The Power of Now : Portal Success Stories

The Power of Now :
Portal Success Stories
www.tibco.com
TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ:TIBX) is a leading business integration and process management software company that enables real-time business. Real-Time Business is about
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delivered the value of Real-Time Business, what TIBCO calls The Power of Now®, to over
2,000 customers around the world and in a wide variety of industries. For more information
on TIBCO's proven enterprise backbone, business integration, business process management, and business optimization software, TIBCO can be reached at +1 650-846-1000 or
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as possible and current as of the publication date.
Published in the USA.
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TIBCO provides a robust portal solution that has been optimized for
rapid deployment while providing the flexibility and extensibility to meet
increasing demands over time. TIBCO's portal solution leverages a
complete set of proven EAI, B2B integration, process management, and
Web Services solutions - allowing you to deploy enterprise portals that
give people personalized interfaces into the entire dynamic and
process-driven machine that is your business. This is ideal for the
deployment of business-to-employee portals, customer care portals,
business-to-business portals, and executive dashboards.
The success stories in this book describe how just some of our customers have used our portal software to better serve their customers,
increase productivity and efficiency, enhance response to competition
and improve compliance with government and industry regulations.
Associated Newspapers Limited
Central Bank of Brazil
City of Detroit
E. & J. Gallo
Essent Energie
Health Net
Kaba Group
Ministry of Hajj
Nordea
PrimeSys
Renesas Technology
Reuters
Seagate
TIBCO Software
TNT Logistics
T-Systems
UTi Worldwide
A S S O C I AT E D N E W S PA P E R S L I M I T E D
MEDIA
TIBCO improves access to information
for Associated Newspapers Limited
“TIBCO® is fundamentally changing the way we conduct business at ANL.
Real-time business integration has increased the availability of information,
dramatically improving our ability to make better and faster decisions. In
particular, TIBCO’s BAM software will help us continually monitor and
improve our operational and financial performance.”
—Allan Marshall, group technology director, ANL
A S S O C I AT E D N E W S P A P E R S
LIMITED
The management company for five major
U.K. newspapers: Daily Mail, The Mail on
Sunday, Evening Standard, Metro, and
Ireland on Sunday
Industry
Geographies
MEDIA
UNITED KINGDOM
Deployment Summary
■ TIBCO’s enterprise application integration
(EAI) software integrates core systems at
ANL including accounting, advertising sales,
circulation support, production and
publishing and data warehousing
■
■
The data warehouse and TIBCO’s business
activity monitoring (BAM) software enable
reporting and trend analysis
TIBCO’s portal software offers centralized
and personalized access to information and
applications
Benefits
■ Application integration greatly reduces
maintenance costs, improves infrastructure
reliability, and enables different groups to
share information in real time
■
TIBCO software enables powerful business
monitoring and reporting and live real-time
views into all stages of the publishing
process, which allows ANL to improve its
operational performance
Associated Mediabase (AMB) is the IT
division of Associated Newspapers Ltd.
(ANL), a company that manages several
major U.K. newspapers: Daily Mail, The
Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, Metro,
and Ireland on Sunday. For the past ten
years, ANL has led the U.K. market in both
circulation and advertising sales with its
highly regarded newspapers and other
publications.
To support publishing operations, five
major IT systems are in place at ANL:
advertising, circulation, editorial and
production, digital media and accounting.
The infrastructure supporting these
mission-critical systems was made up
of an eclectic combination of legacy,
outsourced and third-party software
packages, as well as applications from
trading partners and acquired companies.
Prior to 2000, ANL connected these
heterogeneous systems using dozens of
point-to-point interfaces—resulting in an
inflexible, spaghetti-like architecture that
was costly and difficult to maintain because
it required specialist technical skills, with
many single human points of expertise.
Allan Marshall, managing director for AMB
and group technology director for ANL,
saw room for improvement.
“Freshness of the information in the
newspaper is a key competitive advantage
for ANL,” Marshall says. “Our vision is to
deliver the latest, personalized news to our
subscribers. This vision requires a robust
real-time integration infrastructure.”
EAI reduces costs and enables access
to real-time information
AMB set a goal to deliver flexible, realtime integration of core systems to ANL
by the end of 2003. The company
selected TIBCO Software Inc. for this
undertaking based on TIBCO’s visionary
leadership in the area of the real-time
distribution of information across
incompatible systems, breadth of product
offering and its reputation for developing
supportive partnerships with customers.
“We evaluated top vendors in the
integration space and selected TIBCO
knowing that we were getting one of the
most complete solution available,”
Marshall says. “We also felt that TIBCO
will be our partner—not just a vendor—to
make us successful with our initiatives.”
In 2001, AMB deployed TIBCO’s EAI
software to enable heterogeneous business
applications to interact in real time via
TIBCO’s patented Information Bus™
architecture. Business integration has
helped ANL to untangle its previously
complex architecture by replacing pointto-point integration. TIBCO’s software
enables data to be relayed and analyzed
within a common interactive environment.
A S S O C I AT E D N E W S PA P E R S L I M I T E D
MEDIA
“TIBCO’s approach to integration and
the real-time nature of the solution have
increased the availability of information
within ANL and dramatically improved
our ability to react quickly to that
information,” Marshall says. “We have
now fully automated the entire process,
from booking an ad in telesales to
invoicing, proof layout and publication”
“TIBCO is fundamentally changing the
way we conduct business at ANL,”
Marshall says. “Real-time integration has
increased the availability of information,
dramatically improving our ability to make
better and faster decisions. In particular,
TIBCO’s BAM software will help us
continually monitor and improve our
operational and financial performance.”
TIBCO’s EAI software enables systems to
share real-time information throughout all
parts of the organization. For example, all
advertising departments now are connected
to a shared system, which facilitates crossselling of different ANL products.
TIBCO portal software enables
centralized information access
“This EAI project has greatly reduced
maintenance costs while improving the
robustness and reliability of our
infrastructure,” Marshall adds. “The
TIBCO-based platform is highly faulttolerant, which is a must for our missioncritical applications.”
BAM and data warehouse software
provide predictive trend information
AMB plans to use additional TIBCO
products to further enhance access to—
and analysis of—information at ANL.
A recently deployed third-party data
warehouse rationalizes historic and
trend reporting across departments.
By the end of 2004, ANL will integrate
the data warehouse with one of TIBCO’s
BAM software products—TIBCO®
BusinessFactor—to provide management
with a powerful real-time business analysis
tool that will enable management to track
key performance indicators. By leveraging
a data warehouse, BAM provides the
capability to track processes and measure
performance—as well as forecast business
trends based on historical context and
real-time information.
In another move toward simplifying and
standardizing information access, AMB
has deployed TIBCO’s portal software to
build an enterprise portal that services all
of its approximately 2,000 employees.
The enterprise portal simplifies and
standardizes access to information,
applications and business processes
throughout ANL.
ANL expects to see an increase in
productivity by providing personalized
browser-based access to the systems
that employees use to perform their jobs.
The TIBCO-based portal will serve as a
communications tool to help improve
working relationships among departments.
The portal integrates seamlessly with
ANL’s search application and the data
warehouse to allow production and viewing
of the enterprise management reports.
The portal will provide access to the
information generated by TIBCO’s BAM
software to give employees a live snapshot
of publication processes at any given
point in time.
“Using TIBCO, we have met our
integration goals and objectives—and
in some cases vastly exceeded our
expectations,” Marshall says. “We find
ourselves with an excellent foundation
and framework, and we look forward to
future operational improvements based
on our use of TIBCO products.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s enterprise application
integration software integrates
core systems at ANL to improve
infrastructure reliability and allow
groups within the company to share
systems and information in real-time.
TIBCO’s business activity monitoring
(BAM) software—used in conjunction
with a data warehouse—enables
powerful reporting and trend analysis.
A TIBCO-based portal provides
employees with centralized access
to information provided by systems
and a new digital data archive.
CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL
GOVERNMENT
TIBCO's portal software opens the door to
information access for Central Bank of Brazil
“TIBCO’s solution will improve access to information by enabling us to
integrate different data sources and different applications—independently of
the technology and platforms that these applications use. Bringing all of this
information together in one convenient location will make life much easier for
our employees, and can ultimately provide the same benefit for the public.”
CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL
An institution tasked with ensuring the
stability of the Brazilian currency and the
soundness of the national financial system
Industry
Geographies
GOVERNMENT
BRAZIL
Deployment Summary
■ Central Bank of Brazil implements TIBCO’s
enterprise portal solution; the portal
integrates legacy mainframe applications
and Web-based applications to provide
employees with a single point of access
■
The Central Bank now uses TIBCO as a
standard integration solution for each new
application implemented
■
TIBCO’s solution will be used to integrate
new applications to the intranet portal
regardless of the technology used by the
application, and will provide access for
employees
■
TIBCO’s portal solution decentralizes portal
content management
Benefits
TIBCO-based portal will improve
productivity by providing employees with
a single point of access to various
applications with different technologies
such as mainframe and Web-based
applications and all pertinent information
—Augusto Ornelas, deputy head of IT, Central Bank of Brazil
In 1964, the country of Brazil created the
Central Bank of Brazil, an autonomous
federal institution, as part of the National
Financial System. Since then, the role
of the Central Bank has gradually evolved.
The bank’s mission today is to ensure
the stability of the purchasing power of
Brazilian currency and the soundness of
the national financial system.
To achieve these goals, the Central Bank
continuously seeks IT solutions that will
make its internal operations more efficient,
and will enable it to provide better tools
to its employees and improved services
to the public. The bank’s infrastructure—
developed over the last 20 years—primarily
consists of mainframe solutions. Despite its
many integrations, the infrastructure lacked
a single interface through which internal
users could access information.
■
■
Single login and customizable, single point
of access to information saves time,
improving employee productivity and
satisfaction
■
Using TIBCO as a standard integration
solution will save time and money by
shortening development cycles
■
TIBCO real-time messaging will enable
the Central Bank to access real-time
information from all areas of the enterprise
■
Customizable external portal will enable
citizens and financial institutions to save
time and more easily access information
they need
According to Augusto Ornelas, deputy
head of IT at the Central Bank of Brazil,
“Before we established Central Bank’s
main intranet, most departments had their
own separate intranets. As a consequence,
data that belonged to certain departments
was sometimes not available to the rest of
the organization and the intranet was not
used very much. It was difficult to update
content, which made it difficult to share
internal information.”
Single point of access saves time and
improves productivity
The Central Bank decided to deploy a
portal to provide employees with a unified
point of access to all information in the
organization. A portal would also make
feasible the integration of legacy mainframe
applications and Web-based applications as
well as client-server applications.
