InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
July 26, 1999
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Companies are rushing to integrate midtier Web and application servers
The Swiss Colony Co., best known for its mail-order holiday baskets, boasts of a successful migration from a mainframe architecture to a three-level IT structure with a Web server in the middle, despite some challenges. For one thing, the 73-year-old company installed its first mainframe, an IBM 1401, in 1963.
Until recently, Swiss Colony had a classic two-tier design, with PCs running applications that communicated with the company's IBM 9672 mainframe. Even more daunting was the age of many of the company's sales and production processes, which dated back to the 1920s, and the fact that the company didn't want to revamp all its back-end operations in the Web migration process. As it turned out, integrating a Web site into the enterprise network without reworking the sales order, credit-card processing, or food-production systems is far from easy.
"We started with IBM tabulators and punch-card sorters back in the mid-1940s," says Hans Bernet, manager of special products. "Our home-built systems work great, but we can't catch up to the Web all at once."
Swiss Colony hired Evergreen Internet Inc. to manage the integration job. The task: Orders and credit-card information from Swiss Colony's Web site have to fit into the company's data-entry formats and be sent to a homegrown authorization system.
Evergreen is using the Extensible Markup Language to translate queries from online customers into the proper format for Swiss Colony's mainframe, says Gary Jones, a programmer at Swiss Colony for more than 25 years. The translated queries pull data from the mainframe, are sent back to the Web servers in XML format, and are displayed in real time via the Extensible Style Sheet Language.
"This is the third wave of E-commerce tools," says Dave Clare, Evergreen's VP of business development. Written in Java, ECentials runs on any Java-compliant server.
The migration effort is paying off big time for Swiss Colony. "The Web is a wonderful way for customers to place orders with us and for us to communicate with customers," says Swiss Colony's Bernet. "The whole company is turning into a Net company, whether we planned it or not. It's just happening.''
Staying In-House
he biggest challenge for developers can be moving forward when there's a strong tie to the past. For years, middleware worked on the back end, exchanging apps between databases and hosts. But middleware servers are now a critical part of any electronic-commerce system design, occupying the middle tier of a three-tier architecture where the business logic that runs and manages Web sites also resides. Companies that happily built two-tier systems to link fat clients to even fatter back-end hosts are now scrambling to migrate application code to midtier Web and application servers.
Middlesex Hospital/Health System, which serves 23 towns in Middlesex County, Conn., added a middle tier to its system architecture last year, but it handled the integration in-house.
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