"Case Study: VAI Increases Revenue by Offering Integrated Web 2.0 Applications"

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"VAI is an award winning software developer and an IBM Premier Business Partner. Founded in 1978, VAI is headquartered in Long Island, New York, with branch offices in Florida, California and Illinois. In conjunction with IBM, the company designs customer driven enterprise management software for the IBM Power Systems."
Source : VAI

Resources Related to Enterprise portal:

• Enterprise portal (Wikipedia)

Case Study: VAI Increases Revenue by Offering Integrated Web 2.0 Applications

S2K Enterprise Portal is also known as : S2K Enterprise Portal, VAI S2K E-Business, Vormittag Associates, Inc. VAI, VAI S2K Enterprise, VAI Implements E-Commerce, Portal Software, Enterprise Portal System, Enterprise Portal Vendors, Integrated Enterprise Portals Applications, Integrated Web Applications, Web 2.0 Ajax Integrated Applications, Web 2.0 Applications Developers , Application Web 2.0 Functionality, Integrated Application Web 2.0 Interfaces, Web 2.0 Revenue Profitability.

RPG IV stored procedures, Java, Sametime, WorkPlace, XML and SOAP are intermixed to drive an integrated user experience.

Today's leading-edge business applications go beyond mere Web-enablement where publishing information to the Web is the primary motive referred to nowadays as Web 1.0 applications. State-of-theart enterprise software must also incorporate a single, integrated interface for the user that links them instantly to business processes and collaborative technologies. These robust, Internet-driven environments, which allow users within and outside the organization to work together easily and share information, are driven by what has come to be known as Web 2.0 applications. Vormittag Associates, Inc. (VAI), a long-time ERP provider and an award-winning IBM® Premier Business Partner, delivers such an aggregated and integrated business application environment in its VAI S2K Enterprise Portal offering.

S2K Enterprise Portal is designed to strengthen relationships by promoting collaboration and communication with sophisticated employee, partner and customer Web-based portals that present a single point of access to content, data, services and people.

Moving to the ILE framework

Developing Web 2.0 applications is not an easy effort. Kevin Beasley, CIO for VAI, explains that the S2K Enterprise Portal is the result of the company's relentless adherence to incremental modernization efforts for more than a decade, thus positioning them to move proactively toward delivering its Web 2.0 offering. In the 1990s, VAI application modernization efforts meant moving millions of lines of RPG III code to the IBM® RPG Integrated Language Environment® (RPG ILE). This effort took 10 of VAI's 85 programmers about nine months to accomplish. By the end of 1996, all critical code had been moved into the ILE framework, an environment that is comparable to the Microsoft® .NET and Java® frameworks.

Working with ILE code makes maintenance efforts easier, although that is not the most significant advantage. The ILE makes additional application efforts much more efficient a benefit that VAI can certainly attest to.

Delivering Web 1.0 applications

By 1998, as the emerging importance of the Internet became clear, the fact that the VAI programmers worked within the ILE greatly supported the rapid assembly of Webenabled applications. The reason for this is the inherent nature of the ILE that forces the application code to be separated into database logic, business rules and userinterface logic; this separation is done through the use of IBM DB2 Universal Database&8482; (IBM DB2® UDB) stored procedures, database triggers and data definition specifications, as well as other similar methods.

Moving VAI applications to the Web provided a simple solution that was easily and securely accessible by enterprises, but it did not deliver an integrated and easy-to-use strategy for Web users who also needed collaborative and team-driven functions.

Testing a portal strategy

For this reason, Beasley and other members of the VAI development team began planning for an overarching browser-based user interface. Initially, they called this interface a Web desktop, although today's industry vernacular refers to it as a portal (see Figure 1). A portal provides oneclick access to all the applications and collaborative tools that users require to accomplish their job functions with an extremely high level of efficiency.

In 2003, A VAI team of six programmers (with various language skills and expertise levels) began prototyping with Bowstreet Portlet Factory (which is now an IBM product called IBM WebSphere® Portlet Factory). During the six to nine months they worked with this portal development tool, it served as a valuable stepping stone to gather expertise on the ideal layout and flow of a portal as well as the nuances of interfacing with portlet code. This early effort also helped the VAI team to gain deeper Java skills.

Using Rational and SOA

After this initial foray into designing and coding a portal and its associated portlets, the VAI team began using a more sophisticated tool for this purpose. IBM Rational® Application Developer (included in IBM WebSphere® Development Studio Client) to design VAI S2K Enterprise Portal. According to Beasley, Rational Application Developer streamlined the application provider's development efforts because of is visual nature. The portal coding also went very fast because of the tool's ability to automatically synchronize the Java code with the visual code models that the developers had established. The VAI portlets were built, in part, by using Java programs to call RPG stored procedures that reside in RPG ILE. In other words, the code reorganization and restructuring required to move to RPG ILE was also important because it became a foundational prerequisite for VAI's portal product.