Ornelas and his team used the government
auction model to find a product that was
easy to use, reliable, capable of integrating
different applications, and offered
personalization. Ultimately, the bank
selected TIBCO’s portal solution. “We
followed the government auction model
and decided to implement TIBCO’s
solution based on its capability to meet
these requirements at a better price than
competing products,” says Ornelas. To
ensure successful completion of the
project, Reuters consultants worked on site
for one month to help implement the
portal. The bank’s IT staff also deployed
the Verity® K2 Search Portlet to enable
searching capability for the portal.
The portal will integrate the Central
Bank’s departmental intranets under
one unified interface and provide a
central intranet for the whole bank. The
consolidation will make data easier to
locate and has enabled a higher level of
employee self-service. A single login
enhances productivity by letting users
present their credentials once and then
quickly and conveniently switch between
applications without re-logging on.
“The single point of access will make it
much easier for Central Bank employees
CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL
GOVERNMENT
to get to the different applications and
information required for their work,” says
Ornelas. “Employees will customize their
own interfaces to put together the main
functions that they require every day. The
TIBCO portal will raise levels of employee
satisfaction as well as productivity.”
TIBCO will shorten development cycles
and reduce IT overhead
The IT department expects to experience
an increase in efficiency as a result of the
portal implementation. By using TIBCO as
the standard solution for integrating systems
and applications across departments, the
IT staff will no longer need to use a new
integration solution for each application
that the department implements. Reusing
existing work shortens development cycles,
saving both time and money. “One of our
objectives was to increase the efficiency of
the IT department. Using TIBCO’s solution
will help us reach that goal,” says Flavio
Araujo, a project manager in the IT
department.
The portal also will improve the
management of the content available
on the portal. Says Ornelas, “Because
TIBCO’s solution provides decentralized
content management, employees in
various departments will manage their
own content more easily. This capability
prevents bottlenecks in updating the portal,
and sharing information with the rest of
the organization will be fast and easy.”
Central Bank plans to deliver real-time
data in customizable portal
As the next project, the Central Bank
plans to expand access to the TIBCO
portal to include the bank’s many
customers. The Central Bank is a source
of key financial data for Brazilian citizens
as well as Brazilian and international
financial institutions. Inflation reports,
bank rankings, and other economic
information published on the bank’s Web
site help to shape the market in Brazil.
Providing this information through a
customizable TIBCO portal will give bank
customers faster and easier access to the
information they need.
“TIBCO’s solution will improve access to
information,” Ornelas says, “by enabling
us to integrate different data sources and
different applications—independently of
the technology that these applications use.
Bringing all of this information together
in one convenient location will make life
much easier for our employees, and
ultimately can provide the same benefit
for the public.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
Using TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution,
the Central Bank of Brazil will integrate
legacy mainframe applications and
Web-based applications to provide
employees with a single point of
access. TIBCO’s portal solution allows
convenient decentralization of portal
content management. Standardization
on TIBCO will save time by enabling IT
staff to reuse already-completed work.
Future plans include improving the
external Web site and using TIBCO’s
messaging solution to share real-time
data across all departments.
D E T R O I T W AT E R A N D S E W E R A G E D E PA R T M E N T
GOVERNMENT
TIBCO's portal software helps City of Detroit
improve water plant management
“It is absolutely essential that our business processes operate flawlessly. With the
implementation of TIBCO, we can now automate business processes and the
flow of information between systems, giving our employees the tools they need
to do their jobs effectively.”
—Kevin Quiggle, information systems manager, DWSD
D E T R O I T W AT E R A N D
S E W E R A G E D E PA R T M E N T
The largest wastewater treatment plant in
the United States, serving the city of Detroit
and surrounding suburbs
Industry
Geographies
GOVERNMENT
SOUTHEASTERN
MICHIGAN
Deployment Summary
■ Solution integrates legacy systems with
off-the-shelf applications and standardizes
around new data management systems
■
Integration creates common platform for
wastewater management reporting
■
Web portal provides employees with
personalized access to operational data
■
Using TIBCO’s Web ticker, the electronic
visual management system (eVMS) can
alert managers when operating conditions
exceed preset thresholds
■
Infrastructure can integrate with the
City of Detroit’s financial system
Benefits
TIBCO’s solution provides real-time
information about plant operations at the
click of a mouse, and the means to access
archival data
■
■
Integration with legacy systems preserves
the value of the organization’s previous IT
investments
■
Availability of historical data in portal
increases business agility by enabling
employees to analyze trends and anticipate
future needs
■
Department saves time and money by
consolidating systems management and
eliminating redundant applications
The Detroit Water and Sewerage
Department (DWSD), a branch of the
City of Detroit government, provides
water to more than 4 million customers in
Detroit and 125 suburban communities.
The department’s five water plants pump
an average of 675 million gallons per day.
DWSD currently provides wastewater
service for 3 million residents in Detroit
and in surrounding suburbs throughout
southeastern Michigan.
DWSD decides to remove
information silos
DWSD manages the largest single
wastewater treatment facility in the
United States. The facility treats an average
of 720 million gallons of flow a day. Six
major business units feed management
information to the corporate intranet, and
consolidating data access had become
increasingly difficult. As Kevin Quiggle,
information systems (IS) manager at
DWSD, explains, “The network was made
up of a series of unconnected data silos,
and getting information in and out of these
silos and into the hands of the managers
who needed it was a real challenge.”
For example, to keep operations running
smoothly, plant operators relied on the
“Six-Hour Report,” a paper report created
six hours into every eight-hour shift to track
equipment operating status, fluid levels,
trouble spots, and general operational
status. This report was generated manually
and passed to the next shift manager, who
would generate his own updated status
report and file away the previous report
at the end of each shift. Records weren’t
effectively available for later reference
or trend analysis. Similarly, processing
requisitions and purchase orders often
required managers to log into three or four
different systems to initiate approvals.
Quiggle recognized that DWSD faced two
primary IS challenges: to integrate disparate
systems into a single, consolidated data
infrastructure, and to quickly deliver
information to the managers who need it.
DWSD partners with TIBCO
The logical solution was Web personalization,
using thin clients to provide 1,500 employees
with authenticated access to DWSD’s
operating data. To do so, Quiggle turned
to TIBCO, a leading enabler of real-time
business, to implement an electronic visual
management system (eVMS).
Working with Westin Engineering, an
IT consulting group, Quiggle’s IS team
assessed various infrastructure integration
and Web portal solutions, including IBM
and Oracle. DWSD chose TIBCO because
of the company’s past successes, the
features of TIBCO’s business integration
and business optimization solutions, and
TIBCO’s technology roadmap for the
future. Using TIBCO’s solution, Quiggle
was confident he could tap into DWSD’s
D E T R O I T W AT E R A N D S E W E R A G E D E PA R T M E N T
GOVERNMENT
legacy systems, standardize around new
data management systems, and expand
the department’s intranet strategy.
intranet systems. With the help of TIBCO’s
solutions, he can consolidate system
access and eliminate redundant data entry.
The first step was to create a common
platform for wastewater management
reporting. As part of Quiggle’s eVMS
strategy, critical data needed to manage the
wastewater treatment plant is now entered
into an Oracle® database via a Web portal
interface. This way, any manager with
appropriate authority can access the system
to check equipment status, fluid levels,
or any other operating conditions. Using
TIBCO’s Web ticker, eVMS also can alert
managers when operating conditions
exceed preset thresholds. And by entering a
year’s worth of Six-Hour Reports into the
database, DWSD’s eVMS can now deliver
historical data through the Web portal for
trend analysis. In addition, the TIBCObased portal has been integrated with
Web content management to enable fast,
controlled access to regulatory information,
human resources data, capital program
reports, and other information necessary for
managers to effectively run their operations.
TIBCO’s business integration solution
provides the means to centralize
operational and management data.
Using secure, personalized Web access,
TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution
delivers timely information through a
single Web interface. In addition, TIBCO’s
strategic relationships with vendors such
as Oracle allow DWSD to standardize on
market-leading technology without
integration issues.
TIBCO helps improve data access
Thanks to TIBCO’s solutions, DWSD
now has a landmark wastewater treatment
tracking system that allows managers to
access real-time information about plant
operations at the click of a mouse, and
the means to access archival data to plan
for the future needs of the citizens of
Detroit and surrounding communities. In
the process, DWSD saves time and money
by consolidating systems management
and eliminating redundant applications.
DWSD expects high ROI
Quiggle’s team also is working to migrate
requisition status to the Web portal. A future
goal is to integrate DWSD’s requisitions to
the City of Detroit’s Oracle Financials®
system; departmental approvals will then
be consolidated into a single step. Rather
than having to use multiple systems, a
flagged purchase order will be delivered
to the manager’s personalized intranet
interface for approval, and then routed back
to the city accounting office for processing.
DWSD expects to realize a dramatic return
on its TIBCO investment by eliminating
the hidden costs associated with moving
data back and forth and giving managers
a central Web-accessible data repository.
Quiggle says his department maintains
138 separate desktop applications and
As DWSD’s intranet infrastructure grows,
DWSD plans to expand access to give the
Board of Water Commissioners and even
the mayor access to status information.
Quiggle also is working to integrate
human resources information (both
employees and contractors) in support
of identity management.
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration and
business optimization solutions help
the Detroit Water and Sewerage
Department improve data access to
support 19 staffed locations and supply
key DWSD employees with current
information regarding plant operations,
equipment status, liquid levels, repairs
and improvement projects, purchase
orders, and other aspects of day-to-day
operations. DWSD now has a landmark
water treatment tracking system that
allows managers to access real-time
information about plant operations at
the click of a mouse, and the means to
access archival data to plan for the
future needs of the citizens of Detroit
and 77 suburban communities.
E. & J. GALLO WINERY
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
E. & J. Gallo uses robust TIBCO portal software to
cultivate personalized, real-time information access
“Integrating the TIBCO-based portal with our business systems has made access
to information convenient throughout our extended enterprise. As a result,
employees, distributors, and suppliers—all of our constituents—are equipped
to make the best possible tactical and strategic business decisions.”
—Kent Kushar, CIO, E. & J. Gallo Winery
E. & J. GALLO WINERY
A leading winery with world-class expertise
in the art and science of grape growing and
winemaking
Industry
Geographies
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■ TIBCO’s enterprise portal software provides
E. & J. Gallo with a common infrastructure
to create one internal and four external
Web views: SalesWeb, DistributorWeb,
SupplierWeb, and TradeWeb
■
■
The portal is the foundation of E. & J. Gallo’s
Grapevine Portal initiative to increase
productivity, promote brand loyalty, and
make information more easily available to
employees and business partners
TIBCO’s business integration and business
process management software links more
than 20 Web-based applications, including
a production control system, a shipment
tracking application, and various discussion
forums, to enable real-time workflow
■
To meet these organizational objectives,
E. & J. Gallo launched an initiative to
increase productivity, promote brand
loyalty, and make information more easily
available to employees and business
partners. This initiative—christened the
Grapevine Portal—sought to accomplish
these goals through enhancements to both
internal and external Web environments.
