e-business Solutions
CGEY: Rewriting the 80/20 rule
with the WebSphere software platform.
Forget the 8/20 rule. Try 60/40 or even
40/60. Cap Gemini Ernst & Young
(CGEY) is showing its clients new ways to
get quick results that are more responsive
to their needs and to the fast-moving
Internet marketplace.
“There’s an enormous opportunity for
companies who can be on the forefront of
business-to-business (BtoB) e-commerce,” said Paul Li, a senior manager
with Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. “The
IBM WebSphere® platform for e-business
is a powerful tool helping us build portals
that let our clients take advantage of that
opportunity.”
Finding the right approaches and tools
for helping clients stay abreast of new
opportunities has helped make Cap
Gemini Ernst & Young one of the world’s
largest management and IT consulting
firms with more than 57,000 professionals in many of the world’s leading commerce centers, from France to Japan,
from Austria to the United States.
Li, who specializes in e-commerce strategy and development, emphasizes finding
an approach that will integrate smoothly
with a client’s existing enterprise IT
structure, minimizing disruption, and
avoiding the need to create everything
from scratch.
Key IBM Products Used
Benefits/Results
IBM WebSphere®
Commerce Suite
Support for catalog and purchasing support
enables smooth integration with existing databases.
IBM WebSphere
Application Server,
Advanced Edition
High-level customization for business-to-business
e-commerce and the ability to work with Java tools
fit the CGEY methodology.
“The WebSphere platform’s excellent
framework for e-commerce and its ability
to integrate well with the strategic use of
Java make it an ideal choice for many of
our clients,” Li said. “It’s particularly
powerful in working with existing legacy
systems, whether we’re talking about
mainframe operating systems or an enterprise resource planning system.”
Dave Tubesing, IBM relationship manager, sees the teamwork between CGEY
and IBM helping improve business processes by providing focused solutions,
with IBM WebSphere platform products
providing major components that fit into
client business decision making.
“e-commerce moves decisions up the
corporate food chain,” Tubesing said.
“The need is to address executive decisions dealing with solving broad business
problems and involving the whole company. The WebSphere software platform
brings solid integration with existing and
planned software directions and also
provides and ease of installation that
helps keep projects on track.
“In this environment, there is a premium
on knowledge, speed of implementation,
risk avoidance and dependability of the
deployed solution,” he added. “The
WebSphere platform offers CGEY real
advantages because of its acceptance in
the marketplace and because it offers
proven tools to help their clients get the
most from their investment.”
Effective BtoB portal
Li cited several key steps involved in
developing an effective BtoB portal strategy, including an evaluation of the business potential of providing a portal,
creating a custom approach, considering
the architectural components the site
will require, possible roadblocks and
competitive influences.
“It’s essential that you have a clear vision
of what the portal will achieve for you,
and that you develop a clear understanding of what you do and what you do not
want the portal to achieve,” he said.
Quick results that are more responsive to clients’ needs
and to the fast-moving Internet marketplace
“One of the key challenges for many
clients is providing connectivity between
elements of community in your organization and with your trading partners.”
The development approach used by
CGEY involves careful task assessment,
setting priorities, harnessing and frontend loading of needed resources, proven
processes and tools, and a ruthless focus
on delivering the required functionality
on time and on budget.
Li said the tools and technology selected
for its projects have to work within
CGEY’s e-commerce development factory
approach, which is based on the firm’s
Rational Unified Process (RUP) methodology. This makes use of reusable Java
objects to speed production and also to
control costs, make support less labor
intensive and leads to a progressive building of tools which can be applied to new
client projects in the future.
Getting results on a tight timeline
“In the Internet space, things work differently than we’re accustomed to; often,
many things happen in parallel and
traditional cycles are either shortened or
just don’t apply anymore,” he said, explaining that CGEY’s methodology is
based on iterative development, which
shaves time from the traditional “waterfall” development life cycle. The iterative
development combined with the factory
approach increases project control —
permitting adherence to a “time-boxed”
duration with defined functionality.
“We have the ability to define a set of
resources, perhaps seven or eight essential
resources, and describe the functionality
“IBM WebSphereCommerce Suite provides
powerful e-commerce
support for large-scale,
complex business
requirements in the
enterprise.”
— Paul Li, senior manager,
Cap Gemini Ernst & Young’s
Advance Development Center
within the same timeframe and budget,”
he said. “When there are changes during
the development project, we manage that
by saying, ‘if this goes in, then that comes
out,’ so we can provide the same functionality for the same budget.”
