F5 Supports Financial Services Firm’s Oracle Solutions, Helps Eliminate Downtime

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking, today announced that ooba, a leader in the South African financial services market, has deployed the F5 ^® BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager ^™ (LTM ^®) solution to improve application performance levels for the Oracle solutions its business efforts depend on. ooba uses BIG-IP LTM to perform load balancing, transparent failover, and optimization (such as caching and compression) across its deployments of Oracle’s E-Business Suite, Oracle Portal, the Oracle SOA Suite, and the Oracle Application Server.

“Without these applications, we don’t have a business,” said Dominique dHotman, Manager of Enterprise Architecture at ooba. “Our core business of mortgage origination—as well as our new services such as insurance—requires fast, reliable, and secure communications with customers and business partners. F5 is a critical enabler of these services. The ease-of-use and reliability we gain with F5 allows us to deploy new solutions and modify existing configurations much quicker and in a far more predictable fashion than with other products we considered.”

ooba Improves Application Performance, Reliability, and Manageability with F5 and Oracle

Formerly known as MortgageSA, ooba began looking for an application delivery platform three years ago as it expanded beyond its core home financing business to also offer real estate listings, insurance, and other services. Because customers want to finalize their transactions quickly, application uptime and performance are critical. Similarly, application security is also a primary concern due to sensitive data such as income levels and credit history reports.

As it rolled out web-based applications to provide these services, ooba found the Linux-based load balancing solution it had developed internally was both difficult to scale and failed to deliver the required performance and reliability benchmarks. For example, the firm’s search portal, which customers use to find homes and provides most of ooba’s prospects, must operate 99.999 percent of the time, yet it and other key applications initially experienced downtime of 15-20 percent per month.