DistributorWeb view reduces costs by
automating 90 percent of orders from
distributors
“In the past, our company intranet and
extranet had largely been one-size-fits-all
systems that offered only limited personalization to users,” says Kent Kushar, CIO at
E. & J. Gallo. “This lack of fine-grained
customizability negatively affected user
acceptance and productivity. By deploying
a highly customizable portal, we planned
to address these inefficiencies.”
Centralized administration increases security,
making it easier for administrators to assign
proper access rights to individual employees
TIBCO portal offers ease of
deployment to speed time-to-market
Benefits
■ Single login and highly customized personal
access to real-time information improve
employee productivity and acceptance
■
During the past 70 years, the E. & J. Gallo
Winery has become a world leader in the
art and science of grape growing and
winemaking. Finding the most innovative
methods of distributing and marketing
the wines it produces is the E. & J. Gallo
mission. The company cultivates a variety
of strategies to meet this goal, such as
expanding and strengthening its distribution
network, increasing the performance of its
organization, and improving the quality of
its products to ensure that customers
receive the highest possible value.
E. & J. Gallo deployed the new Grapevine
Portal to integrate multiple business
systems and enhance application access.
The company wanted a single login and
customized content including production
control, shipment tracking, and discussion
forums. The company selected TIBCO for
the project because of the breadth and
depth of TIBCO’s product offerings, which
include messaging, business integration,
portals, and workflow.
The Grapevine Portal, built using TIBCO’s
enterprise portal software, is designed
to provide one internal view and four
external views of company systems
and information. The internal view,
EmployeeWeb, provides a central location
for employee-related information, applications, and task status—all accessible
through a single login. The four external
views—SalesWeb, DistributorWeb,
SupplierWeb, and TradeWeb—are
designed to enrich brand intimacy and
loyalty with external constituencies by
delivering timely and innovative content.
“Our approach was to leverage a single
portal infrastructure to provide appropriate
information to all elements of our supply
chain—from grape growers to distributors
to retail stores to restaurants,” Kushar says.
The first phase of the project, EmployeeWeb,
took six months to complete from project
initiation to production. Subsequent phases
have taken only one month each to develop
and deploy.
“As we move forward, the deployments are
getting faster because we can leverage
work from the earlier phases, which
enables accelerated time-to-market,”
E. & J. GALLO WINERY
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
Kushar says. “For each new deployment,
we simply reconfigure content presentation
and access control, and include any
necessary additional content.”
Customizable portal enhances
productivity and improves
user acceptance
With the TIBCO-based Grapevine
Portal, E. & J. Gallo achieved two
primary objectives: increased employee
productivity and increased acceptance
of the intranet. Employees now routinely
use the portal to access a broad range of
information concerning bottling schedules,
cellar operations, warehouse operations,
marketing programs, finance reports, and
more—all from one centralized location.
More than 20 Web-based applications are
served through EmployeeWeb and the
extranet portals, including a production
control system, shipment tracking application, and various discussion forums.
TIBCO enables a single, Web-based login,
so users log on only once to access all of
the information and applications available
through the portal. This feature provides
greater convenience for employees and
improves security by centralizing the
management of access privileges—making
it easier for administrators to assign proper
access rights to individual employees.
E. & J. Gallo is also rolling out a real-time
workflow infrastructure for the Grapevine
Portal using TIBCO’s business process
management software. A “My Tasks”
portal category consolidates workflow
from individual applications and presents
each user with a personalized taskmanagement interface, providing a
visual reminder of each task’s status.
Multiple portal views keep
all constituents of the supply
chain informed
E. & J. Gallo employees are not alone
in enjoying greatly improved access to
information and services. Distributors now
save time by processing 90 percent of their
orders online using the Web Distributor
Order Entry (WebDOE) system available
through DistributorWeb, one of the four
E. & J. Gallo external portal views, which
also includes useful distributor reporting
and reimbursement applications. Both
DistributorWeb and SalesWeb offer access
to Brand Central, a central relational
database containing a wealth of point-ofsale and marketing-related information for
all of the E. & J. Gallo Winery brands.
Brand Central provides distributors and
the E. & J. Gallo sales force with access
to critical information to aid sales and
marketing efforts.
“The flexibility of TIBCO’s portal software
allows us to support a very diverse user
base,” Kushar says. “For example, TIBCO
enables centralized user administration
and access control through our corporate
lightweight directory access protocol
(LDAP) directory, which greatly reduces
the administrative burden. From an IT
perspective, TIBCO lets us do more
with less.”
At present, the user base for the E. & J.
Gallo Winery Grapevine Portal is 6,200
users, but that number is expected to grow
to more than 8,500 in late 2004 when the
final TradeWeb portal view goes live.
TIBCO-based Grapevine Portal brings
award to E. & J. Gallo
The benefits of the new portal infrastructure were not limited to an increase in
employee productivity and easier employee
and partner access to information. The
E. & J. Gallo Winery Grapevine Portal
won the 4th Annual Portal Excellence
award for Best Business Integration
Project at DCI’s Portals, Collaboration,
and Content Management Conference.
“No longer is it a challenge to get the right
information and application functionality
to the right people at the right place and
time,” Kushar says. “Integrating the
TIBCO-based portal with our business
systems has made access to information
convenient throughout our extended
enterprise. As a result, employees,
distributors, and suppliers—all of our
constituents—are equipped to make
the best possible tactical and strategic
business decisions.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s enterprise portal and business
integration software connects more
than 20 Web-based applications
providing internal and external users
with a highly personalized experience.
TIBCO’s business process management
software includes a personalized taskmanagement interface with visual
reminders of each task’s status. Through
the TIBCO-based Grapevine Portal,
E. & J. Gallo employees routinely access
a variety of information, such as bottling
schedules, cellar operations, warehouse
operations, marketing programs, finance
reports, and more, and distributors
process 90 percent of their orders. With
TIBCO, the E. & J. Gallo Winery has
achieved its primary objectives:
employee productivity gains and
increased acceptance of the intranet.
ESSENT ENERGIE
ENERGY
Essent Energie improves
customer service with TIBCO
“We wanted a solution that is open and not dependent on certain server
technologies. We needed flexibility because we are going through a period of
change, which is when reliability problems can occur. We spoke to people with
integration experience, and they all said that TIBCO is the best and most
logical choice.”
—Frans Schoot, manager of information management, Essent Energie
ESSENT ENERGIE
A division of the Essent Company, the
Netherlands’ largest multi-utility group,
supplying 2.8 million customers with
electricity and 1.9 million with gas. The
Essent Company has total annual revenues
of ¤6.9 billion
Industry
Geographies
ENERGY
NETHERLANDS
Deployment Summary
■ Three-year project—split across multiple
phases to support deregulation—
integrates multiple applications to create
a real-time infrastructure
■
TIBCO’s solution enables integration of
SAP, Siebel, and metering systems to
provide commercially valuable, real-time
information spanning front- and backoffice applications
■
The solution includes a customer portal for
customer self-service
Benefits
Using TIBCO’s business integration
solution, Essent became the first Dutch
energy utility to manage billing by the
deregulation deadline
■
■
Essent reduced invoicing errors by linking
transaction systems to customer service,
metering, and billing systems
■
Integration of the LODESTAR® PricingExpert®
application reduced time to quotation from
28 days to 3 days
■
TIBCO’s solution helped Essent to reduce
its number of applications by 37 percent
and number of interfaces by 32 percent
■
The self-service environment enhances
customer loyalty
Deregulation of the electricity and gas
markets in the European Union has
created intense competition among utility
providers. Now that customers have
choices, it is not only harder to attract
new customers but tougher still to retain
them. These changes in the market
mean that the old, monolithic monopolies
are transforming into multiple service
organizations that must make choices
about the sectors in which they can
perform best.
Essent Energie, which operates primarily in
the business-to-business (B2B) sector of the
energy market, already held a commanding
position in its marketplace. Essent realized
it would need to make radical changes to
defend against the uncertainties of new
market conditions while taking advantage
of fresh opportunities.
Essent responded to this challenge by
selecting best-in-class applications that
would help the company run each area
of its business most efficiently. Essent
chose the SAP® Utilities solution to hold
customer power consumption and
accounting information. The Siebel®
Energy solution was selected to manage
the customer experience. Essent uses the
LODESTAR PricingExpert application
for pricing and quotations, and the KWI®
kW3000™ solution for risk management
and deal capturing. In addition, Essent
Energie has a host of its own custom
applications.
Although a best-in-class approach to
applications provides the best functional fit
for specific operations, those applications
were developed when the need for
integration between different departments
was not fully appreciated. Essent quickly
realized that it needed a comprehensive
integration framework to extract the most
value from its investments.
Integrating processes creates
complications
As part of the transition to a deregulated
marketplace, Essent recognized an
opportunity to change its business
practices and processes. For instance,
the company wanted to collect metering
data from multiple sources so that it could
effectively monitor and manage power
consumption. In addition, Essent wanted
a solution that would enable its retail
operation to expand and provide access
to information for cross- and up-selling
opportunities.
Finding the right solution
Essent created a list of potential integration
solution providers, and ultimately decided
to partner with TIBCO Software Inc., a
leading enabler of real-time business. “We
wanted a solution that is open and not
dependent on certain server technologies.
We needed flexibility because we are
going through a period of change, which is
when reliability problems can occur,” says
Frans Schoot, manager of information
management at Essent Energie. We spoke
ESSENT ENERGIE
ENERGY
to people with integration experience, and
they all said that TIBCO is the best and
most logical choice.”
In fewer than three months, Essent
completed its initial pilot, which was a
scaled-down version of the final solution,
and felt confident that its time-critical
requirements would be met.
On-time deployment ensures business
continuity, improves customer service
Essent wanted to ensure that its systems
would continue generating bills accurately
after the market changes took effect.
“We had to have everything completed
by April 1, 2002, because that was our
deregulation deadline,” Schoot says. “We
knew that a rapid project completion
would give us an enormous advantage.
In the end, Essent was the only company
to complete the required transitions by
the changeover date.”
Because Essent wanted to improve its
customer-care handling and the quality of
the metering data, it decided to integrate
accounting, sales, billing, and metering
systems. TIBCO’s business integration
solution accomplished this goal by
reconciling customer information across
multiple systems. Real-time data sharing
among these systems has eliminated
manual reconciliation and reduced
invoicing errors—results that have led
to improved customer service.
TIBCO’s helps Essent manage
complexity
Essent’s situation was complicated by
the way in which business processes are
completed. For example, quotations are
sent to the pricing desk, which issues a
requisition for the quotation. The quotation
must take into consideration the customer’s
usage profile, which is also necessary for
metering purposes. The set of interlinked
processes was slow, yet the company
needed the information in real-time as
part of its objective of providing the best
customer service.
