LinkedIn and Xing profiles

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

You might take a look to my LinkedIn and Xing profiles clicking on the following pictures:

Good luck Djibril

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Tonight the French soccer team played against China in a training match for the World Cup 2006 in Germany.

After 11 minutes, Djibril Cissé, was hurt and it seems that his right leg is broken.

I just want to say that I really like this player, and that I am pissed off by this stuff.

So Djibril good luck for your recover.

[ Currently Playing : Run Baby Run - Garbage - Bleed Like Me (03:58) ]

Opening users access to the new ecenter solutions platform

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Tuesday 6th, June 2006 we launched our new platform to the 12 000 users. This was a big day for us after lots of efforts we finally made it.

After 15 minutes of pure stress because of an issue on a front end server, we finally had a platform running without any major issue. The platform is running since two days now and we received wonderful feedback about the response time. 

The last days and first minutes really showed us the importance of having two production streets in fail over mode. And this part was fully tested ;-)

Now we enter a stabilization phase, and for the moment only two adaptations on the front end. Not bad with such a complex project.

As next step we planned horizontal scalability of the architecture and it will really allow us to grow without any issue with this new architecture. But that's another story.

[ Currently Playing : Song to Say Goodbye - Placebo - Meds (03:38) ]

Second step of a long migration weekend reached

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

My migration weekend started on Friday at 5:00PM, you might read more about here : "First step of a long migration weekend reached".

The second step was System Acceptance Tests from business application's owners. And I am really happy to say that it went well, even better than what I thought, and all applications are tested and are working well and really fast according to the different testers. So we received the GO from the business to activate the new platform to all the users.

Tomorrow will be step three with the access of 12 000 users to the platform. I hope it will go like step one and two.

First step of a long migration weekend reached

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Yesterday, Friday 2 June, 2006 at 5:00 PM, we started our platform migration process at ecenter solutions.

This is the result of one year of hard work splitted in two phases:

1. first 6 months we made several proof of concepts
2. last 6 months we redesigned the whole architecture, made a new security concept, defined new processes and finally implemented it

So what did we currently have changed. We still have a three stages strategy with Integration, Pre-Production and Production, but we went :

• from 4 HP L2000 (RISC Processor, 32 bits, 440MHz) to 11 HP DL385/DL585 (AMD Opteron processor, 64 bits, 2.6GHz)
• from one DataCenter to two DataCenters with Business Recovery
• from HP-UX 11.x to SLES 9 (64 bits)
• from Virtual Vault to appArmor
• from Apache 1.x to Apache 2.x
• from Tomcat 3.x to Tomcat 5.x
• from Java 1.3 to Java 1.5 (64 bits)
• from Oracle 9i to Oracle 10g (64 bits)
• from a hoster in Francfort, Germany to one in Basle, Switzerland

We also improved our deployment process, you will like it Thomas ;-), our maintenance setup, our production street switch...

The tough time of this weekend is the migration of the whole data set sized to more than 650 Gb. It worked :-) Great job Philippe.

After some slight last modifications our internal tests are all on green. We now are waiting the system acceptance test of the business for tomorrow. And the final Production activation on Tuesday. So as Didier write it "eCENTER: Please cross your fingers for us :-)".

After that we will need for sure some rest and "normal working hours".

Swiss Company Proved Value of Services Architecture Before the Name Was Even Coined

An article by Laurent Kempé 1 Comment

CIO INSIGHT just published "Insuring the Future" an article by Edward Cone about the ecenter, wow that's us :-)

Before all the hype over service-oriented architecture, before the cumbersome acronym had been coined, and before the now infamous Microsoft memos were sent, one small insurance company in Switzerland had a big head start. Helvetia Patria Group, a St. Gallen, Switzerland-based insurance company put its service-oriented architecture in place four years ago, before anyone even knew what to call it.

New year, New Job: ecenter solutions - enabling business innovation

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

Starting 1st of January 2006 I will work, as a Senior Solution Architect, for the ecenter solutions, a new company of the Helvetia Patria Group, located in Zurich - Switzerland created this morning, on December 23, 2005.

Congratulations to my old friend Didier who made the spin-off a reality. Read more about it here.

eCENTER: we are recruiting a SysAdmin!

An article by Laurent Kempé 1 Comment

«Are you proactive, communicative and independent? Welcome in our Team!»

Helvetia Patria is a leading Swiss insurance service provider with core competencies in risk management and private pensions. Mutual appreciation, open communications and clear objectives are important principles of management and collaboration in our company.

We are looking in our ecenter for a professional, client-oriented and motivated

System Administrator to strengthen our Infrastructure and Architecture Team.
(ID 340281)

The ecenter, a small and very specialized unit of the Helvetia Patria Group, is delivering a central e-business infrastructure and platform, based on the J2EE specifications, to the Group’s subsidiaries already for the past 5 years. We differ from others in offering a great team spirit and a motivating environment where technical and business expertise is thriving. Our office is based in Zurich, Switzerland.

In cooperation with our outsourcing partners and internal architects, you will be working on ensuring a secured and highly available delivery of our e-business infrastructure and platform to our clients.

We are expecting you to bring to the position a deep knowledge and expertise of - as well as a minimum of 3 years experience in - the administration and operation of Linux systems (SuSe distribution), of Oracle and MySql databases, of Apache and Tomcat components, and last but not least, of the BEA WebLogic application server. General competency in network and security is also necessary as is experience with scripting languages (shell, perl, ant). German and English (written and spoken) are required while knowledge in a third European language is appreciated.

Competencies in Microsoft Windows 2003 Server and SqlServer are a plus.

If you are interested in working in a growing and fast moving international environment, if you are interested in learning and discovering, do not hesitate to contact me at:

laurent DOT kempe AT techheadbrothers DOT com
- or -
laurent DOT kempe AT helvetiapatria DOT ch

The advert on the Helvetia Patria website.

Report from Redmond - By Rick Ross of Javalobby

An article by Laurent Kempé 3 Comments

"Rick Ross, founder of Javalobby, talks about our recent trip to the Microsoft campus in Redmond Washington for the Technology Summit 2005. This gathering of developers from a variety of platforms yielded some interesting insights from all parties. Listen on for Rick's overview and thoughts on the summit.

Listen to the report now!
Read the offline PDF "

From Rick: "I am encouraging mutual respect and a dialogue to keep the possibility for progress alive. Frozen hatred is not in the best interests of the Java developer community."

"I want it to be explicitly clear that I am NOT advocating any Java developer to abandon Java. I am only saying that we should consider, as a community, treating our peer developers in the Microsoft world and elsewhere with more respect and open-mindedness."

Nothing to add. You said everything Rick !!!

Software development industrialization

An article by Laurent Kempé No Comments

I have been interviewed by the French magazine 01 Informatique about the software development industrialization.
For sure the article talks about Microsoft, Visual Studio 2005 Team System, IBM, Atlantic and Borland Themis.

The whole article in French is also available as a PDF.