Li cited the case of a large appliance
manufacturer who wanted to tie together
trading partners and employees to provide a business interchange, provide
access to relevant information, and the
ability to place and track orders.
“This had to be accomplished in a way
that maintains the security of information while making it more accessible,
faster, and gives better service to both
the employees of the company and to the
trading partners,” he said.
An essential part of the process requires
an appropriate technology solution, one
that would fit with the architectural
requirements, including other Webbased applications and ERP systems,
while integrating with the Java components that are core to the CGEY process.
“The WebSphere platform has the advantage of being one of the few Java application engines that can scale from an NT
server to the mainframe,” he said.
Customization
“We developed the BtoB and BtoE portal
for the appliance manufacturer using the
WebSphere platform as the foundation,”
he pointed out, but also made use of
existing tools including IBM’s LDAP
server for directory service, Lotus Notes™
for some administrative content and an
Oracle database for dynamic content. The
final solution involved Java™ servelets
and Java objects that carried much of the
business functionality.
The client needed the portal to consolidate different solutions it had already
deployed to different user communities,
each requiring separate URLs (Universal
Resource Locators). They decided to
create a central BtoB and BtoE portal
that would focus users to a single area
and provide the appropriate service based
on who they are. And they wanted to
ensure a consistent experience everywhere on the site to reduce training,
maintenance and the potential for confusion.
“Visitors don’t want to know about all of
the e-commerce applications that you’re
trying to knit together,” he said, “they
only care about dealing with you, as a
company, and they expect that experience
to be consistent and easy to use, starting
with a single logon infrastructure that
permits access to the applications appropriate for each visitor.”
The solution used XML as an open standard and incorporated several pieces of
Client Example - Application Architecture
System Services
Java Server Pages
Servlet
HTML/Javascript
Web Browser
(3.x, 4.x browsers)
Content Page
IBM HTTP Server 1.3.6
Servlet
Servlet
Servlet
JSPs
IBM WebSphere
Application Server
Advanced Edition 2.03
Security (LDAP)
Logging Service
LDAP
IBM Directory Server
technology around the WebSphere server.
CGEY met its goal of delivering the
results they had promised within the
90-day window and on budget.
“WebSphere Commerce Suite, especially
in the new release, supports the kind of
large-scale, complex business requirements that our manufacturing client
encountered,” Li recounted. Because
IBM has made a major commitment to
the WebSphere software platform, it also
provides the known quantity of support
that both IBM and other companies will
enrich over time with new extensions
and applications.
“The WebSphere family of products also
works well on multiple platforms and can
scale from small to large without losing
functionality,” he said. “That’s especially
important when we work with smaller
companies or with companies wanting to
start development in one area of the
business that they may want to extend
throughout the enterprise at a later
point.”
The firm’s experience with e-commerce
and its use of the reusable tool approach
based on the RUP methodology pays off
for both current and future clients.
Session Service
Mail (SMTP)
Data Access Service
Static
Content
Notes
DB
Dynamic
Content
Oracle
The IBM WebSphere software platform for
e-business is a key component of an
architectural solution that can incorporate
IBM LDAP server for directory services to
provide authentication, Lotus Notes,
servelets that are routers to individual
functionality, dynamic data from an
Oracle database, Java objects and Java
beans to handle functionality such as
registration, login/logout, session management, single sign on or focusing some
content for specific users.
It all has to work together and WebSphere
Application Server integrates with Java
capability to provide a powerful, flexible
and scalable client solution.
The architecture accommodates future
needs — and future releases of the
application server — by applying business
logic and Java objects.
When a large soft drink distributor
wanted an e-commerce site to serve the
information and business transaction
needs of its distributors, CGEY was able
to use its structured approach to deliver
a portal solution that provided everything from information exchange to
order placement and tracking.
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2000
Building on success
“We have an approach that can evolve
with the changing needs of the marketplace,” said Li. “Just as the WebSphere
platform provides a solid framework for
today’s e-commerce needs, it continues
to grow to meet future challenges, such
as building a bourse, an exchange,
where buyers and sellers can broker
their goods.”
For more information,
please contact your:
IBM marketing representative or
IBM Business Partner.
Visit us at:
ibm.com/e-business
For more information about CGEY,
visit: www.cgey.com
IBM Corporation
Software Group
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Produced in the United States of America
12-00
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