TIBCO’s business integration solution
connects and coordinates each process in
Essent’s demand chain. This has led to a
decrease in time-to-quotation from 28 days
to 3 days. “The ability to manage quotations
in such a short timeframe gives us a huge
competitive advantage,” Schoot says.
Today, TIBCO’s solution enables Essent to
manage multisite contracts, consolidate
metering information for the SAP billing
system, and allow the sales teams to view
individual, multiple, or consolidated usage
views. In addition, with the help of
TIBCO’s solution, Essent has simplified its
architecture. The company now has 37
percent fewer applications and 32 percent
fewer interfaces. Plus, Essent has eliminated
data duplication, improving operational
efficiencies within the company.
Integration proves beneficial
to customers
Customers expect to manage their energy
accounts in a variety of ways, including
through the Internet. Essent used TIBCO’s
enterprise portal solution to provide
customers with a self-service environment
on the Web. The system provides secure
access so customers only see information
relevant to their accounts. Internally,
information is delivered to managers’
desktops based on their roles. The
convenient portal reduces operational
costs by decreasing customers’ need to
contact the company call center or sales
teams. In addition, the portal improves
customer loyalty by making it easy for
customers to do business with Essent.
Essent regards the TIBCO project as
strategic to its success and sees benefits
well beyond those initially envisioned.
“As our market evolves in the future, we
feel confident that our business integration
foundation will help Essent continually
improve its market position,” Schoot says.
“Thanks to TIBCO’s solution, we are far
more agile and responsive to customer
needs than we were before.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration solution
enables Essent Energie to successfully
integrate accounting, sales, billing,
and metering systems to provide
commercially valuable real-time
information in a solution that spans
front- and back-office applications. This
provides the company with a significant
advantage over its competitors.
TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution has
enabled Essent to create a customer
self-service portal, which improves
customer loyalty and decreases
operational costs.
H E A LT H N E T
H E A LT H C A R E
TIBCO's portal software improves communications
and unites disparate sites at Health Net
“Using TIBCO’s solution, we developed a portal for our employees, or
‘associates’, in just two months. The portal is one of the first enterprise-wide
systems that unites all departments and associates together under one corporate
umbrella. We now have a vehicle for reaching associates at all levels.”
—Deanne Yamato-Tucker, director of IT, Health Net
H E A LT H N E T
One of the nation’s largest publicly traded
managed health care companies, consisting
of more than 9,000 employees and providing
health care benefits to approximately
5.3 million individuals in 15 states through
group, individual, Medicare, Medicaid, and
TRICARE programs
Industry
Geographies
H E A LT H C A R E
U N I T E D S TAT E S
Deployment Summary
■ Enterprise application integration (EAI)
solution unites multiple applications across
various platforms; the solution provides an
integrated interface that allows service
providers to access back-end systems for
claims and eligibility information
■
The employee portal solution integrates
different company intranets into a portal
that gives associates a central location to
access company information, business
tools, HR self-service functions, and more
Benefits
EAI enables more efficient business
processes and data exchange across a
wide range of systems
■
■
Business integration improves business-tobusiness (B2B) interactions by enabling
service providers to more easily access
important member information from
multiple back-end systems
■
The portal gives associates across
business units fast and easy access to critical
administrative tools and company information
■
TIBCO’s portal solution allows the company
to create a common look and feel for its
intranet sites
Corporate restructuring presents a
significant challenge to companies;
integrating previously distinct companies
or business units requires a clear
understanding of how each organization’s
process will affect corporate structure,
technology requirements, and employee
morale. As each organization comes
together, it brings its own diverse systems
and applications, which contribute to an
increasingly complex IT infrastructure.
At Health Net, one of the nation's largest
publicly traded health care companies,
mergers and acquisitions helped the
company grow but also created many
IT challenges. Through a number of
mergers and acquisitions, Health Net
acquired different core applications that
could not efficiently communicate with
each other. Combining companies also
meant fusing together different intranets to
promote a sense of company unity among
employees—or “associates,” as Health
Net refers to employees. The company
needed a business integration solution to
address these challenges.
Health Net needs to alleviate
inefficiencies and high costs
After multiple mergers and acquisitions,
lack of integration between Health Net’s
disparate systems created inefficiencies
that slowed down the company’s daily
operations. “When core applications and
systems have a difficult time 'talking' to
each other, the flow of data across the
entire organization is slower. We wanted
to fix that problem immediately,” says Ted
Wilkinson, a director of IT at Health Net.
In addition to integrating its core
applications, Health Net needed to
create an integrated interface for outside
vendors to access real-time claims and
eligibility information from what were
previously inaccessible back-end systems.
By providing this access, Health Net
would strengthen its vendor relationships
and improve the quality of its service to
customers. After evaluating various
integration vendors, Health Net chose
TIBCO Software Inc., a leading enabler
of real-time business.
“We knew TIBCO’s solution would
provide the most efficient way for us to
build the interface, and would also be an
excellent long-term choice because it
could ease future integrations with new
partners,” says Deanne Yamato-Tucker,
a director of IT at Health Net.
“Furthermore, we wanted an integration
vendor that had financial stability and
professional services to assist us with our
projects. When it comes to significant
implementations within our infrastructure,
vendor expertise is invaluable.”
Because TIBCO provides a simple
development environment, Health Net
can continue to integrate its IT systems
H E A LT H N E T
H E A LT H C A R E
rapidly and cost-effectively. “TIBCO
provided us with the packaged integration
we needed to quickly and easily unite
our core systems,” Wilkinson says. “We
are now able to perform interface
development work with lower
implementation and maintenance costs.”
According to Hillman, another benefit
of the TIBCO-powered portal is the
speed and ease with which they can add
new features. “If the communications
department needs to add a new resource
to the portal, our IT staff is able to
accommodate our needs very quickly.”
TIBCO opens the door to company unity
Health Net is in top condition for
the future
Part of uniting companies after a merger
or acquisition is fusing together diverse
corporate processes and methods of
communication. For Health Net, a central
associate portal was crucial to maintaining
consistent communication and uniting
associate processes under a single
corporate vision. “After growing from
mergers and acquisitions, Health Net
began to feel more like a collection of
separate companies rather than a unified
team,” Yamato-Tucker says. “We wanted
to create a more unified feeling among our
associates so we initiated a ‘One Company,
One Mission, One Vision’ campaign. An
enterprise-wide portal was the ideal way
to bring all departments and associates
together under one corporate umbrella.”
Lori Hillman, a senior communications
specialist at Health Net, agrees. “The portal
must be the primary communications
vehicle for the entire company.”
Health Net used TIBCO’s portal solution
to create an associate portal that brought
together the different companies’ intranet
sites in a single location. The pilot project
was completed in just two months.
Now, all Health Net associates can use
the same interface to access company
announcements and forms, stock quote,
industry news, and more. The portal
gives associates the ability to access
critical business tools, view personal
benefits and paychecks, submit
suggestions, access online training
resources, and perform other important
tasks. “The portal has improved our level
of corporate communications,” says
Yamato-Tucker. “We now have a vehicle
for uniting associates across numerous
geographical locations.”
Thanks to TIBCO’s business integration
and portal solutions, Health Net and its
IT staff can look forward to an integrated
infrastructure that is easy to manage, costeffective, and efficient. The company
plans to expand the functionality of the
portal by enabling access to e-mail,
calendar, and business applications.
According to Wilkinson, the breadth of
TIBCO’s solutions and its financial
viability give Health Net confidence that
it will be able to quickly and easily tackle
future integration challenges by extending
the TIBCO infrastructure. “We know that
TIBCO will be around for the long haul,
and that is an invaluable benefit when it
comes to choosing an integration
technology vendor.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration solution
allows Health Net to efficiently handle
the effects of a growing company and
an expanding IT infrastructure. Using
TIBCO’s solution, Health Net has
streamlined data exchange and
communication across its systems,
and can create custom features with
speed and efficiency using TIBCO’s
rapid-development capabilities.
TIBCO’s business optimization solution
has enabled Health Net to create an
associate portal that serves as a vehicle
for internal corporate communications,
uniting once-disparate company
intranet sites and processes into a
more cohesive central location.
KABA GROUP
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
Kaba Group raises its productivity
with TIBCO’s portal software
“TIBCO’s portal software offers such a user-friendly integration framework that
we were able to bring the portal into operation sooner than we had anticipated.
What was also particularly impressive about this project was the amount of
deployment time we were able to save and how we raised productivity not only
across the whole company but also with our trading partners.”
—Hans-Peter Sauter, Corporate IT Manager,
Kaba Management + Consulting AG, Switzerland
KABA GROUP
A leading global manufacturer of access
systems, doors, keys, and other security
systems
Industry
Geographies
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■ Using TIBCO’s portal software, Kaba
developed a company-wide employee and
partner portal
■
■
TIBCO’s business integration software
integrated decentralized partner applications
such as an ERP application from SAP and
Navision from Microsoft
The portal software’s single-sign-on feature
enables user access authorization for
individual applications, content, and
individual portal sites based on user profile
data in a corporate LDAP directory
Benefits
■ Centralized portal provides more and up-todate information
■
■
■
■
The solution—which optimized order,
service, and support processes by enabling
access to relevant applications through the
portal—helped decrease operational costs
by approximately 10 percent
The company uses a single portal with a
single sign-on for all products, applications,
and collaboration tools
The partner portal enables Kaba to better
collaborate with its partners
TIBCO’s portal software allows Kaba to
distribute content management
responsibilities
With 6,200 employees, the Kaba Group is
a leading global provider of access, door,
and key systems as well as enterprise data
collection to the security industry. As part
of its Total Access strategy, Kaba supplies
end-to-end solutions to meet customers’
needs for security, organization, and
convenience at all physical entrances and
exits as well as for identification and
enterprise data collection.
The Kaba Group’s product range includes
mechanical and electronic access and
locking systems, key and key code systems,
security and automatic doors, data
collection terminals, interface solutions for
enterprise data collection, and a contactfree identification system called Legic.
Since going public in 1995, Kaba has
performed outstandingly well in terms of
sales and returns. Thanks to technological
leadership and its successful and partially
acquisition-based expansion into more than
50 countries, the group is now in an ideal
position to continue its growth path.
Rapid corporate growth in the last few
years saw the development of a highly
heterogeneous IT topography at Kaba.
Individual processes were characterized by
a high rate of media fragmentation and a
lack of communication support between
Kaba’s companies and divisions. Given its
distribution across a large geographical
area, a powerful corporate portal with
a single-sign-on function was essential
to ensure effortless operations.
Organizationally, Kaba has been reacting
to these requirements for some time. The
e-Way project represented the realization
of these changes at an IT level. The
implementation of Phase 1 took only
160 person-days despite the complexity of
the project.
