Legal information retrieval company bets the future on migration of a core service delivery application from Java to .NET and wins big

Microsoft® .NETCustomer Migration Case Study

OverviewCountry or Region: United States

Industry: Legal Information Technology

Customer ProfileA leading technology and services expert in information retrieval for the legal industry

Business SituationA growth inflection point in the business and establishment of a globally distributed development team created the need for a new development platform.

SolutionThe migration of a primary service delivery platform from Java to .NET and standardization of development teams on the .NET platform for all development.

Benefits Better developer collaboration,

particularly enabling and sustaining a globally distributed team

Enhanced development continuity via access to skilled .NET resources

25% faster time-to-market based on increased efficiency and uniformity of code quality

Bonus benefits based on the Microsoft platform road map and integration including Microsoft SharePoint

“In the span of three years we have gone from 90% development on Java to 90% on .NET. We made a conscious decision to migrate to .NET, and it has turned out to be a tremendous benefit. We’ve enabled a continuous global development process and cut our beta to launch cycle time by 25%.”

Chief Technology Officer, Information Retrieval Company

Founded in 1999, a leading information retrieval company whose

customer list includes high-profile law firms and legal departments of the

Fortune 500 reached a growth inflection point in which they needed to

re-architect their primary service delivery platform, which was originally

developed on Java. In fact, at that point, 90% of the company’s

development portfolio was on Java.

Three years ago, the company made a strategic, “bet the future” decision

to shift their development to the Microsoft .NET platform based both on

the need for a next-generation service delivery platform and also to

enable a global team of developers to effectively collaborate using an

integrated development tool set. Now, the development portfolio is

90% .NET, and it has provided tremendous benefits to the company.

The benefits of the platform change include better collaboration,

enhanced development continuity via access to more resources skilled

in .NET, 25% faster time-to-market, and future benefits related to the

Microsoft platform road map including the integration of Microsoft

SharePoint.

SituationA leading legal technology and services company is the foremost expert in information retrieval for law firms and legal departments of large corporate clients. Since 1999, law firms and corporations have turned to them to help solve their document search, review, and analysis challenges in connection with litigation, investigations, and related legal information management needs.

The company addresses these challenges by combining advanced proprietary technologies with professional expertise in linguistics, statistics, computer science, law, information technology, process engineering, and e-discovery.

The primary service delivery application for search and retrieval—the heart of their business offering—was developed in Java by the founding engineering team. In fact, the overall IT development portfolio was 90% on the Java platform and using Java-based tools.

As the company grew amid the rapid growth of the e-discovery and litigation compliance market, a seasoned chief technology officer (CTO) was brought in to lead the company’s next phase of growth. According to the CTO, “My charter was to bring technology into the company and have a streamlined and seamless way to bring innovation to bear for our core search technology, which is our key strategic advantage.”

When the CTO joined the company, there was a team of 10 engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area, and plans were in the works to greatly expand the development team to New York and Mumbai, India. With this new team and development capacity, the CTO’s plans included a major revamp of the company’s service delivery application,

which was the foundation of their service offering and increasingly was being installed on-premises by their larger customers.

The CTO recognized the need to revamp his development platform as well, saying that, “by increasing the amount of development by a distributed global team, we really needed to move to a common set of development tools. At that same time, we needed the ability to attract and retain staff with the skills to do first-class testing and development that delivered consistent quality. One of the things Microsoft has, better than any company in the world, is development tools and support for engineers.”

The primary issue the CTO was finding with the Java platform was the consistency and uniformity he needed to count on to scale his business. He noted that, “There are some awesome Java developers, but the uniformity of quality doesn’t really exist. It can be all over the map in terms of what methodologies they use, what tool set they use, how good the code is, and how well it integrates. It’s just a pretty chaotic world compared to the world of Microsoft.”

SolutionWith his charter and strategy in hand, three years ago the CTO and his team commenced the shift from a Java development world to a more standardized development environment based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and the suite of integrated Microsoft development and testing tools.

A large initial element of the migration involved the complete redevelopment of the company’s primary service delivery application on .NET. In tandem with that effort, the newly engineered system also

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“By increasing the amount of development by a distributed, global team, we really needed to move to a common set of development tools. At that same time, we needed the ability to attract and retain staff with the skills to do first-class testing and development that delivered consistent quality. One of the things Microsoft has, better than any company in the world, is development tools and support for engineers.”

