solution’s graphical design tool, BMCC was able to capture legacy functions – including screen navigations and data elements – in component form to help automate the registration process. Because the Verastream solution easily integrates with the college’s database, BMCC was able to take their existing web application code and integrate it with the default code generated by Verastream Web Builder to get the custom upgrade they needed.
“It’s amazing to see the speed with which we can now receive data from the mainframe,” said Dumeyer. “Verastream is smart enough to know what keys are needed to continue on and quickly maps and navigates those screens. Now we’re able to navigate to a page eight screens in the blink of an eye. We didn’t think that was possible.”
During the first registration period after implementing Verastream, BMCC immediately realized the benefits of the enhanced system performance, scalability and reliability with more than 21,976 students successfully registering for courses on the new system.
“During a peak moment, when approximately 160 students were concurrently using Panther, with the Verastream interface, I logged on to check the system’s speed and performance and it was as if I was the only one using the system. It was that fast,” commented Dumeyer.
Beyond the enhanced speed and reliability of the new Verastream-powered interface, BMCC has benefited from increased visibility into the system’s performance thanks to Verastream’s advanced logging capabilities.
“The old system provided zero visibility into what was happening behind the scenes so, while we anticipated problems every registration period, we never knew that the system crashed until the Registrar called with student complaints,” said Dumeyer “With Verastream, we can not only know, in real-time, how the system is performing, but we’re able to leverage the system logging to solve problems after they occur. This function has been invaluable to improving the performance of the system.”
About Verastream
Verastream Host Integrator is part of the Verastream legacy integration suite, a complete range of mainframe, Web and desktop modernization tools built to speed the reuse of legacy application investments. Verastream software delivers the full spectrum of basic rejuvenation to customized presentation and sophisticated high-performance integration. Verastream-generated services can be mixed, matched and reused to extend legacy functionality to new applications or users. No code changes to legacy applications are required.
Attachmate® Verastream software works collaboratively or as a stand-alone tool along with the company’s integration, legacy access, security and management products, enabling companies to extend the use of existing IT investments while they adopt valuable new technologies to improve their businesses.
About Attachmate
Attachmate, owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Cressey Bravo, enables IT organizations to extend mission critical services and assure they are secure and compliant. Attachmate’s leading solutions include host connectivity and systems and security management. Our goal is to empower IT organizations to deliver trusted applications, manage service levels, and ensure compliance by leveraging knowledge, automation and secured connectivity. For more information, visit www.attachmate.com.