Kaba integrates back-office applications
with a new, centralized portal
Initially, the principal requirement of the
Kaba e-Way project was to minimize
operational costs in order, service, and
support processes. In general terms, sales
support between partners and the Kaba
Group companies needed to be more costeffective. Kaba wanted to give optimum
support to its partners by providing them
with greater connectivity to the relevant
companies in the Kaba Group. Thus, the
anticipated cost savings would go hand in
hand with an increase in sales.
Total Access is a central strategy of the
Kaba Group that aims to provide better
access for Kaba customers to closure
systems, time recordings, and gate
systems. Kaba e-Way helps ensure that the
implementation of the Total Access
philosophy in sales, service, and support is
better supported both within in Kaba’s
own companies and at partners.
The consolidation of IT systems and use
of common resources have improved
performance. The central administration
was also disbanded and replaced by a
KABA GROUP
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
broad degree of autonomy for each Kaba
company. All necessary administrative
tasks such as customer set-up, assignment
of rights, design of layouts, and creation of
groups and roles are now carried out by
individual salespeople wherever possible.
For its corporate portal and integration
infrastructure, Kaba chose TIBCO
PortalBuilder® and TIBCO® BusinessWorks
software and three adapters. The new portal
has replaced 50 stand-alone company Web
sites. The Kaba Group companies each had
their own Web site and LDAP servers that
were used to manage user directories,
including access privileges to various
company-wide applications such as e-mail,
the enterprise resource planning (ERP)
application, collaboration, and a variety of
miscellaneous applications and content
repositories. Kaba decided to simplify this
approach by setting up a single corporate
portal available to all employees and
trading partners via a single LDAP server.
In addition, the company’s most missioncritical applications would be integrated
with this portal.
The main reason for choosing TIBCO as
solution partner was that TIBCO could
offer an end-to-end solution: in other
words, complete back-end and front-end
integration. The high degree of maturity
of TIBCO’s software, particularly in the
back-end integration, played a major role
as did the large number of TIBCO
adapters available to connect the backend systems. In addition, Kaba was
pleased with the simple way that
processes could be linked to the workflow
system and connected into the portal.
TIBCO’s portal solution facilitates
support for business partners
“The portal project, which began with
the implementation of the companywide LDAP server, has now been
completed,” says Hans-Peter Sauter,
Corporate IT Manager at Kaba. “The
TIBCO solution, which has an embedded
LDAP server in its integration framework,
will be connected successively to other
back-office applications, including
e-mail, collaboration software, an ERP
application, and databases. Doing so
will ensure seamless processes, both
internally and externally, at Kaba.”
Kaba’s objectives were reached through
classic integration work both in the backend and front-end areas. With Mercatis as
its system integrator, Kaba implemented a
portal for its partners that has an access
control mechanism. With a single sign-on,
partner employees can log in and access
all applications, information, and
documentation they are allowed to access.
“What’s important is that the single sign-on
allows partners to switch between different
areas and Kaba companies to which they
are entitled access,” explains Wolfgang
Traxler, CEO of Mercatis. “There are no
changes in the portal behavior for partners
when they switch sites, but they know
which Kaba company they are working
with at any given moment.”
A variety of roles are available to each
partner so that they can offer their
employees various views, particularly in
the areas of sales and distribution, order
processing, and service and support.
Using the portal, partners have the option
of doing all their work in one place.
External partners are also offered the
option of having all order data provided
in a form such that the data can be
automatically integrated into partners’
order processing systems.
Sauter is also pleased with the “excellent
language support” that TIBCO’s portal
software provides. The easy-to-use
administrative tools, which allow
management of users, groups, and rights,
require no technical knowledge and yet
take into account a corporate LDAP
directory. Another positive feature is the
role-based content generator in the
TIBCO PortalBuilder product, which
enables dynamic portal pages.
Plans for the next phase of the e-Way
project include the integration of the
remaining Kaba companies in Europe,
the development of enterprise
application integration (EAI), and the
construction of a portal infrastructure
for Asia and North America.
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
Using TIBCO’s enterprise portal and
business integration software, Kaba
and its systems integrator, Mercatis,
implemented an enterprise-wide portal
for employees and partners in a backend application integration project.
The solution improved partners’ order,
service, and support processes and
helped decrease operational costs
by approximately 10 percent. The
company deployed the software on a
Microsoft Windows or Linux platform,
depending on the requirements. TIBCO
Adapter™ for R/3, TIBCO Adapter™
SDK, and TIBCO Adapter™ for Lotus
Notes are also used in the solution.
MINISTRY OF HAJJ
GOVERNMENT
Ministry of Hajj uses TIBCO software
to help pilgrims get to Makkah
“Every Muslim is supposed to visit Makkah at least once in their lifetime. As host,
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is now better able to provide uplifting experiences
to pilgrims fulfilling this important commitment through the use of the new
information infrastructure at the Ministry of Hajj. Because of its great religious
significance, this project was a dream for the ministry and all Muslims—and with
the help of TIBCO, it became a reality.”
—Ahmad Ghamri, CEO, Sejel Technology
MINISTRY OF HAJJ
The government agency responsible for
facilitating the travel of Muslims to holy
sites in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Industry4
Geographies4
GOVERNMENT
SAUDI ARABIA
Deployment Summary
■ Sejel Technology uses TIBCO’s software to
build an e-government solution for the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
■
TIBCO’s business process management software speeds the approval process for visas
and local businesses applying to provide
services to pilgrims
■
TIBCO’s business-to-business integration
software makes real-time information about
pilgrims available to government agencies
and travel wholesalers
■
TIBCO’s portal software supports the intranet
that travel agencies and tour operators use
to access pilgrim information
Benefits
■ Visa approvals, which once took up to six
weeks, now occur in less than a day
■
■
■
The Ministry of Hajj can bring new service
providers on board to serve visitors faster
and more easily while qualifying service
levels and monitoring quality of service
Travel wholesalers make data about pilgrims
available online to licensed travel agencies,
ensuring that visitors get the high-level
services they expect
Improvements in hospitality services allow
more Muslims to fulfill religious commitments
quickly and easily, increasing the amount of
pilgrims by 35 percent in the first year alone
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia plays
an important role as host to nearly six
million Muslims every year from around
the world—travelers who come to
perform a ritual pilgrimage to the holy
city of Makkah, and to visit Madinah
and other sites of religious significance
throughout the kingdom. Issuing visas
and provisioning facilities to these
travelers is the responsibility of the Saudi
Arabian government’s Ministry of Hajj.
A desire to better serve the large—and
growing—number of annual pilgrims
led the Ministry of Hajj to initiate a
plan to improve services to visitors
by implementing a new technology
infrastructure. Derived from the vision of
His Excellency Iyad Madani, Minister of
Hajj, the objective of the new project was
to build an e-government solution that
could benefit Muslims worldwide by
enabling seamless information-sharing
between government agencies and the
vendors that provide accommodations
and other travel services to pilgrims.
TIBCO® supports Sejel’s globally visible
e-government solution
Sejel Technology—a consortium of
American and local companies—was
founded to oversee the development and
operation of the new infrastructure, and
also to assume responsibility for issuing
visas to pilgrims on behalf of the Ministry
of Hajj. As a first step, Sejel evaluated
business integration software companies
to find one whose product portfolio could
address the requirements of the project—
in particular, the need for business
process management software and portal
technology. Sejel chose TIBCO Software
because it offers the breadth and depth of
products to support Sejel’s short-term and
long-term IT objectives.
“In addition to its well-integrated, wide
range of products, TIBCO has a good
relationship with our existing vendors—
HP and Cisco Systems—which helps us a
great deal,” says Zoubair Skiredj, CIO of
Sejel. “Throughout the project, TIBCO
also provided excellent support and
continuously supplied us with information
to improve our understanding of the latest
technology advancements and research.”
Over the course of nine months, Sejel
implemented TIBCO’s business
integration software, business process
management software, portal software,
and business-to-business (B2B) integration
software. Because of its high national
visibility and significance to Muslims
around the globe, when the project went
live it was inaugurated by Saudi Arabia’s
crown prince and deputy prime minister,
Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz al-Saud.
Automation enables pilgrims to
receive visas more quickly
One of the most immediate benefits of
the project has been a considerable
increase in the speed and efficiency with
TIBCO SOFTWARE—SUCCESS STORY
MINISTRY OF HAJJ/SEJEL
GOVERNMENT
which visas are issued to pilgrims who
plan to visit Saudi Arabia. Using TIBCO’s
business process management software,
Sejel Technology has integrated the
systems of different government agencies
and consulates with those at the Ministry
of Hajj—and the visa application and
approval process, which used to take three
to six weeks, now takes a mere four to
eight hours.
The same processes are also helping
enhance the level of services that pilgrims
receive. The Ministry of Hajj maintains and
monitors a list of approved vendors, which
helps ensure that the quality of vendor
services is accurately rated. For example,
the ministry makes certain that only 4-star
hotels receive a 4-star rating. New hotels,
tour bus operators, restaurants, and other
providers are routinely added to the list—
but only after the ministry ensures that
these companies meet certain standards.
The TIBCO-enabled infrastructure
automates the vendor-approval process so
that additional providers can begin serving
travelers more quickly.
Online information improves
services to travelers
The new e-government infrastructure also
helps improve services to pilgrims by
enabling direct B2B contact between
Sejel and its major partners. Using TIBCO
B2B and portal software, Sejel can share
online information with other government
agencies as well as travel package
wholesalers.
In the past, local vendors serving pilgrims
did not know in advance how many
people were scheduled to arrive on a
given day or which services and
accommodations they had requested.
Now, B2B integration provides travel
wholesalers with up-to-date information
about arriving pilgrims. Using TIBCO’s
portal software to build an intranet, Sejel
makes this data available to the thousands
of licensed travel agencies that bring
visitors into the country. On this site, travel
agencies find information about travel
packages, including accommodations,
transportation, and other travel details.
Using this real-time information, they
TIBCO SOFTWARE—SUCCESS STORY
select the appropriate package for each
pilgrim. This newfound availability of
up-to-date information has raised the level
of service that pilgrims receive.
“Assisting pilgrims is key, and the Ministry
of Hajj saw an opportunity to enhance the
level of service to pilgrims by providing all
relevant travel information online in real
time,” says Ahmed Ghamri, CEO of Sejel.
“Using TIBCO, it is now easier for local
companies to provide the right number of
buses for transportation, hotel rooms—
every service that the pilgrims require.”