Chief Technology Officer

Information Retrieval Company

included a migration of the back-end database from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server data management software.

This migration to .NET was very strategic to the company and, therefore, not without risk. In fact, the ability to execute the migration would have a huge impact on the future of the business. According to the CTO, “It was a really big commitment because we had to run both systems for a number of years due to existing customers who had installed versions of the Java-based platform.”

The .NET platform and the technology supplied by Microsoft enabled a successful and seamless migration process. The new service delivery application was developed efficiently, and the company is now able to sustain its development activities due to the ubiquity of skilled .NET development resources, who can join projects in progress and contribute immediately.

Regarding the technology and tools, the CTO commented, “The [Visual Studio] IDE impressed me more than I expected. The integrated tool set that comes with .NET supports and enforces, in a good sense of the word, a certain way of building, writing, testing, and sharing code. All of that is built in an integrated way. For developers who get trained and use .NET, quality is more uniformly high as compared to Java.”

In addition to the development tools, the overall decision was further influenced by what the CTO call the “entire package” from Microsoft, including .NET, SQL Server, Windows HPC Server, and at that time, the road map for maturing capabilities like Microsoft Virtualization and Microsoft SharePoint technology.

BenefitsIn the span of roughly three years, the team went from 90% Java to 90% .NET by a wholesale shift in their development platform for their core service delivery application and the broader portfolio of IT development projects.

Better Collaboration Enables and Sustains a Global Development Team

The foundational benefit of the migration was the standardization on the .NET platform and development tools to build out and enable a growing development team distributed across the globe. “It is very straightforward and easy for us to build in the .NET environment with the kind of C# programming tools that are available from Microsoft and therefore it allows us to develop code as an international team,” commented the CTO.

In fact, the .NET platform and tools have been integral in the team transitioning to a continuous development process where development and testing work, for example, is handed off from the team in the United States to the team in India at the end of the business day, and the next morning is picked back up by the U.S. team.

Enhanced Development Continuity

Shifting to .NET has also helped the continuity of development as there are the inevitable staffing changes over time. With the Microsoft development tools, the CTO noted that it is not only easier to find resources skilled in .NET and Microsoft development tools, but also easier for these incoming or new engineers to engage and pick up projects.

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“With the move from Java to .NET, the cycle of going from beta to launch is better because we’ve built better code out of the box from the early stages of development. Overall, we’ve been able to cut the development cycle time by 25%.”

Chief Technology Officer

Information Retrieval Company

He shared, “We felt that when we were building up our engineering team in India and the States, it would allow us a more consistent way of attracting the right talent and of continuing engineering without being so dependent on the hero skills of any one developer.”

Faster Time-to-Market

As a result of the efficiencies in the development activities and the more uniform quality achieved since the adoption of .NET, the CTO noted the benefits related to faster cycle time.

According to the CTO, “With the move from Java to .NET, the cycle of going from beta to launch is better because we’ve built better code out of the box from the early stages of development. Overall, we’ve been able to cut the development cycle time by 25%.”

Platform Road Map Benefits

Another benefit anticipated by the CTO was that of the overall Microsoft platform road map and how the continued maturation and integration of complementary Microsoft solutions would play into the company’s longer-term IT strategy beyond the initial migration of the development platform.

An example the CTO shared in this context was SharePoint. Looking beyond the initial migration of the development platform, he viewed SharePoint as key to the next transformation of the company’s service delivery platform.

He commented, “SharePoint is another benefit for the company as well as for our application users in terms of being able to access the information in new ways. Even though we didn’t have a need for

SharePoint at the outset of the migration, we could clearly see the need for it as the business needs grow and change.”

The CTO of the information retrieval company summarized the magnitude of the strategic decision to move to the .NET platform by saying, “In our case, it was a ‘bet your future’ type of decision, and it turned out to be the right decision for us.”

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“In our case, it was a ‘bet your future’ type of decision, and it turned out to be the right decision for us.”

Chief Technology Officer

Information Retrieval Company

Visual Studio and .NETMicrosoft Visual Studio is a powerful IDE for developing .NET Framework applications that ensures quality code throughout the entire application lifecycle, from design to deployment.

The Microsoft .NET Framework enables developers to use the same set of skills to rapidly build quality applications for Windows, SharePoint, Windows Phone, Windows Azure, and beyond.

For more information about Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, go to:

www.microsoft.com/visualstudio

www.microsoft.com/net

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This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published March 2011

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