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By Kristy Pryma
The days of Web sites serving as
online brochures are over. Internet users have become insistent in
demanding more interactivity and information, and those corporate sites
that comply are seeing a marked competitive advantage and a significant
return on investment, as did Banff,
Alta.-based Brewster Transportation and Tours.
Like many companies, Brewster set up a
basic Web site during the dot-com boom, but recently realized that by not
enhancing the site, potential customers were clicking their way to other
alternatives. The touring and sightseeing company’s original site
contained information, but did not allow for online booking or invoicing.
According to Brewster’s manager of
application development, Karen Karpa, the
company’s traditional hands-on methodologies could not reach the customer
base that they had hoped, and therefore chose to acquire an application
server to establish an Internet framework and sustain ongoing site
development. The company chose Sybase’s Enterprise Application Server
3.6.1 (EAServer).
The EAServer
is an integrated set of tools and application servers consisting of the PowerDynamo dynamic page server, the Jaguar CTS
component transaction server, Application Integrator for CICS,
Application Integrator for Stored Procedures, the Sybase Adaptive Server
Anywhere RDBMS and the PowerJ Java development
environment.
“We had used Sybase products in-house
for a number of years, including our reservation system which we
developed six years ago. At that point, based on other products on the
market, Sybase was the best opportunity for us,” Karpa
said.
For this implementation, Karpa explained that other vendors were considered,
but Brewster’s legacy with Sybase dictated that they would be the best
choice.
“We did pursue other pieces on the
market, but the changes that would have had to be made to our reservation
system and other internal systems would have been substantial,” she said.
Omkar Bhongir, director of product
management and product marketing for the eBusiness
Division of Sybase in Dublin, Calif., agreed that the ability to build on legacy applications
rather than start from scratch proved to be a large part in Brewster’s
success.
“They were not only able to leverage
investments in technology, but also in people resources — they had staff
going on all cylinders with Sybase technology,” he said. “For companies
like Brewster who have invested a lot of money in their people and their
training with the technology, the product gets to the market at a much
faster pace than if you have to do a lot of rewriting or building of new
back-end systems.”
Stephen Ibaraki, an industry analyst
for iGEN Knowledge Solutions Inc. in New Westminster, B.C., agreed that starting from scratch is rarely a good
option for most companies in terms of cost and retraining. The reality
for most enterprise environments is that legacy systems will have to
interoperate with newer systems, he said, and going with a vendor that
the company is comfortable with is cost-effective in the long run.
“Staying with known and existing
technologies doesn’t require learning new skill sets from the standpoint
of end users, system administrators and in-house developers. For
industries where IT changes are incremental, this would be the best route
to go,” Ibaraki said. “In rapidly changing and dynamic industries, the
adoption of new technology must be rapid and immediate.”
Brewster devised a two-phase plan
which involved the establishment of an online read-only service for
wholesalers to view accounts, itineraries and bookings, and eventually
the deployment of an interactive Web site so that wholesalers, travel
agents and individual customers could book online.
“Our site is a reflection of us, and
by providing more of an understanding of our product and Brewster through
the site, we’re multiple steps ahead of where we could even imagine
being,” Karpa said. “Everything in our business
is about relationships, and the easier we make it to deal with us, the
more likely our customers will choose to deal with us in the future.”
According to Karpa,
this implementation is simply a step in Brewster’s evolution.
“The next thing we want to do is
incorporate an online system to mirror our reservation agents
internally,” she said.
For information on Sybase’s EAServer
go to http://www.sybase.com.
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