Lane Financial International is one of the world’s largest brokerages. Over the past five years, brokerage and annuities firms have become the most regulated businesses in the entire world. In accordance with our mission statement, we at LFI make every effort to be in complete compliance with the law. As we see the law become increasingly more intrusive each and ever year, we also seek to stay several steps ahead, so we do not lose our customers in the face of political change. It is because of this attitude that we have established advantages over many other firms which have been in this business many decades longer than ourselves.
Business Requirements
The Information Technology department at LFI is renowned for its swift development and agile solutions. The department to date has never let the business down, and has been one of the largest factors in the company’s success. Like any business, the areas we continually try to improve are the areas which consistently show the most need for improvement. For this reason, the IT department has never been in the spotlight, as far as criticism is concerned. However, with the growing regulations on the business, the increasing complexity of the systems, and many of our key IT staff retiring in the near future, we believe it will be worthwhile to create some additional internal tools to manage these sensitive systems.
At present, upper level IT management personnel have complete control of the production environments for all of our applications. These managers control what content gets published, and what content needs to be reviewed. They organize and order regression and load tests, and they are in a sense, the key holders for all of our systems. Almost everything they do in their jobs is a manual process.
All of the production environments are backed up daily at minimum, while others are backed up hourly by tape. In the event that something does break, although it never has come to that, the process for restoring the backup is long and arduous, as often times the tape that is needed is stored off-site. With the coming changes of retirements and new regulations, we no longer feel safe with our manual processes, and we do not believe our backup system is adequate for our needs in and of itself. We also believe it would be worthwhile from a cost perspective to not directly replace these employees, but instead create a tool which will allow existing employees to take on their responsibilities with very little effort. See Evaluation for complete requirements.
Constraints
The project must be completed by July 07, 2008. Bids must be submitted before December 15, 2007. Cost must be under $400,000.
Evaluation
The proposal will be evaluated on how well it meets the following mandatory business requirements:
- Track all changes to web and database servers, including:
- Complete before and after webpage code.
- SQL, T-SQL, and PL-SQL code executed to change a database
- Date and time
- User who made the change
- Be able to undo all changes to web and database servers.
- Store and execute compete regression tests.
- Be user-friendly.
- Be deployable for any one application, which may consist of up to five web servers and five database servers.
- Be scalable to deploy on any two-tier web application.
- Have password protected access controls
- Must have a warrantee or support license of at least five years
Optionally, the program should also:
- Be able to redo changes to web and database servers that were previously undone.
- Be capable of simulating load and stress tests
- Have a programmable interface to expand tests.
Expectations
All bids must meet the requirements in the evaluation section. The bid submission must include:
- Cost estimate
- Timeline of development and implementation
- Additional/Optional features
- Product specs
- System and compatibility requirements
- Licensing or purchase plan
- Vendor history and references
