InformationWeek

December 8, 1997

Extranets Get Simpler

Today, extranets are easier to build than ever. You don't even need an intranet to create one

By Richard Adhikari

uilding extranets has never been easier. You no longer need to have an intranet in place to create an extranet. Web-enabled applications will do, and some products will help you take shortcuts that cut costs and speed up implementation.

That's been the experience of specialty shipper International Shipholding Corp. Last year, the New Orleans company, which had revenue of almost $400 million and operates more than 1,800 vessels worldwide, wanted to expand its operations in Southeast Asia. First, it bought out its partner in a Singapore shipping agency. Then it began modernizing the agency's operations to handle more business.

The agency used to fax financial reports to International Shipholding's head office every month. This information was then entered manually into the corporate financial system, which consisted of Lawson Software's financial application running on Oracle7.3 under Unix on an HP 9000 computer syst em. That was the easy part, says Michele Spoons-Wood, director of business systems analysts; the difficulty lay in the delays caused by the process. "We were receiving each month's financial information in the middle of the following month, so we'd have to close our July books with June data from Singapore," Spoons-Wood says.

caption Stephen Fraser, International Shipholding's CIO, ruled out duplicating the New Orleans setup in Singapore because it would cost "about $200,000 for hardware and software and another $150,000 to $200,000 per year for people to run the systems." Letting the Singapore staff log on to the company's back-end systems-financials as well as a vessel-reservation system-through leased lines also proved too expensive. Fraser pays $7,000 a month to lease one 56-Kbps line between Singapore and New Orleans. He'd need at least two more, or preferably a T1 line, which costs $40,000 a month to lease.

Instead, Fraser turned to the Internet. International Shipholding's LAN runs TCP/IP over 10Base-T Ethernet; the Lawson Financials package also runs over TCP/IP.

Fraser solved the problems of security and performance by installing one Cisco Systems PIX (Private Internetwork Exchange) router each in New Orleans and Singapore to set up links over the Internet. The PIX offers firewall capabilities, lets users build a virtual private network between two PIX routers, and encrypts data using hardware to create a secure tunnel through the Internet, effectively giving users a private link over the Web.

It was an inexpensive solution. "Those routers cost us less than $15,000 each, and we already had a T1 connection to the Internet here in New Orleans, so for a one-time cost of $30,000, we have a connection that works," Fraser says. He also replaced the dumb terminals in Singapore with PCs running Windows 95 and a terminal-emulation package.

Work on the project began in Sept. 1996, and the system went live in January. International Shipholding's financial and billing transactions now are processed in real time over the Internet. Spoons-Wood's business analyses are more accurate because "We don't have to make so many assumptions anymore," she says. Best of all, the company is saving $120,000 a year by using the Internet-a figure Fraser describes as a very conservative estimate.

International Shipholding isn't extending its corporate intranet to its Singapore office because it doesn't have one; it's running the link as a straight extranet setup. In fact, you don't need an intranet to run extranet links, says Michael Ferro Jr., president of Click Interactive Inc., a Chicago extranet builder. "None of our clients has used its intranet with its extranet application, and in fact most of them do not have intranets."

Dairy cooperative Land O'Lakes Inc.'s move to an extranet was relatively easy because the infrastructure was already in place. The $4 billion company in Arden Hills, Minn., supplies members and farmers in 15 states and markets dairy products nationwide. It runs Lotus Notes databases containing information on trade promotions, internal sales, and other subjects, which food brokers and regional sales managers access from their notebook computers through dial-up links. But Land O'Lakes couldn't use the Notes databases to send the most important information of all-syndicated scanner data purchased from Information Resources Inc., a market information company in Chicago that provides the retail food industry with information on purchases gleaned from grocers' scanners.

That data resided on Metaphor, a proprietary IBM decision-support system running Red Brick's database on a proprietary server with OS/2 PCs at the front end. "You need access to all that data to make sure your stores have the best products available at the best price in the right markets," says Adam Krauter, manager of information and technology at Land O'Lakes.

Less Legwo rk
Land O'Lakes used to print out the scanner data and send it via courier to regional sales managers and food brokers, but that didn't go over very well. "You have this 2-inch-thick stack of paper to lug around, and most sales managers don't have time to dig through that stuff," Krauter says. Also, by the time the sales managers received the printouts, they were two weeks old and not current enough to be helpful.

Krauter decided to build an extranet so the scanner data could be accessed over the Web. He migrated Land O'Lakes from the Metaphor system to a Web-based system using the DecisionSuite family of online analytical processing software applications and toolset from Information Advantage Inc. of Eden Prairie, Minn. This comes with WebOLAP, an extension that offers Web server capability and lets users perform OLAP analysis over the World Wide Web. Krauter replaced the existing proprietary server with an IBM RS/6000 running AIX and the WebOLAP Web server, but retained the Red Brick database.

Bo th local and remote users now access data and reports on the server using Windows 95 and Microsoft Internet Explorer to come in over the Internet. They can drill down to various levels of information and look at products by brand name, size, or whatever other criteria they're allowed to use. "It's easy to drill down to data over the Web, and it eliminates the problem of carrying paper reports with you," Krauter says. Also, users can access new data as soon as it's received, rather than having to wait for up to two weeks. "It's hard to measure how much we've saved with the new system, but it's a question of, if you don't do it, you get to be toast," Krauter says.

Krauter's situation was unique in that he couldn't leverage his Notes databases to create an extranet-most companies with Notes databases can do this by adding a Lotus Domino Web server. Adding Domino to Notes lets companies implement strong security, says Suzette Jaskowiak, a principal at the Revere Group Inc., a Chicago systems integrator. Not on ly does Domino have its own internal security, but Notes' replication feature also lets users replicate data to a separate server outside their firewalls. This "prevents intruders from getting into your network and lets you replicate out only the data you want people to access," Jaskowiak says.

Domino Theory
Revere Group client Wheels Inc. in Des Plaines, Ill., is leveraging Notes and Domino to create an extranet. Wheels handles large-scale corporate car leases and has been working with the Interleasing Partnership, a group of 16 other leasing companies in the United States and Europe, to offer services worldwide for about four years. "The idea is, if a client of ours is opening an office in Britain and wants me to help him lease a car there, we call up our partner in Britain," says Ed Harding, director of systems development at Wheels.

But that old bugaboo of international business, time-zone differences, made it difficult to reach the right person at the time they were needed. So Wheels, which uses Notes internally, set up Notes discussion databases with information on each partner. This information goes to its partners over CompuServe's WAN using X.25 connections. Wheels commissioned the Revere Group to Web-enable the discussion databases using Domino because, says Harding, "Some people don't like to use Notes but prefer the Web, and we want to make the information available to all the partners."

The bonus to taking this approach is that it lets Wheels open its database to its clients, so they know who Wheels' partners in different countries are, what services they provide, and whom to call.

The partners have set up a coordination center in Brussels, Bel-gium, which will update the Notes dis- cussion databases. "That's the beauty of Notes, because we can maintain the Domino site from the applications point of view and not worry about the data content maintenance," Harding says, adding that Notes replication is "a big plus." Domino translates information in the databases automatically to HTML , and new information is broadcast to partners.

The result is a no- fuss extranet that does what Wheels wants and more. That, says Harding, is all you can ask for.

See related story, " Build A Better Extranet ."

See related story, " Develop An Intuitive Interface ."

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