When Philips Semiconductors Division consolidated all of its applications into the corporate data center in 2000, the company took advantage of that opportunity to migrate to a common portal architecture through the combination of both an upgrading of application software and the retirement of legacy application software. Sun and several of its iForceSM partners were the vendors for Project Renaissance, as the migration was called.

The core functionality at Philips Semiconductors now consists of 14 extranet portal applications powered by a common architecture platform that can be used by distributors, customer care representatives, sales agents and customers themselves to access a variety of manufacturing and sales tools, resulting in enhanced communication and the ability to initiate transactions.

According to Bill Roeder, director of Worldwide eBusiness for Philips Semiconductors, "Sun had extensive experience in implementing Internet-enabled platforms. We have relied heavily on Sun for our hardware and software infrastructure. They have extensive insight in those areas as well as in their unmatched commitment and knowledge in working with Java technology."

The solutions provided by Sun and its iForceSM partners include the SunTM ONE Application Server, SunTM ONE Directory Server, SunTM ONE Web Server (all formerly iPlanetTM products), the JavaTM 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EETM) technology, Netegrity's SiteMinder, Isomorphic's SmartClient and the Oracle8i database residing on Sun EnterpriseTM 3500, 420R and 220R servers that run the SolarisTM 8 Operating System (Solaris OS).

Explaining the improvement in development cycle times, Arunabh Chowdhuri, technical lead, eBusiness Technology at Philips Semiconductors, said, "The adherence of our architecture to open standards, including the support for open standards by the Sun ONE software platform and J2EE [technology], provides us with a common services foundation, one from which we can reuse various architectural components and code. This allows us to significantly reduce development cycles and improve the time to market for future applications."

By a margin of roughly 45 percent, Philips was able to reduce application code as a result of reusing architectural frameworks and design patterns. Philips projects a 30 percent reduction in development cycles as a result of reusing architectural frameworks alone. Trouble tickets have dropped from 40 a month to two since the migration to a common architecture. Availability for the extranet portal is in excess of 99.5 percent.

The extranet portal network architecture is divided into a number of tiers: client, presentation, application, data and legacy, which means that changes can be made to one without the need for changes in all the others as would be the case in a monolithic configuration. The heart of the presentation tier is the more than 3,000 JavaServer PagesTM (JSPTM) technology templates that display content on the client tier and the JavaTM technology servlets that connect client communications to the correct business logic in the presentation tier. New end-user requirements are integrated using the J2EE platform components in the presentation tier. Philips simply creates new JSP technology pages and the Java servlets required to deal with new application services.

The final measure of the success of Project Renaissance is that it has provided Philips Semiconductors with a platform able to scale to support over 10,000 end users, a margin for growth that will meet the company's needs for years to come.

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