Success Stories

Sadly we cannot possibly present in this site information about all of the great projects and tasks we have taken part in. Since most projects we worked on are the property of our respective customer, we cannot take credit or present you with a proper portfolio.

However, we can give examples of cases in which vPrise Consulting was called in for help and how we contributed to the overall success of the projects involved. We won't name specific customers to protect their privacy, but this should give you a good indication of what sort of work we can do on various projects.

Performance - Profiling in a major bank

We were called to help a project within a major local bank, it seems the bank was given a guarantee of sub second performance for a specific operation within a newly developed J2EE system. However, the process took at least 7 minutes to run in the debugging environment and no one could figure why.
When asked for the profiling results we received the all too common response: "We tried to but it didn't work". Profilers are very easy to use once you understand the idea of exclude lists and how to operate them properly, it took us well over a day to get a profiler to work (this was a huge code base and building an exclude list for the portions we needed/rerunning the profiler was time consuming).
Everyone in the project had an idea of their own regarding the source for the performance problems, they were all wrong... At the end of the day we tracked down the problem to two sets of remarkably simple two column queries that were invoked repeatedly without caching the results.


Performance - UI Profiling

Profiling a UI has its own complexities, you need to understand the complexities of user interaction and perceived performance. That is why when we hear complaints about UI performance issues we reach to other tools first before we pull out the standard profiler (which we mostly use for memory tracking in GUI applications).
A customer of ours making use of proxy models in tables (developed by us) was complaining of sluggish performance and blaming the proxies, after a quick investigation we had discovered that one of the proxies recursed into itself causing 16 million method invocations per paint call. The fix was trivial and the UI was much faster after that.


Evaluation of libraries/platforms
We are often contacted in order to consult about a choice in technology, e.g. which platform/library should be chosen for future development. Some of our customers wish to go further and build proof of concept solutions in order to compare the advantages of each approach. We have made such comparisons for image processing companies deliberating between Java and a native library. We have also made such comparisons for different enterprise servers, tools and technologies.
We often found out interesting results such as Java's performance can indeed compete with native libraries. We have also found out the some open source offerings can compete with commercial offerings in some aspects, but not always and they shouldn't be taken at their word when they claim to support feature X.
Hands On Teaching

Probably the most common form of help we provide companies is just hands on work with their staff, its hard to quantify the amount of knowledge held by our developers after all of these years of Java experience.
That is why when one of our developer becomes a part of the team and works together with a developer in the customers team the knowledge passes more fluidly. We handled such cases in government contracts, banks and IT companies. In all cases the benefits were remarkable, within weeks the team members that had spent time working with our developers had become a focal point of knowledge within their companies. This is probably the most efficient method of knowledge transfer possible and it is remarkably fast since the knowledge is adapted to the needs of a specific domain.