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Woolworths
Holdings Limited is an international retail group that operates and franchises
180 stores in South Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australasia.
As part of its commitment to deliver high-quality customer service
in retail stores and over the Internet, Woolworths' IT department launched Data
Flow Review (DFR) v 1.0. The company's data monitoring and alerting system
enables Woolworths' service management team to quickly identify and resolve
sensitive dataflow issues across Woolworth's numerous in-store, on-line and
back-end systems.
Business opportunity
In preparation for the 2004 holiday shopping season, Woolworths' management
team identified the opportunity to increase the scalability and functionality
of its business-critical data monitoring and alerting system (DFR). DFR v 2.0
needed to support more sophisticated, real-time monitoring and alerting
capabilities in an easy-to-use, centralized reporting environment.
Specifically, DFR v 2.0 needed to monitor more than 200 applications and
systems running on more than 4,000 servers, as well as the company's
centralized customer database and IT infrastructure.
Woolworths' enterprise IT department favored the scalability,
flexibility and security of Sybase's Java™ EE enterprise
application server and portal solution. However, the company faced a mismatch
of skills and technologies, since its enterprise developers were skilled
exclusively in Microsoft® development
technologies.
Decision process
Woolworths recognized that retraining its in-house developers in Java™
was a risky, high-cost strategy and quickly dismissed this option. The company
also evaluated outsourcing application development. However, Woolworths
determined v 2.0 was too complex, and the process too lengthy, to develop the
reporting system and portalize the business application in time for the
holidays.
Woolworths chose Mainsoft, an innovative
cross-platform development solution that enables the retailer to develop DFR v
2.0 for deployment on a Sybase enterprise portal and Java EE application
server, without having to retrain its developers.
Solution
Mainsoft is a cross-platform development solution that
enables .NET developers to rapidly develop and maintain .NET Web and server
applications that run on Java EE. It is seamlessly integrated in the Visual
Studio® IDE, allowing enterprises to preserve their existing
skill sets. .NET developers continue working closely with business analysts to
understand and refine the business requirements, and they continue using the
Visual Studio IDE to develop and maintain .NET applications running on Java EE.
Implementation
Woolworths' enterprise developers used C# and ASP.NET to develop, debug and
deploy DFR v 2.0 as Java bytecode. The resulting Java class files were packaged
into JAR files and deployed on a Sybase enterprise portal and application
server.
The application went into production, following a four-month development and
deployment cycle.
Conclusion
Woolworths is significantly lowering its total cost of ownership, saving an
estimated 85 percent in development fees, and reducing time-to-deployment by 60
percent using Mainsoft, rather than outsourcing Java development.
Woolworths is also saving thousands of dollars in management software licenses,
and boosting performance, by replacing DFR v 1.0 with a home-grown, Java
EE-based system.
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