For a successful company in the margin driven business of food retailing, every penny counts. This holds in particular true for the IT supporting the critical business processes in place. It is therefore paramount for the IT to be as cost-effective as possible, delivering the best service to the business side of the company. In return, the IT department demands the highest quality software and support from its suppliers. But what happens when the relationship with the incumbent communications middleware vendor exhibits early signs of changing priorities, the focus of products and features seems to be unrelated to currently supported platforms and where little consideration is given to providing value and support?
When there are plans in place to upgrade the HP NonStop systems and to capitalize on the latest Intel Itanium technology and benefit from lower costs, being unable to exploit the cost savings because of one middleware offering taking the gloss off whatever deal the systems vendor can offer!
The Challenge
For a major American supermarket chain, operating across country borders and within many states, and where a succession of mergers and acquisitions gave it many operational brands to support, upgrading systems at the very heart of their operations is never a step taken lightly or without considerable planning up front.
However, even as they were concerned about their existing communications middleware they were just as concerned about compatibility as well as performance; they didn’t want to pursue solutions that would represent taking a step backwards. The critical role communications plays in ensuring every store can stay in business mandated that the chosen vendor is willing to work closely with the supermarket while staying very close to the changing technologies that are ever-present with networks as complex as were in place at the supermarket.
The company operated 1,700 stores with more than 10,000 check-out lanes. Several times a year there are sizeable peaks – whether it’s the rush to purchase what is needed for Thanksgiving or Christmas or simply Superbowl Sunday – retail operations called for strict attention be paid to costs. As complex as the operation is and as diverse as are the networking needs, pulling together a communications fabric for a reasonable price was paramount for this retailer.
The Solution
Having depended upon ICE/DLSw in support of their SNA in-store controllers that allowed them to effectively tunnel over TCP/IP, the applications on their NonStop Server platform unaware that the network was anything other than SNA, had proved valuable and any replacement product would need to include the full and rich feature set that they needed. comForte, with their partner Infrasoft, provided the supermarket with uLinga for DLSw as a complete replacement for ICE/DLSw and the opportunity to exploit the cost savings on offer proved advantageous to the supermarket.
However, while the product was new to market, the uLinga for DLSw product was unproven with no other company as yet deploying the product. But for the supermarket, the knowledge they had of the personnel in the Infrasoft development team partially mitigated this quite obvious detraction and was addressed by a more intense and longer running product evaluation. Testing of uLinga in the supermarket’s environment would run for six months with another three months set aside for a staged roll-out.
As conservative as this plan may at first appear it helped the supermarket learn about the new product and about the people that would be supporting uLinga for DLSw. When the time came to roll-out the product for the last group of stores, the supermarket had come in almost a month ahead of plan. The compatibility was complete and the performance proved to be better, and uLinga for DLSw met all the technical as well as the business requirements that the supermarket had identified.
The Benefits
While there had been very legitimate concerns over migrating away from a well-entrenched product, such as ICE/DLSw, particularly to an unproven product, such as uLinga for DLSw, the early performance results and the ease with which the product could simply be rolled-in as a replacement were more than enough for the organization’s IT management to proceed with the transition. Working with the team from comForte as well as with the developers within Infrasoft , even though they were many time zones removed from the supermarket’s data centers, was equally as encouraging for the support staff at the supermarket.
Today, the network fully relies upon the presence of uLinga for DLSw and all brands and all locations are fully operational. The cost savings that came with the installation of uLinga for DLSw proved the turning point as well, as with uLinga for DLSw in place the migration to the new NonStop Servers – NS2000’s – was able to proceed and generate the overall operational savings the supermarket expected. Today, this supermarket continues to look at comForte as the premier middleware software vendor in the NonStop marketplace and there’s every likelihood of further business in the future.