DGI SnapShot

“Open source middleware, such as JBoss, is becoming increasingly popular for use within European governmental I.T. infrastructure such as that of the French tax department office. This is not only because of its known advantages of reliability, modularity and security, but also and more importantly, because it provides a critical independence from traditional industry constraints.”

-Jean-Marie Lapeyre, Project COPERNIC technical director.

Company Overview: The Direction Générale des Impôts (the Directorate-General of Taxes) offer new online services, via the Internet, for tax declaration, payment, consultation and information. This project for increasing the convenience and efficiency of DGI’s tax services is known as the ‘Copernic Program’.

Challenge:

• The Directorate-General of Taxes (DGI) needed to modernize the whole of their administration process, as well as enterprise management, while being able to offer new services through information technology (declarations, on-line payments, and real-time status checks through a Web interface, etc). This included the need for a system that had built-in continuity and longevity.
• DGI needed an improvement in quality of service for its large range of tax applications. This included plans for an improved system for online tax calculation, declaration, payment and completion of official tax forms. As a comprehensive management and monitoring service, the system would be a user-intensive, mission critical environment that would enable well over 50’000’000 annual site visits.
• The remit for this project included a significant reduction in the I.T. departments operating costs.
• DGI needed all services to be available 24 X 7.
• The software solution needed to be highly modular, and conform to industry-recognized standards and norms.

Solution:

• After a thorough evaluation, DGI selected Atos Origin and JBoss, who formed an alliance and provided the JBoss J2EE Application Server for DGI’s mission-critical I.T. system.
• Atos Origin, recognized for its ability to direct projects of scale and for its knowledge of the existing infrastructure of the governments, brought, with JBoss, the technical support and expertise needed to implement the project. JBoss and Atos Origin conceived, and then offered, the most reliable, most open and evolutionary solution on the market to DGI.

Results:

• DGI achieved its strategic objectives, amongst them a middleware infrastructure that conformed to standards, was modular, flexible and adaptable.
• The French Inland Revenue gained a far greater influence over its own infrastructure, by using Professional Open Source that offered non-exclusive access, making rapid change and development possible.
• The Directorate-General of Taxes is emancipated from any dependency engendered by buying support for proprietary technological platforms. Regarding its adoption of Open Source software, DGI is now more independent of its suppliers, with no obligation to continue paying to use software in case of conflict. For DGI, Open Source acts as a guarantor of system longevity.
• An outright saving of 13 million Euro’s on project costs.