Mr. Ghamri added: “This project is
considered a cornerstone of the
e-government initiative by HRH Crown
Prince Abdullah. It integrates the Ministry
of Hajj, the Ministry of the Interior, and
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to better
process visa data and expedite and
improve the level of service to pilgrims.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
In a project of great religious
significance to Muslims around the
globe, TIBCO’s business process
management software speeds the
approval process for visas and service
providers who serve the visitors to the
holy city of Makkah. By making data
about pilgrims available online using
TIBCO’s B2B integration software and
portal software, the Ministry of Hajj
enables government and travel agencies
to share up-to-date information to
ensure that visitors receive the highquality services and accommodations
they expect. An upcoming portal
project will provide online travel
information directly to pilgrims from
around the world.
External portal will serve nearly
1 billion Muslims worldwide
The number of pilgrims visiting the
kingdom has increased by 35 percent
since the Ministry of Hajj implemented
the TIBCO-enabled e-government
solution—perhaps because visitors know
that the service levels have increased
significantly. The next step for Sejel and
the Ministry of Hajj will be a new portal
to serve pilgrims directly. Instead of
making travel plans through a licensed
travel agency, as they currently do, the
portal will provide greater convenience
by allowing visitors to apply for visas
online and book their own travel plans,
potentially increasing revenue for Saudi
Arabian airlines, hotels, and other
companies. The new portal will serve
nearly 1 billion Muslims around the world.
“Every Muslim is supposed to visit
Makkah at least once in their lifetime,”
Ghamri says. “As host, the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia is now better able to provide
uplifting experiences to pilgrims fulfilling
this important commitment through the
use of the new information infrastructure
at the Ministry of Hajj. Because of its
great religious significance, this project
was a dream for the ministry and all
Muslims—and with the help of TIBCO,
it became a reality.”
TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ:TIBX)
is the leading independent business
integration software company in the
world and a leading enabler of realtime business, helping companies
become more cost-effective, more
agile, and more efficient. TIBCO
has delivered the value of real-time
business, what TIBCO calls The Power
of Now®, to over 2,000 customers
around the world and in a wide
variety of industries.
http://www.tibco.com
Global Headquarters
3303 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Tel: +1 650-846-1000
Toll Free: +1 800-420-8450
Fax: +1 650-846-1005
© Copyright 2005, TIBCO Software Inc. All rights
reserved. TIBCO, the TIBCO logo, The Power of Now,
and TIBCO Software are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. in the United States and/or
other countries. All other product and company names
and marks mentioned in this document are the property
of their respective owners and are mentioned for identification purposes only.
NORDEA
FINANCIAL SERVICES
Nordea merges into the fast lane
with TIBCO's portal software
“The ability to easily plug new applications and services into the portal enables
us to develop very specific services and deploy them—and avoid having to roll
out a whole new application.”
—Preben Gardal-Hansen, business IT manager for e-Markets, Nordea
NORDEA
The largest financial services company in the
Nordic region, with consumer and corporate
banking, investment management, and life
insurance services throughout Scandinavia
and Europe as well as $240 billion in total
assets and 11 million customers—3 million of
whom use Nordea’s online services
Industry
Geographies
FINANCIAL
SERVICES
EUROPE
Deployment Summary
■ TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution provides
a common platform for building and
managing a highly customized onlineservices portal
■
TIBCO’s business integration solution
quickly interconnects portal applications
to present service as a single interface
■
Reuters® Automated Dealing infrastructure
is used for foreign exchange transactions
■
The portal provides market information and
news, which are aggregated using Reuters
News Delivery Service (NDS) and delivered
using Reuters Streaming Server
Benefits
Ease of use enables rapid implementation
of cutting-edge services
■
■
Standard interfaces eliminate costly
deployment of separate applications and
development of point-to-point connections
among them
■
Efficiencies achieved through electronic
trading lead to expected 100 percent
return on investment (ROI) within two years
for the portal implementation project
Nordea Banking Group is the largest
financial services company in Europe’s
Nordic region, with core banking operations
in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland.
Although the Nordic countries are Nordea’s
home market, the Group has a network of
international branches and representative
offices to support Nordea’s Nordic and
international customers. The bank’s vision
is to be valued as the leading financial
services group in the Nordic and Baltic
markets. It plans to be in the top league
of European banks by showing superior
and profitable growth in every market
and product area in which it chooses to
compete. Nordea achieves this goal by
using its leading multichannel distribution
platform and its top-ranking e-based
financial solutions.
Mergers and acquisitions have bolstered the
banking industry in recent years, but they
have simultaneously complicated the lives
of technology managers. Nordea has
experienced this lesson firsthand. A series of
mergers has created the constant challenge
of integrating incompatible and disparate IT
systems of several large entities.
The bank’s growth has been impressive: In
1997, Finland’s Merita Bank and Sweden’s
Nordbanken joined to form the Nordea
Banking Group, which then acquired
Denmark’s Unidanmark and Norway’s
Christiania Bank og Kreditkasse in 2000.
When you consider that several of those
banks were also created out of mergers,
you can begin to understand the
integration puzzle that Nordea faced.
Nordea’s challenge was exacerbated by its
need to quickly develop the electronic
services that its customers demand. Not
only did the bank have to integrate several
different network infrastructures because
of the mergers, but it also had to launch
cutting-edge Internet-based services. To
deal with this highly complicated task,
Nordea turned to Reuters and TIBCO
Software Inc., a leading enabler of realtime business.
TIBCO helps ease integration pain
After the mergers, Nordea found itself
with foreign-exchange desks in its four
core countries—Sweden, Finland,
Norway, and Denmark—each with its
own deal-capture and credit systems.
IT personnel would have to integrate
those systems and migrate the old
phone-based services to the Internet for
corporate customers. Besides foreign
exchange and money-market transaction
capabilities, the new service—called
e-Markets—would have to provide
financial analysis tools, news feeds,
streaming quotes, and other market
information. Moreover, the bank needed
to implement the service quickly to
reduce the cost of its previous phonebased solution and meet rising demand
for convenient electronic transactions.
NORDEA
FINANCIAL SERVICES
The eventual solution, an online portal, ties
together features from different sources and
applications, and presents them in a single
interface for customers. The portal uses the
Reuters Automated Dealing infrastructure
for foreign exchange transactions; Reuters
News Delivery Service to aggregate and
stream news on the desktop; Dow Jones
and four Scandinavian sources for the news
feeds themselves; Kalends for an economiccalendar tool; and Citrix for browser-based
delivery of Microsoft® Excel analytics
spreadsheets. Nordea relied on TIBCO’s
proven technology and extensive financialservices experience to integrate these
elements into a seamless, cohesive solution.
Using TIBCO’s solution, Nordea can realize
significant savings by eliminating costly
development cycles of point-to-point
application connectivity. Applications tie into
the TIBCO integration platform through
standard adapters that reduce the time and
complexity of the integration process. In
addition, replacing the old phone-based
system with a Web-based foreign exchange
trading service provided significant
operational efficiencies. As a result, Nordea
expects 100 percent ROI on the portal
within two years, as more corporate
customers move to electronic trading.
Nordea used TIBCO’s portal solution to
build the portal, easily organizing service
presentation with layout templates and
targeting content and services to different
end users. With the reliable TIBCO
platform in place, Nordea could quickly
deploy customized tools and information
to its customers. On the back end, the
TIBCO business integration solution
interconnects the portal’s various
applications. TIBCO’s solution allows
applications to easily integrate with the
platform and share information with other
incompatible applications, lowering overall
development costs.
TIBCO’s solution has enabled Nordea to
deploy new services quickly. The bank plans
to launch electronic versions of existing
bond, derivative, and equity trading services.
Nordea will replace Reuters Automated
Dealing with the Reuters AVT product line
to standardize access to credit systems and
use TIBCO’s technology to automate error
handling. Eventually, the bank hopes to use
TIBCO’s solution to integrate the portal
with the bank’s back-office workflow
systems. Thanks to the simplicity of the
TIBCO architecture, Nordea looks forward
to streamlining these processes and reducing
costs—a rare feat in a world of complexity.
“The ability to easily plug new applications
and services into the portal enables us to
develop very specific services and deploy
them directly to the user group that
requires them—and avoid having to roll
out a whole new application,” says Preben
Gardal-Hansen, business IT manager for
e-Markets at Nordea.
Platform’s flexibility gives Nordea
a portal into the future
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution
provides Nordea with a powerful tool to
organize, build, and deploy its onlineservices portal for corporate traders. The
solution’s easy-to-use interface allows
the company to rapidly customize
content for end users.
TIBCO’s business integration solution
connects numerous incompatible
applications that tie into Nordea’s portal.
PRIMESYS
T E L E C O M M U N I C AT I O N S
Portal and business integration software
gives competitive edge to PrimeSys
“Using TIBCO’s solution, we have a very sophisticated level of business
integration that a lot of companies in Latin America don’t have. We expect
TIBCO to continue fueling our growth, with a flexible and stable architecture
that will make PrimeSys even more competitive in the Brazilian
telecommunications market in coming years.”
—Miguel Sá, IT director, PrimeSys
P
S The world’s fourth-largest
CR
HIEMVERSOYN
publicly traded,
Provider
of integrated telecommunications,
integrated
energy
company,
with operations
Web,
and IT
outsourcing
solutions
in Brazil,
in more
than 180ofcountries
and
a subsidiary
Portugal Telecom
Industry
Geographies
T E L E C O M M U N I C AT I O N S
BRAZIL
Deployment Summary
■ Sophisticated distributed enterprise
application integration (EAI) architecture
integrates information from 11 disparate
systems, enabling real-time information
sharing
■
Using the integrated infrastructure, the
company added TIBCO’s portal solution,
easily extending direct access to all
systems and information to customers,
employees, and partners
Benefits
■ Integrating all data ensures data integrity
and removes redundancy, while eliminating
overlooked orders and related customer
billing errors
■
Eliminating duplicate data entry reduces
data processing times and costs
■
Customers have access to accurate,
real-time information about orders,
billing, and trouble tickets through the
self-service portal
■
Extremely flexible IT infrastructure
provides very short time to market for
new business requirements
■
TIBCO’s distributed integration architecture
provides 24×7 systems availability
■
The project was implemented in less
time than expected, allowing a reduction
in implementation time of other systems
■
New flexible architecture reduced support
team and costs
When PrimeSys, one of the leading
telecommunications and IT services
companies in the Brazilian corporate
market, needed an integration solution,
it made perfect sense to turn to TIBCO
Software Inc., a leading enabler of realtime business. TIBCO had successfully
powered enterprise architecture integration
for the parent company of PrimeSys,
Portugal Telecom. Based on Portugal
Telecom’s successful enterprise integration,
PrimeSys executives knew TIBCO could
meet all of its integration requirements.
