InformationWeek

Executive Summary
Toromont Industries/InformationWeek Live RFP

Microsoft Corp.

Solution Overview
Our solution extends Tormont's line of business systems, making them securely accessible to customers over the Internet. As new functionality is built into Tormont's AS/400 system, it can quickly be brought to the Web for customer self-service. The solution also extends Tormont's reach to vertical business-to-business markets using XML and BizTalk. Highlights of our solution include:

Real-time integration with Tormont's AS/400 systems via SNA Server. SNA Server, more accurately named Host Integration Server in its next release, is both a gateway and application integration platform. It fully supports 5250 and APPC communications; direct access to AS/400 applications and data is through the OLEDB Provider for AS/400.

Site Server is a key enabler for this solution.

Personalization & Membership, which is an LDAP-compliant directory, provides secure authentication and access controls. It also lets Tormont personalize the presentation to individual customers (e.g. language, catalog restrictions, pricing).
Site Server Commerce Edition brings catalog, shopping basket, merchandising and order processing capabilities.
The Commerce Interchange Pipeline (CIP) and BizTalk facilitate business-to-business integration with partners and vertical marketplaces. The CIP is a tool for transforming data, modeling business processes, and transporting documents between business partners. As Tormont expands its interactions with business partners in the future, BizTalk Server will bring a more sophisticated document transformation, workflow, routing and transport solution.

Middle-tier business logic will be developed as COM+ components, and deployed as COM+ (or MTS) applications. The Web front-end sits on IIS 5.0, and can be developed as a set of Active Server Pages.

SQL Server 7.0 will be used for the online catalog, state management, and miscellaneous storage requirements on the web site. SQL Server 7.0 provides exceptional reliability, scalability, performance and manageability. Its scalability is more than sufficient for Tormont's requirements, and will scale to meet any future requirements. Audited TPC-C numbers we have achieved with Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000: 227,000 tpmC @ $19.12/tpmC.

The Microsoft Strategy: Meeting the Challenge
Microsoft's E-commerce strategy helps businesses establish stronger relationships with customers and partners by delivering the benefits of E-commerce and addressing the issues of implementing E-commerce systems. Platform, portal and partners are three essential elements of the Microsoft E-commerce strategy. BizTalk is our platform-neutral E-commerce framework.

The Microsoft E-commerce platform, with Windows 2000 at its core, offers several advantages to organizations developing Internet-based business solutions. To help businesses create comprehensive online sites and applications, the platform includes the Microsoft BackOffice suite of server applications, including Windows NT Server, SQL Server 7.0, and Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition. BackOffice integrates with development tools such as Microsoft Visual Studio, allowing speedy development of secure, scalable E-commerce applications. BackOffice-based E-commerce applications integrate with existing systems�including SAP, Baan, Oracle, AS/400, and mainframes�through Microsoft SNA Server, COM TI and BizTalk. BizTalk is a platform-neutral E-commerce framework that uses XML to make it easy for businesses to integrate applications and conduct business over the Internet with partners and customers.

Back to Toromont RFP

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