An application framework for the future

Management must-have More automation to come

Over the last two decades, Smith & Associates in Houston has built a global resale business out of being at the ready with semiconductor components when any one of its varied customers - from automakers to medical equipment manufacturers - comes calling. The calls always are urgent - an expected shipment of critical components hasn't arrived on schedule, the buffer inventory is nearly depleted, and the vendor says the delivery delay might be weeks long. If the manufacturer doesn't get more components shortly, a critical production line will screech to a halt.

Smith's IT team has enabled account representatives to deal with the "I need it yesterday" demands of a global clientele through new-data-center-style application and infrastructure choices. In the process, it has built an application infrastructure that will support the company's growth throughout this decade and beyond. Smith is among the first companies to take a hardware-based approach to managing its application infrastructure - shunning traditional management software as too complex and too costly to maintain.

Smith's exploration of new data center concepts started with SalesChain X, the application used during those demanding customer negotiations. Smith's IT team had three goals for the 7-year-old application: improve its performance, increase its scalability and integrate it with the company's ERP application.

The team decided a complete re-architecture of SalesChain X, a Java application, was in order, including migration of SalesChain X onto a newer standards-based, Web-centric platform. Building a componentized, services-oriented application architecture would be critical for ensuring the flexibility and scalability needed to keep up with Smith's expansion. The company recently opened its ninth office, adding Shanghai to a list of cities that includes Amsterdam; Barcelona, Spain; Guadalajara, Mexico; and Seoul, Korea, says Sean Trinh, vice president of IT at Smith.

Setting the new data center foundation at the application layer, Smith reworked SalesChain X using Sun's Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition running on BEA Systems' WebLogic platform. Application components are written using Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) technology. Java Message Service technology provides the messaging infrastructure between SalesChain X and specialized ERP applications, provided by Glovia International, a Fujitsu subsidiary, for engineer-to-order and high-volume manufacturers. "Tight integration with the ERP system gives us the ability to create sales orders without ever leaving the SalesChain application, making performance much improved. And the messaging infrastructure provides us with alert-type features so we can push data to traders rather than having them constantly requesting it," Trinh says.

With that foundation, Smith's IT team has begun planning its Web services architecture, Trinh says. Turning the EJB components into Web services will be easy with BEA's tools, he says. "The more difficult part is mapping out all the services that will be exposed, identifying the service consumers and hashing out the life-cycle policy for the services," he says.