Contact Peggy Watt

By Peggy Watt
IntraNet, 6/23/97

Unlike most intranet builders, Xilinx, Inc. designed its corporate Web with a front gate that swings open to accommodate access by far-flung employees and independent sales representatives.

In fact, a key reason this San Jose, Calif., microprocessor company decided to build an intranet was to improve communications among its worldwide locations and the more than 400 independent representatives it contracts with for sales. Of course, the internal Web - Crossroads - supplies the typical useful mix of workgroup, departmental and corporate home pages. But it also includes an extranet component, Partner Web.

Xilinx is truly a virtual corporation in that it's an organization not defined or constrained by physical boundaries. Besides relying on highly technical outside salespeople, some of whom only represent Xilinx, the company maintains a network of about a dozen manufacturing partners. At each of these partners, several people deal regularly with Xilinx.

Xilinx posted $560 million in revenue last year selling programmable logic devices. Its specialty is field-programmable gate arrays - logic chips customers can reprogram rather than returning the chips to a fabrication plant.

Programmers in Boulder, Colo., Edinburgh, Scotland and San Jose, collaborate on chip development, then run their work past test facility engineers in Dublin, Ireland. Security is crucial, not only to keep competitors from viewing the communications among Xilinx programmers, but also to keep competing distributors from seeing each other's correspondence with Xilinx.

''I call this 'controlled chaos,' '' says Sandra Sully, vice president and chief information officer, of the challenge in maintaining access rights for so many different organizations dealing with many of the same resources in Xilinx's intranet and extranet.

Sully joined Xilinx less than two years ago, charged with creating a ''simple and ubiquitous'' network of resources.

Adding meaning to the madness

What's more, Xilinx wanted to make information easily available internally and externally, on a selective basis, through a single interface.

A Web interface is ideal because Xilinx supports a variety of user platforms internally and, of course, has no control over what software is used by the large number of nonemployees who need to communicate with the staff, Sully notes.

Inside the company, IT supports approximately 600 Sun Microsystems, Inc. computers running Solaris, in use as engineering workstations by programmers and to manage financial databases on the business side. Most nonengineers use the company's 1,600 Windows PCs, but the company also has about 75 Macintosh systems.

Appropriately, Xilinx's intranet also is distributed. Xilinx houses the centerpiece, Crossroads, primarily on a Solaris TCP/IP-based internal corporate network. The extranet component, Partner Web, runs on servers owned by an Internet service provider. Crossroads and Partner Web pages point to Xilinx's public Web site.

Xilinx relies heavily on Netscape Communications Corp.'s software, including the SuiteSpot server applications and the Navigator browser.

Local and remote employees enter Crossroads through a password-protected home page residing on a LAN-attached Sun UltraSPARC in San Jose. The firewall in Xilinx's Netscape Communications Server protects the intranet from unauthorized entry through the Web. Solaris' network management tool kit manages the logon and password access procedure.

Tending the gate

When Partner Web users access pages developed for Crossroads and maintained by corporate gatekeepers, they're actually seeing a replicated copy of the page housed on the ISP's server. Xilinx does this strictly for security reasons, Sully says.

Xilinx eventually will invite partners into portions of Crossroads directly. For that purpose, Sully's staff is building a demilitarized zone (DMZ), hoping to expand the extranet by the end of this year. Through a series of firewalls and directory-level restrictions based on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, Xilinx will strictly control user access and keep the gates closed to employee-only sections.

But even the current gateway opens many new paths for the sales reps. Time zones or distance are no longer constraints on checking product information, obtaining collateral or ''talking'' with other Xilinx reps. The sales force especially likes the wealth of online presentations they can download and then tailor for use in their sales calls.

''Before, I would have to call Xilinx to get a floppy or hard copy,'' says Russ Sinagra, a supplier and business manager for semiconductor distributor Hamil-ton Hallmark, a division of Avnet, Inc. in Great Neck, N.Y. ''I can customize the presentation for my customers but still present the information the way Xilinx wants.''

