marketboomer is a business-to-business exchange mainly for the hospitality industry. Buyers select products from online catalogues, and marketboomer disaggregates each order and routes line items to the appropriate supplier.
| "Messaging is fairly self-contained, but managing internal infrastructure takes a lot of time." |
Prompt transmission is particularly important in the hospitality industry, as suppliers specify a cut-off time for next-day delivery and buyers often leave their orders to the last minute. So marketboomer looked for a hosted service that could handle the delivery of fax and other messages, and selected Xpedite for its large infrastructure and because it operates on demand.
According to Gyaneshwar, the change is cost-neutral on the company's current volumes, but it removes the management headaches associated with the previous fax infrastructure. Savings are expected as marketboomer continues to grow.
"Messaging is fairly self-contained," says Xpedite technical director Tim Ward, but "managing internal infrastructure takes a lot of time.
The project took six months from the decision to go with Xpedite to the time that Gyaneshwar was able to ignore it on a day-to-day basis.
The trading software was developed in house using the locally designed Bullant object-oriented language (an earlier implementation was built on Lotus Notes), and much of the elapsed time passed while the company ensured messages would be sent correctly via the Web Services interface. Bullant provides some XML/SOAP support, but a fair amount of work was needed.
The development aspects of the project took about three months "due to our own issues," says Gyaneshwar. Trials with a handful of suppliers proved the system was working and that the status messages being returned by Xpedite were handled correctly. When a fax is submitted, Xpedite responds with a job number that can be used to query the status of that transmission. marketboomer polls this status every minute so the service team can see any outstanding faxes, explains Ward.
Another month or so was spent fine-tuning the rules in the messaging system that control the number of retries, failover, exception handling, and so on, but Xpedite was being used for production work during that time.
marketboomer's requirements were different to those of Xpedite's existing customers in that the worst-case acceptable delivery time for any fax was 20 minutes. Other businesses were using the service for fax broadcasting, and there the concern is that the whole batch is sent within a given period. This required some changes at Xpedite's end, but the outcome was very satisfactory: in July, the slowest delivery time was eight minutes.
"Xpedite gives us fairly extensive reporting," says Gyaneshwar, including a list of fax numbers causing frequent problems. Suppliers vary from the very large to the very small, so "all sorts of different issues arise" from a sole trader talking on the business's single phone line to people failing to keep a busy fax machine replenished with paper.
The system is currently sending around 1000 documents per day, and 95 percent are successfully delivered at the first attempt, which Ward says is pretty good for faxes.
Esker
Enterprise communication software specialist Esker used Siebel CRM software and had "invested thousands and thousands of man-hours" to integrate it with other applications, says James Elkington, managing director of Esker Australia.
A Siebel upgrade became necessary about a year ago, but that would have meant repeating the integration work. Instead, Esker switched to salesforce.com CRM and integrated it with SAP financials and an in-house sales administration system (known as SAS, but don't confuse it with the commercial software of that name) via salesforce.com's weblinks feature and a data warehouse.
All the SAP and SAS data is stored in the warehouse, and a weblink connects a customer record in the CRM system with the information in the warehouse regarding that customer.
For example, the "Assets & Contracts" link sends the customer ID from salesforce.com to the data warehouse, which builds a Web page showing the requested information in the same style as the CRM system. "It looks like salesforce.com data," says Elkington.
Nicolas Bragard, Esker's corporate director of IS, explains that storing all the data within salesforce.com was a more expensive proposition, but salesforce.com's integration and customisation facilities made the job easy.
"salesforce.com provides a really useful integration with Visual Studio .NET" and other platforms, he says. The company initially used the salesforce.com XML-RPC API to upload those portions of the Siebel data that were not accessible by salesforce.com's import tools, but shortly afterwards Web Services support was added ("more friendly, more useful," according to Bragard) and Esker used that for the rest of the project.
Another issue was that the customisation tools provided by salesforce.com do not allow the addition of logic to the standard screens. For example, when a sales opportunity is closed because the business has been lost to a competitor, Esker requires staff to record the reason. Another example is that the values presented in a version number pick list will depend on the product selected in a previous pick list. "Ninety percent of the time we can do what we need with salesforce.com's basic tools," says Bragard, but for the other 10 percent "it's really easy to develop extra screens -- we can use tools we are really familiar with," such as Visual Studio .NET.
The entire salesforce.com implementation took less than three months, including the integration with SAP and SAS.
"Whenever [salesforce.com] upgrade, we get that upgrade simultaneously," he says, "and these Web integration links seem backwards compatible" so Esker doesn't need to rework the integration.
"Salesforce.com is becoming the central view into all our systems," he adds.
Esker has experienced some version-of-the-truth problems, as data from a variety of sources including spreadsheets flows into the data warehouse. "From a user's perspective, that's been a bit of a problem," he says. In most countries, Esker sells through resellers and customer information is captured by SAS when end-users register their software to receive the activation code. Around 90 percent of Australian sales are direct and licence keys are shipped with the product, so "from an Australian perspective, salesforce.com is the cleanest data." In some cases, less accurate data is being pushed from the data warehouse into the CRM system. "It's not so much of a problem for the other subsidiaries, says Elkington, and "in France, I know their best system is SAS."
In future, Web integration will be used to create new SAS records based on customer data from salesforce.com, and then SAS will create the licence key. This will help ensure consistency of data. "salesforce.com is becoming the central view into all our systems," says Elkington.
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