Boomerang History - Project Redstone

When we first started our efforts under Boomerang, we created an example for one of our early customers. This customer runs a series of very successful resort, casino and other hospitality destinations across the United States. They ran components of their IT on IBM iSeries mainframes, Java components connected with message oriented middleware, and a large data warehouse. In spite of the hard work of a good sized team in house, they were still unable to come up with solutions to some of the businesses' needs. In this case they wanted to better track and manage how their properties in the lucrative Las Vegas market were performing.

The data that represented what they wanted to know was scattered across several systems, most of which had no normal means of integration, and thus their problem. Using the current industry state of the art would have resulted in another J2EE system that the estimated would take over 12 months to complete.

We applied the principles of "Content Based Integration" to the problem and the Boomerang Feedkit. Our Feedlet's (small Java programs that produce tagged content from enterprise data) scavenged from the Mainframes, the data warehouse and other sources to create a comprehensive, up to the minute picture of several key performance indicators for each property. Furthermore because we created a conforming XML feed for each property, we could use a Fuselet (a small Java program that fuses content based on tag and aspect aggregation) that would create a view of this information across the entire Las Vegas market.

This effort took weeks rather than months, left the important data and systems untouched and in place, and created a new integration channel "out of band" with minimal impact on existing operations. Information on key business concepts, such as how many people were at a property, and what games they were playing (and how much was being wagered) was now available via a simple machine to machine interface to other systems.

Like the original "Redstone" it was a bit of an experiment that was used to prove a point. Our concepts worked, and Redstone was our first successful feed system. Suffice to say the customer was impressed.