INDUSTRY

GoldenGate Software Inc., the leading provider of transactional data management solutions, today announced that the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), a global organization representing professionals involved in land, property, construction and environmental issues, will be using its software to support its online services for members. RICS is using GoldenGate solutions as part of a continuous change programme, to ensure that its global membership has 24/7 online access to information and services via applications at their data centers located in Coventry and London, UK. RICS realized that in order to extend its relationship with its members, it needed to improve its access to member data and information within its existing IT infrastructure which is based on an IBM DB2 database. Steve Howells, Director of Programme Management and Technology at RICS, said: “As a progressive professional body, we realized that we needed to make some improvements to our IT infrastructure so we could provide continuous access for online member services. However, we also wanted to avoid a ‘big bang’ solution that would take months to implement and so instead we decided to go for something that would allow us to improve the delivery of our existing systems and avoid any lengthy outages. Our member services applications run on a DB2 database but all our other applications run on Microsoft SQL Server. We needed a solution that could manage the migration of data between both systems and at the same time allow new applications to be developed using data from both the DB2 and SQL Server systems.” RICS also wanted to improve its disaster tolerance and recovery systems for its membership and other applications and, in the event of any unplanned outage, have the ability to fallover to a secondary system with minimal impact to its members. RICS will use GoldenGate’s high availability solution to synchronize the data bi-directionally between its two MS SQL Server systems in London and Coventry, UK - as well as the DB2 also situated in Coventry, which will function as a live standby. In the event of planned and unplanned outages, the data will be synchronized between the two systems and all global offices can access this information on a continuous basis. Before choosing GoldenGate, RICS looked at other solutions, but selected GoldenGate after rigorous testing against its member database. “Our testing of GoldenGate’s solution went so well that we signed up for it straight away,” continued Howells. “So far there have been no surprises; a good thing from our perspective. In addition, the GoldenGate system has required very little configuration and we have been very impressed with the support that we have received.” “We chose GoldenGate because the application allows RICS to efficiently move data between our DB2 and our SQL Server environment, bi-directionally and in real-time. By using GoldenGate as part of our solution, we know that our members will have 24/7 accessibility even if we experience an outage on one of our main systems,” Howells concluded. Richard Dobber, Managing Director for GoldenGate EMEA, said: “GoldenGate has built its reputation on the success of our customers. Application migrations can be complex and extremely time consuming. Experiencing any outage can seriously impact an organization’s ability to do business. We are very happy to help organizations like RICS keep their member applications continuously available, while improving their overall IT infrastructure.”