Sinagra also notes he can get information for customers more quickly. ''It makes me look a whole lot smarter,'' he says.

Sinagra is eager for Xilinx to launch the online order status application now under development for the extranet. ''Now we're constrained by time zones and personnel. We have to call, get to a customer service person, and then wait while that person gets the information from the computer and then tells us. Soon we'll be able to just dial in and get information in real time.''

Sinagra says Xilinx is ''definitely an innovator'' among the chip manufacturers with whom he and his colleagues work. He credits Xilinx with asking questions first and then building. This results in a useful product.

''Xilinx asked for a wish list from the field,'' Sinagra says. ''Then it was able to start rolling out some resources quickly, on the basis of what it could easily make available.'' Speaking of his experience as a beta tester of Partner Web, he says, ''It seemed like every day Xilinx was telling me to try something new.''

This summer, Xilinx expects to launch an extranet application that lets its partners register their software licenses online. They'll enter the quantity and usage information in a series of forms on Partner Web. Xilinx will still accept registration by telephone, but sales reps who saw a demo of the online registration at their April conference were enthusiastic, Sully says.

Although Partner Web is key to the overall usefulness of Xilinx's internal Web, having an extranet is also a vulnerability, Sully says.

''Our biggest challenge was when we opened our information to our partners,'' Sully says. They needed access, ''but we didn't want them to have access to everything,'' she adds.

In fact, Xilinx keeps extranet users on the public pages, housed on its ISP's server, whenever feasible. For example, a sales rep seeking product information may click to access a specification sheet that is generally available, so the link takes that user to the public Web site. Any restricted pages on the extranet bear the company logo and are flagged ''Xilinx Confidential.''

Teamwork on the intranet

''I learned from using Lotus Notes that you need to have a discussion facility online,'' Sully says. ''Especially when you cross time zones and geography, threaded discussion is better than e-mail.''

Online discussion lets users track their collaborative efforts, jump in and out as appropriate and maintain a record for reference. Crossroads supports dozens of active discussion groups running on Netscape's Collabra Server software. Development teams in multiple locations rely on them to track projects, for example.

Because of Xilinx's emphasis on collaboration, Sully expects to implement many other workgroup tools Netscape is developing, notably the calendar and mail functions provided in Commun-icator. Her staff tests but does not deploy beta software, so it expects to implement Communicator companywide this summer, after it ships.

''One reason to choose a Web-enabled mail and calendaring system is the diversity of hardware and operating systems here,'' Sully says. Her staff also is testing and experimenting with publish/subscribe technology, which Net-scape is building into its browser. Sully expects it will be especially useful for distributing applications to employees and customers.

She also hopes to implement video over a 256K bit/sec link Xilinx maintains between its San Jose and Edin-burgh facilities. Because of time zone differences, some video recordings would be stored for users to retrieve when convenient. Most of Xilinx's desktop systems have at least 32M bytes of RAM because they've needed that power to access X Window System programs on the company's Unix servers. That makes most systems well-suited for video.

''We're doing software work in Ireland, Boulder and here,'' Sully says. ''More collaborative tools could make us a lot more productive.''

The IT staff also is working on ways to make parts of the corporate data warehouse, an Oracle7 database, available on the extranet. Of course, giving outsiders limited access to internal databases raises more security concerns.

Xilinx wants more sophisticated, re-dundant security products. ''All the [security] pieces aren't there yet,'' Sully says.

Neither is the variety of development tools, Sully adds. Her staff is still experimenting with a number of programming products, trying to find what works best for their intranet application development projects.

Many of Xilinx's intranet/extranet development plans, such as the DMZ and browser-based desktop, are waiting on the release of new products, most of them from Netscape. It took Xilinx awhile to jump into the corporate Web, but now that the company has begun building its gateways, it's eager to keep the construction zone busy.