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By Kristy Pryma
ComputerWorld Canada
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 incorproate an online system to mirror our
reservation agents internally," she said.
For information on Sybase’s EAServer
go to www.sybase.com.
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