InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
October 19, 1998
 Print this story |
continued...page 4 of 5
Efficient ApplicationsThe introduction of a major new application can be a good time to rethink how the network is being used. Houghton Mifflin is building a customer-management system that uses a Sybase product as the relational database housed on Sun Microsystems' high-end E10000 servers. The first phase, launched last March, will let service representatives query data about customer accounts across the eight divisions of the company. Thus they can gain real-time information about the book-buying patterns and needs of schools, colleges, and other large accounts. In the second and third phases of the project, due to be launched over the next two years, the application will be extended over the Internet so customers and sales reps can view data.
In addition, Houghton Mifflin is consolidating its servers. Some years ago, several of its mainframe applications were migrated to a client-server environment, and the book publisher had excess Unix servers. Now, many of the servers are being recentralized on the E10000, which has mainframelike partitions that allow for greater flexibility in the configuration of memory and processors.
Rising bandwidth use was one reason for the consolidation. "Systems upgrades are forcing a higher dependency on the network than ever before," says CTO Mooney. "The costs for the network infrastructure are going up substantially. The issue is how to manage that wisely so that we get the return."
The customized application is being designed so that the E10000 holds a year's worth of customer data, with the mainframe holding older archived data. End-users' workstations will communicate mostly with the E10000, rarely needing to go back to the mainframe. The client machines, in turn, will hold 30 days worth of information about an account.
For ease of management, the E10000 will be in the Boston headquarters, along with the host system. High-cost networking talent won't need to be deployed in the remote offices.
"This is where the client-server approach to systems is really an art form," Mooney says. "For every application, there are 20 different solutions, depending on how you want to move the data and how you want the network to perform. "
Virtual private networks, which provide an encrypted path over the public Internet for data, have been touted as a way to cut networking costs. So far, VPNs remain more a promise rather than reality. Of the companies interviewed for this article, only one--TRM Corp.--has a VPN running.
TRM, which supplies copying services, is a good example of how a midsize company can use VPNs to sharply cut remote-access costs. Of the company's 400 employees, about half are in its Portland, Ore., headquarters, and the rest are spread over 75 domestic and European locations. To exchange E-mail, mobile and remote employees use a local Internet service provider, which routes calls to the company's headquarters. Those in the remote offices have a Visual Basic application on their desktops that automatically makes the calls every hour to the ISP.
TRM is migrating its servers from Novell NetWare to Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0. It uses the remote-access services of NT 4, with the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol for security. With PPTP--which is an extension of the Internet's Point-to-Point Protocol sponsored by Microsoft and other companies--any user of a PC with PPTP client support can use an ISP to connect securely to a server elsewhere in the user's company.
This system saves the cost of the modem bank, says Gary Cosmer, TRM's director of IS. "As fast as that technology is changing, I would already have had to switch from 56K to V.90 modems," he says. "I've avoided that."
Cosmer also estimates the company has saved more than $100,000 a year in long-distance phone charges.
But TRM has experienced bandwidth problems on the Internet between Europe and the United States. A lot of the ISPs in Europe, primarily in France, haven't yet embraced larger pipes, Cosmer says.
continued...page 5
return to page 1, 2, 3
Or read sidebar story, "Find Your Network ROI."
Illustration by David Flaherty
Back to This Week's Issue
Send Us Your Feedback
Top of the Page
Featured Microsite
