Athene focuses on managing retirement savings solutions for both individuals and institutions in an ever-changing world. Their management team leverages over 165 combined years of expertise in long-term management of retirement benefits. As the number of opportunities in the retirement marketplace continued to evolve, and the number of individuals nearing retirement also grew, Athene recognized their digital landscape needed a change.
Business Challenges
When Asponte was contacted for the initial project, what was described seemed like a straightforward migration from IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1 to IBM WebSphere Portal 8.0. Like many projects, the real challenges presented themselves once work had begun. Athene rebranded during the project and asked Asponte to integrate their new branding into the new, mobile-friendly theme. Finally, Athene wanted to switch from using the deprecated remote rendering portlet to a local rendering portlet.
Our Approach
The scope of this project included 5 virtual portals that needed to be preserved and separation of content to then branch out into a 8.0 portal with managed pages enabled. This was done using a sandbox as the target to migrate to, then creating a PAA with components for the 5 VPPs and 1 for the base. Also using syndication, we moved their content from the sandbox environment to the new environments.
This approach allowed Asponte to deliver to Athene a repeatable procedure for updating existing environments and allowed us to beat projected timelines.
During the project, the rebranding work was launched and their updated theme was deployed after the environments were built. Some additional work was done on the source system to switch from remote rendering to local rendering portlets before starting the migration. This was done via an XML Access script that allowed us to revert to any previous point in case of error.
Software/Products Leveraged
- IBM WebSphere Portal
- IBM Web Content Manager WCM
Results
After Asponte’s engagement, Athene can take advantage of the new features of IBM WebSphere Portal 8.0, and continued product support as 6.1 was nearing the end of its life cycle. Their end users can also now access their data anywhere, without a traditional desktop or laptop PC, thanks to the added mobile-enabled experience. Lastly, Athene’s customers and employees will see a cohesive, consistent look across all media types as their rebranding was integrated into each component.