S2K Enterprise Portal is based on an application model known as the service-oriented architecture (SOA). SOA is a widely-used architecture in which a description language defines all functions. (These function are also called services.) The application invokes interfaces to perform business processes. The invoked functions are independent from other interactions and from interconnect protocols. In other words, the ability to call and run a service does not depend on, nor require, a particular programming language, system platform or interface mechanism. This also means that a client from any device that is using any operating system in any language can call the service. The result of this type of application architecture is that SOA allows enormous flexibility in rapidly assembling robust applications from diverse sources, including RPG procedure calls, Web services and Java applets.

Beasley explains that his development team used a service builder within Rational Application Developer to produce simple objectaccess protocol (SOAP) components, many of which were exposed (that is, made available as services) from mission-critical stored procedures that resided in ILE. After these stored procedures were packaged as SOAP components, VAI built SOA programs that make calls to the wrappered code. In fact, SOAP components can also call other SOAP components; this means that SOAP components can act both as a consumer of other services and as a provider of services.

To state this more clearly, the new portal software supports portlets that are driven, in part, by RPG code. Dan Bivona, VAI director of sales, points out that this last statement is very important, "VAI delivers state-of-the-art, highly flexible, portal-based user interfaces that invoke business logic that has been embedded in VAI ERP solutions for years." Bivona explains why this is so important, "Our S2K Enterprise Portal, which uses portlets that can access virtually any database and business logic repository, enables us to move rapidly into additional business sectors. The portal technology we have implemented with our existing component library and IBM tools allows us to make marketexpansion decisions and deploy new offerings in much shorter timeframes."

Incorporating collaborative technologies

Integral to the definition of a Web 2.0 application is its ability to provide best-practices collaborative tools. That is why VAI decided to embed IBM Lotus® products as foundational technologies in S2K Enterprise Portal. Lotus Domino®, IBM Workplace® Services Express and Lotus Instant Messaging drive the portal's calendaring, e-mail, instant messaging, team room, data and document sharing and peoplebased processes. The use of these technologies allows S2K Enterprise Portal to provide leading-edge business-to-employee (B2E), business- to-consumer (B2C) and business- to-business (B2B) processes. According to Beasley, "There is nothing that delivers the qualitybased capabilities of Workplace Services Express. Because it is so customizable, we can use one platform to facilitate a number of different business processes."

Thrilling customers and prospects

The VAI S2K Enterprise Portal, including its Lotus collaborative services, was released in 2004, just a year or so after the company began learning how to design and code portals, and the response from customers has been strong. They are excited with the new ability to run their entire set of job functions from a single browser interface. The portal requires no complex installation of end-user software (only a plug-in is necessary), yet it offers many benefits (see Figure 2), including the following:

• It provides user authentication and single sign-on across multiple applications.
• Users can manage, edit and share documents with other users.
• Users can customize the layout of their own portal pages.
• Productivity and collaboration tools let portal users interface with each other, anywhere, anytime.
• Users can resort and print personalized, dynamic content that appears on the portal screen.
• Users can export data to Microsoft
• Excel and other spreadsheet applications.
• On-screen reports can be refreshed with one click, allowing easy monitoring of activity throughout the day.
• Users can access their Microsoft
• Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes® or other POP3/IMAP e-mail systems.
• Web-page content is displayed and can be printed, based on user role and authority level.
• Working collaboratively with others is highly effective and efficient.

Delighting VAI resellers

The S2K Enterprise Portal solution interfaces transparently with the VAI ERP system on the back-end that drives its many functions. It supports customer self-service applications for B2B, B2C and B2E, including order entry and catalogs. It is an IBM System i&8482; and IBM System x&8482; solution on a very stable platform. The highly reliable nature of the System i platform, coupled with the elegant design of the VAI portal and portlets, allows this ecommerce portal to cater to nontechnical administrators and Web masters. Bivona mentions that this is a very important selling point, which the company's worldwide network of partners and resellers appreciate.

The VAI Web 2.0 portal generates new revenue from longstanding customers and allows VAI partners to reach and close new prospects with very impressive product demonstrations.

But this is not all. VAI employees and partners were the beta test site for S2K Enterprise Portal. Employees enter and track project-related time and billing, even when they are traveling. The customizable portal offers tools that support the unique needs of VAI dealers. For instance, VAI dealers can do tasks such as lead generation and tracking through the portal. And, through Lotus Instant Messaging, they can communicate with the internal VAI sales team for advice or to seek marketing materials. The portal also provides presence awareness, e-mail and calendaring services. Needless to say, productivity has risen measurably.

Anticipating a very successful decade

Bivona is, of course, always looking to the future, as any excellent director of sales should be. He is convinced that the powerful nature of VAI S2K Enterprise Portal has positioned the company to be highly agile in selling efforts for years to come. "VAI is delivering state-of-theart, highly flexible portal-based user interfaces that drive the same business logic that has been embedded in VAI ERP solutions. Thanks to the competitive edge we have been able to establish, in large part because of the IBM Rational, WebSphere and Lotus collaborative tools and SOA, we are going to have a very busy decade in front of us."

Beasley sums up his view of the future from an additional perspective, "Our VAI portal product positions us to be viewed as a strategic partner with the enterprises who use our offerings. We are adding value on top of their fundamental IT assets that they simply could not have imagined a decade ago. We are very proud of that accomplishment and are glad to have IBM partnering with us to bring this robust and diverse functionality to our clients."

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