A company in the life science industry experienced unpredictable performance in their Siebel application – queries that sometimes would return instantly would at other times take minutes to return. Other parts of the application was predictably poor performing. The situation had come to a point where users would have two Siebel applications open at the same time – one for running queries and another for working with the data when the query eventually returned the results. Naturally this negatively impacted the organization's productivity.

The client had previously engaged another well-known consultancy to resolve the issue; their suggestion was to upgrade the Siebel application. That consultancy did not inform the client that if the performance was bad today, it would also be bad after an upgrade; our consultant was engaged for a second opinion.

Through interviews with the end-users and a thorough, but sharply focused, analysis of key performance metrics on the Siebel Application and Database servers, our consultant pinpointed the specific queries that were performing poorly and were the root cause of the unpredictable response pattern across the whole application.

In a five-day engagement our consultant tuned the performance of a handful poorly performing queries. As a result of this tuning, a key performance metric (the cache-hit-ratio), increased from an utterly unacceptable 70% to consistently hover around a very good 98-99%. This was a reflection of that the whole application was performing well; the impact on productivity in the organization was immediate.

It may seem as if the case study above is an un-characteristic example of performance tuning: where a few specific changes have a drastic effect on the overall performance of the application. But it is not when working with Accelsior! In approximately two-thirds of the performance tuning cases we have worked on, we have made very focused changes that have had a major beneficial impact.

The challenge in performance tuning is usually NOT in the scope of the changes that needs to be implemented. The challenge is:

If you are managing a Siebel application or a user group that is experiencing slow response times and want to eliminate the performance issues, contact us now - we have resolved these problems on numerous occasions, also where others have tried before us and failed.

A resolution is probably closer than you think!