Client Showcase  >  Cornerstone

Cornerstone

Metropolitan Regional Information Systems (MRIS), Rockville, MD

Client Profile

Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. (MRIS) operates the largest online real estate network in the United States, providing services to over 40,000 licensed agents, brokers, and appraisers in Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware, and the District of Columbia.

The Challenge

MRIS engaged us for the development of a new real-estate listing application, called Cornerstone. Design goals for this application called for a single, centralized database, ability to scale to millions of real estate listings and over 100,000 users with high performance, support for a wide variety of real estate queries, and the ability to deliver data to various existing third-party front-end tools in multiple formats. As well, 24/7/365 availability and rapid failover/recovery in case of hardware problems were mandatory.

Solution Highlights

We delivered a very flexible and scalable application that is optimized for high performance and which operates on a single database. Cornerstone currently supports 43,000 concurrent users. It represents a significant step towards adoption of public standards in the Real Estate industry: we ensured that the services and data formats of the Cornerstone platform are compliant with the protocols developed as a part of the RETS specification (Real Estate Transaction Standard, see http://www.rets.org). To simplify the task of implementing Cornerstone in new locations and markets, we implemented a single application interface and query engine for all MRIS clients, hiding the underlying complexity yet efficiently supporting different underlying business rules and datasets depending on the target users. Cornerstone capabilities are delivered to the end-users via the Keystone web-based interface.

The availability, scalability, and extensibility requirements of the Cornerstone architecture make it one of the most advanced in any industry.

Technologies Used

The Cornerstone solution currently runs on an Oracle 9i Real Application Cluster running on two 8-node IBM SP mainframes. The middle tier runs on a set of BEA WebLogic J2EE servers. Web traffic is dynamically distributed via Cisco load-balancing routers.

Cornerstone is used to provide 24/7/365 service to as many as 43,000 concurrent users.

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