As a young company, PrimeSys faced
the challenge of integrating 11 different
systems, including a Siebel® customer
relationship management (CRM) system,
SAP® R/3® enterprise resource planning
(ERP) system, a Brazilian billing system,
a business intelligence (BI) system, and a
proprietary provisioning system. For its
first six months in business, PrimeSys
relied on communication via flat files,
which the IT team had to handle manually
among disparate systems. Knowing that
this method was untenable for customers,
employees, and partners, PrimeSys IT
director Miguel Sá turned to TIBCO.
“At Portugal Telecom, we originally chose
TIBCO based on its technical features,
stable architecture, and cost-effectiveness,
as well as our expected return on investment
(ROI),” Sá explains. “We have been very
happy with TIBCO’s solutions, so there
was no need to waste time on a new
selection process. We immediately launched
the integration project with TIBCO.”
Integrated, real-time data improves
quality and reduces processing times
PrimeSys had one overriding objective
from the start: to ensure data integrity on
all of its 11 disparate systems, and create
one point of entry to the data. With
TIBCO’s EAI solution, PrimeSys could
do just that, ensuring that the data in one
database would be the same as that in
any other database.
Because TIBCO propagates data in real
time, everything PrimeSys sells to its
customers is registered in the company’s
CRM system. From there, it is accurately
propagated to all other systems in the
business process at the right moment. The
benefits of this synchronization include
higher data quality and consistency, no
need for duplicate data entry, and a
reduction in processing times.
Thanks to the full data integration,
PrimeSys could start a BI project.
Because key data from all systems flows
through the information bus, it was easy to
aggregate all the data in a single master
database. TIBCO’s enterprise portal
solution makes this information available
to the decision makers wherever they are.
PRIMESYS
T E L E C O M M U N I C AT I O N S
Integration ensures accurate customer
billing—and not a dollar lost
One of the biggest challenges PrimeSys
faced before integrating its billing system
with the Siebel CRM system was accurately
billing for orders and collecting revenue
from customers.
“In the past, data was entered in the billing
system through a manual process. This
process did not give us the highest level of
confidence, causing constant internal audits
to ensure all billing was 100 percent correct.
This process was not only costly, but also
time- and resource-consuming.” Sá says.
“With manual data entry, we were failing to
capture and bill a certain percentage of
orders that were only identified after the
internal audit. Our entire project is justified
by the fact that we now do not worry about
losing a single dollar from any sale made.”
Since the TIBCO implementation, customer
data goes directly into the billing system
without manual data entry. Information
about customers and their orders is
absolutely accurate and invoices are
processed much faster.
The portal keeps customers in the loop
In addition to its EAI initiative, PrimeSys
set up a customer portal that gives
customers access to complete and up-todate information about the solutions
installed by PrimeSys, including network
availability, billing information, trouble ticket
status, order status, and entry of new order.
Based on the success of the customer
portal, PrimeSys is creating employee and
partner portals as well. The employee
portal will serve as a single point of entry
for all PrimeSys business systems and will
also provide access to human resources
information. The partner portal will enable
collaboration with PrimeSys partners and
ensure high-quality services by tracking
every detail of what happens with each job
and each supplier—a huge improvement
over current partner communications,
which are essentially confined to phone
and e-mail.
Distributed integration architecture
is key to stability
Sá knew from experience that the TIBCO
distributed approach to enterprise
integration offered more stability than
the centralized hub-and-spoke approach
offered by many competitors’ products.
Downtime was unacceptable to PrimeSys
because it must provide continuous service
to its large Brazilian corporate customers.
“If there’s a failure in a server because of a
technical problem, TIBCO’s distributed
architecture enables us to keep working as if
the problem never happened,” Sá explains.
“In competing products, everything is
concentrated on one machine, so if that
server crashes, the entire system crashes.”
Another great advantage of TIBCO’s
solution is the ability to plug new systems
into the architecture with minimal impact.
That makes the IT infrastructure extremely
flexible, allowing PrimeSys to select bestof-breed solutions—without worrying
about connectivity issues—and to respond
quickly to new business requirements that
might arise.
“Using TIBCO’s solution, we have a very
sophisticated level of business integration
that most companies in Latin America
don’t have,” Sá says. “As our young
company grows—in client base, revenue,
and more—we expect TIBCO to continue
fueling that growth, with a flexible and
stable architecture that will make
PrimeSys even more competitive in the
Brazilian telecommunications market in
coming years.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration solution
connects 11 disparate applications,
giving PrimeSys a stable architecture
and improved data integrity for realtime information sharing and accurate
customer billing.
TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution
enables a customer-facing portal, in
which customers can view their bills,
check orders, request new services, and
submit trouble tickets in real time.
Additional portals are being developed
for employees and partners.
RENESAS TECHNOLOGY
SEMICONDUCTORS
Business integration and portal software
energizes Renesas supply chain
“By using TIBCO’s business integration solutions, we can seamlessly integrate
our partners—large and small—into our supply chain and manage and
respond to business opportunities much faster.”
—Viren Patel, VP of eService, Renesas Technology America
RENESAS TECHNOLOGY
A joint-venture semiconductor company
established by Hitachi, Ltd., and Mitsubishi
Electric Corporation on April 1, 2003, and
designer and manufacturer of highly integrated
semiconductor system solutions for mobile,
networking, automotive, industrial, and digital
home electronics markets
Industry
Geographies
SEMICONDUCTORS
NORTH AMERICA,
EUROPE, ASIA
Deployment Summary
■
TIBCO’s business integration solution
coordinates end-to-end business processes
and integrates back-end applications
■
TIBCO's business-to-business (B2B)
integration solution enables secure, realtime transactions with distributors and
customers
■
TIBCO's enterprise portal solution provides
visibility into the supply chain
Benefits
■
Renesas gains a secure, Web-based
environment for registering, managing,
tracking, and collaborating on new design
registration opportunities
■
TIBCO's solution allows seamless
integration of large and small partners into
the supply chain using industry standards
■
Renesas can manage and respond to
business opportunities much faster
■
Speed, responsiveness, and visibility of
production processes increase across the
entire supply chain
■
Streamlining supply-chain processes
reduces costs and improves customer
service
Renesas Technology America, Inc. is a
subsidiary of a joint venture semiconductor
company established by Hitachi, Ltd.
and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation on
April 1, 2003. The company supports
the requirements of the North American
marketplace with a broad range of standard
and low-power semiconductor solutions,
including RISC and CISC microcontrollers
and microprocessors; memory ICs, including
PC100 memory chips, DRAMs, DRAM
modules, SRAMs, Flash memories,
Flash cards, and EEPROMs; logic ICs;
discrete devices; optoelectronic devices;
communication ICs; RF/wireless ICs;
and mass storage ICs. Substantial design
engineering, manufacturing, and research
and development facilities in the United
States help bring some of the world’s best
technology to U.S. customers.
Renesas decides to streamline the
supply chain
Supply chains in all manufacturing sectors,
especially semiconductors, are encountering
new requirements for competition in the
e-business environment. In the face of
greater demand for more customized
products, faster delivery schedules, and
instant access to order status, Renesas
Technology needed to increase the speed,
responsiveness, and visibility of production
processes across the supply chain. The
company also wanted to automate their
existing design registration process, which
was still being done via phone and fax.
Renesas had to tackle their integration
challenges first, since several disparate
back-end systems and databases couldn’t
communicate with each other.
Renesas sent out proposals to several
vendors, listing the following requirements:
• Proven expertise in e-business
integration
• Real-time business-process
automation using RosettaNet
standards
• Thorough understanding of
semiconductor supply-chain issues
During their four-month evaluation
process, Renesas Technology discovered
most B2B integration solutions required
the implementation of multivendor
products. Renesas preferred to partner
with only one vendor who could meet all
of its needs: TIBCO Software Inc.
TIBCO solution enables seamless
B2B integration
Renesas successfully implemented
TIBCO BusinessConnect™ RosettaNet
Protocol, enabling the integration of its
B2B processes with those of its trading
partners, using the RosettaNet™ e-business
standards. RosettaNet is a consortium
of major IT, electronic components,
and semiconductor manufacturing
companies—including Renesas—that
is working to create and implement
industry-wide, open e-business process
standards.
RENESAS TECHNOLOGY
SEMICONDUCTORS
TIBCO BusinessConnect for RosettaNet
is an industrial-strength B2B integration
server that fully supports all published
RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes
(PIPs) and allows enterprises to define their
own processes for maximum flexibility.
Renesas harnesses improved
business agility
TIBCO’s comprehensive solution helps
Renesas Technology to reduce costs and
increase the visibility of its supply-chain
by streamlining its supply chain processes.
Renesas now has a secure, Web-based
environment for registering, managing,
tracking, and collaborating on new design
registration opportunities.
End-to-end infrastructure: TIBCO’s
combination of enterprise application
integration, portal infrastructure, and B2B
connectivity was the comprehensive,
single-source platform Renesas needed
to deliver real-time communication and
collaboration.
“The industry-wide adoption of RosettaNet
e-business interoperability standards is
eliminating the barriers for supply-chain
participation,” said Viren Patel, VP of
eService at Renesas Technology America.
“By using TIBCO’s BusinessConnect for
RosettaNet, we can seamlessly integrate
our partners—large and small—into our
supply chain, and manage and respond to
business opportunities much faster.”
TIBCO’s business integration solution
integrates Renesas back-end applications
such as enterprise resource planning
(ERP) and forecasting. TIBCO’s enterprise
portal solution provides the portal
construction tools to offer Renesas
partners visibility into its supply chain.
TIBCO BusinessConnect for RosettaNet
enables Renesas to conduct secure, realtime B2B commerce transactions with its
distributors and selected customers, using
the RosettaNet e-business standards.
TIBCO’s solution provided significant value
through a fully integrated infrastructure that
enables Renesas to respond to change
more effectively.
Time to market: TIBCO enabled
Renesas to go live with its first RosettaNet
process within eight weeks from design to
implementation.
Scalability and reliability: With rapid
growth planned for the future, TIBCO’s
proven, scalable technology allows
Renesas to easily expand and add new
services over time. TIBCO’s real-time
messaging also helps ensure improved
service to Renesas customers.
Integration platform provides
flexibility for the future
Renesas is now in the process of building
extranets for its partners and customers
and is also looking to integrate more of
its back-end systems using TIBCO’s
solution. Now, armed with TIBCO
BusinessConnect for RosettaNet, Renesas
can develop future plans to offer a B2B
platform to rapidly enable enterprise hubs
and e-marketplaces to connect customers,
partners, and suppliers. TIBCO’s proven,
scalable technology allows Renesas to
easily expand and add new services as
the company grows.
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration solution
coordinates end-to-end business
processes and integrates Renesas’s
back-end applications such as ERP
and forecasting. The solution uses
adapters for easy integration of legacy,
packaged, and third-party applications,
and permits integration and data
transformation from multiple sources.
TIBCO’s business-to-business integration
solution integrates members of the
Renesas supply chain. It enables the
company to conduct secure, real-time
B2B commerce transactions with
distributors and selected customers using
the RosettaNet e-business standards.
TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution
enables Renesas to reduce service
costs by deploying interactive business
services and offering partners visibility
into the supply chain with a single,
consistent, and personalized view.
REUTERS
MEDIA
Reuters consolidates global information
access using TIBCO's portal software
“We needed a strong back-end platform on which we could build for the future.
Once you have a strong back end, the world is your oyster and you can build
what you like. TIBCO helps make this possible.”
—Michel Gelbart, director of corporate Web office, Reuters
REUTERS
World’s largest financial news and
information services company
Industry
Geographies
MEDIA
GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■ TIBCO’s portal platform enables Reuters to
provide a single Web interface for its 17,000
employees
■
TIBCO’s messaging solution connects
legacy applications and other systems,
making it possible to query disparate
platforms
Benefits
TIBCO technology ties hundreds of Web
sites into a single intranet portal
■
■
Users access a single, searchable data
universe through their browsers
■
“MyWeb” portal provides employees with
access to news, streaming video, live chat,
instant messaging, and other key
technologies
■
Single intranet portal eliminates duplicate
resources and hardware
■
TIBCO-powered architecture establishes a
robust, scalable infrastructure to support
growth
Reuters is at the forefront of the
information business, tracking financial
data for customers and providing news
to its affiliates. The challenge facing the
company was managing the internal
information resources that power the
organization. The company uses a selfpublish model on its corporate intranet
for local bureaus and staff to continually
update Reuters’ information base. The
result was 450 separately maintained
Web sites, all contributing content to
the corporate intranet.
With so many information repositories,
many offering redundant data, finding
information was difficult at best. “The
rapid evolution of our intranet was a
testament to our technological maturity,
but we outgrew it very quickly,” says
Michel Gelbart, director of corporate
Web office for Reuters. Gelbart’s solution
was to create “MyWeb”—a single intranet
portal that would give the company’s
17,000 employees access to all of Reuter’s
informational resources, including data
repositories. The portal also would
seamlessly connect employees to the
corporate intranet and the Internet with
integrated collaboration tools such as
instant messaging.
Gelbart’s team assessed various
technology options for MyWeb, including
Plumtree™ Software. However, the company
ultimately chose TIBCO Software Inc., a
leading enabler of real-time business. In
addition to TIBCO’s strong front-end
capabilities, TIBCO’s portal technology
provided a strong back-end foundation
with multiple integration options. “We
needed a strong back-end platform on
which we could build for the future,”
Gelbart says, “because once you have a
strong back end, the world is your oyster
and you can build what you like.”
Reuters needs a world of information
in one portal
After Gelbart’s team decided on the
TIBCO portal solution, the next step was
to design a front end for MyWeb. Reuters’s
IT team designed its own front end with
a look and feel that could accommodate
dynamic content and all of the tools
they determined their users needed. By
installing TIBCO PortalBuilder® at the
back end, integrating a front-end graphical
user interface (GUI) with various
collaboration tools was relatively easy.
Gelbart’s vision is to deploy MyWeb in
stages. The first step was to provide an
internal window to all company data:
databases, legacy systems, and newly
gathered information from offices around
the world. The next step will be to extend
the corporate intranet to an extranet,
supporting partners and customers with
Reuters’s source material using a secure
connection.
Reuters starts project with
infrastructure consolidation
Reuters first consolidated the existing
corporate intranet infrastructure. This
process included cutting the number of
corporate Web sites by at least two-thirds,
REUTERS
MEDIA
thus reducing the amount of time required
to maintain intranet sites, eliminating
redundant data, and reducing the number
of required servers. The consolidation
also provided a way to mine data from
legacy systems on IBM® mainframes as
well as new data repositories. “We had
to consolidate our intranet, reduce the
number of Web sites by at least twothirds, and make it easier for employees to
find the information they need to do their
jobs,” Gelbart says.
To eliminate replication of legacy data
throughout the system, Gelbart used a
“pipelining” approach, in which the most
frequently accessed data is made readily
available via SQL query. By centralizing
data access through MyWeb, Gelbart can
identify what information is being most
frequently accessed and what legacy data
is never accessed. This ability makes it
easier to determine what information can
be archived and if there are underutilized
systems that can be taken offline. Gelbart
also sees effective knowledge management
as the means to drive dynamic content,
which is the key to success for MyWeb.
Reuters has plenty of content available,
including streaming video and live data
feeds from around the globe. The
challenge is organizing the content.
As Gelbart explains, content
categorization is more a question of
human know-how than technology.
“There are a number of tools and
methodologies available to aid in
knowledge management,” Gelbart says,
“but at the end of the day we need people
who are indoctrinated in the Reuters
culture, who understand how our business
works, and who understand the knowledge
organization we are trying to build to
index the data. It is really a very pragmatic
process.” In addition, different data
elements must be made available to
different user communities and job
profiles. There are already more than
20 distinctly defined user communities
accessing MyWeb, and each has specific
informational needs.
Reuters increases employee
productivity and saves on IT
management costs
The TIBCO-powered infrastructure
enables Reuters employees to proactively
receive the information they need. Using
a publish-and-subscribe model, users both
post data and proactively receive real-time
information from the data channels to
which they are subscribed. If they need
to search for additional information, the
MyWeb portal shortens the time required
to scour the corporate intranet. Gelbart
believes Reuters will realize a substantial
return on investment (ROI) from MyWeb—
by improving employee productivity
through shorter search times and
increased collaboration, and by reducing
redundant data sources as well as the time
and processing power needed to keep
those resources current.
By using TIBCO’s solution to create
MyWeb, Reuters can eliminate redundant
data repositories and realize substantial
savings in duplicate resources and intranet
hardware. Additionally, Reuters can
provide a common platform with an open
architecture that will allow the company
to add new Internet-based services to
provide even better support for customers
and partners. As Gelbart explains, there
isn’t a technological challenge to scale
MyWeb, but employees need training to
make the best use of such a powerful
resource; otherwise, they will drown in
the information available. Gelbart also
plans to extend MyWeb with the TIBCO
PortalPack™ to add e-mail capability once
the company migrates from its current
Lotus Notes® messaging infrastructure to
Microsoft® Exchange. He is also looking
for ways to extend secure access beyond
the corporate firewall, providing corporate
partners and customers with direct access
to MyWeb and creating even better
relationships for Reuters in the future.
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration and
optimization solution helps Reuters
create a single Web interface, called
“MyWeb,” to give its 17,000
employees all of the necessary
information to support Reuters clients.
TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution
provides a solid integration platform on
which Reuters can add collaboration
tools, streaming media, and customdesigned templates to give MyWeb a
customizable look and feel.
TIBCO’s messaging solution provides a
common language to link legacy
applications and other systems into a
single, searchable infrastructure.
S E A G AT E T E C H N O L O G Y
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
Portal and business integration software
brings smooth sailing to Seagate
“TIBCO has unmatched depth of experience and breadth of products. We knew
that TIBCO’s solution would be more mature and stable than anything else we
could find on the market.”
— Steve Luczo, CEO, Seagate
S E A G AT E T E C H N O L O G Y
Manufacturer of hard disk drives for PCs,
high-end servers, and consumer electronics
Industry
Geographies
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■ Seagate® Information Bus integrates diverse
applications and systems, and automates
order management
■
Seagate Business Exchange provides XML
gateway for exchange of transaction data
with more than 100 partners
■
my.seagate.com portal provides customers
and employees with access to Seagate
resources
Benefits
■ Enterprise-wide view of all orders in realtime improves Seagate’s operational
efficiency and customer service
■
Fast, simple integration of new systems
enables rapid growth for Seagate, its
customers, and partners
■
Reliable system scales to handle 160 percent
annual increase in transaction volume
■
Improved relationships heighten customer
satisfaction
■
Integrated systems reduce costs for
suppliers
Seagate is a world-leading manufacturer of
magnetic disk and read-write heads for
hard disk drives, designed for PCs, high-end
servers, and consumer electronics. The
company designs, develops, produces, and
distributes all key components that compose
its storage devices, giving Seagate greater
control over every aspect of its business. In
the third quarter of its fiscal year 2002,
Seagate shipped more than 15 million disk
drives—a new company record.
The late 1990s brought shrinking margins
and shortened product life cycles to the
PC industry. Prices sunk and competition
soared. Seagate—already a market leader
with profitable products—realized that
the best way to maintain advantage over
competitors was to streamline operations
and decision making through improved
processes among employees, customers,
suppliers, and partners.
Free-flowing information improves
relationships and processes
A successful streamlining effort required
the free flow of information and access
to resources throughout the company, the
supply chain, and the company’s network
of customers and partners. Specifically,
Seagate needed to adopt real-time
operations that would automatically feed
data to the applications that needed
it. The answer was to integrate all
applications and systems and move key
business processes to the Web.
Seagate’s first order of business was to
improve its order management system.
Steve Luczo, Seagate CEO, says the
previous system involved so much manual
entry that it often recorded orders late—
and sometimes not at all. “We would build
a drive in Singapore, clear customs, and
ship it to Amsterdam for distribution. The
drive would physically be in Amsterdam,
off the production floor, before the IT
system had recorded that order. We had to
re-trigger some orders that were simply
lost,” Luczo says. “Keeping our customers
and partners accurately informed wasn’t
always possible.”
To solve the problem, Seagate needed
to integrate the many applications that
compose its order management system.
This would ensure that information could
move from one application to another
without delays caused by human interaction.
Integrated databases would be the source
of real-time data for all applications and
systems, laying the foundation for the
next step: to become a fully Web-enabled
enterprise that seamlessly connects
partners, customers and suppliers.
Seagate chooses technology from an
integration originator
Seagate selected TIBCO Software Inc. for
its business integration solution because
TIBCO’s offering was broad and scalable,
and backed by a strong reputation for
successful end-to-end integration.
S E A G AT E T E C H N O L O G Y
M A N U FA C T U R I N G
“TIBCO has an unmatched depth of
experience and breadth of products,” Luczo
says. “We knew that TIBCO’s solution
would be more mature and stable than
anything else we could find on the market.”
Seagate implemented the TIBCO business
integration solution to create the Seagate
Information Bus—a platform that integrates
many diverse applications and systems,
allowing people throughout the world to
access up-to-the-minute information and
communicate in real time. After a speedy
deployment, lost orders and delays quickly
became a thing of the past. And, Luczo
says, Seagate realized it could use TIBCO’s
solution to put an end to many other
nagging business problems. “Once we
had installed TIBCO’s solution, new
uses for the integrated information system
emerged,” Luczo says. “The flexibility
provided by TIBCO generated many new
ideas to improve the way we do business.”
After streamlining its order management
process, the company built the Seagate
Business Exchange using the TIBCO
business-to-business (B2B) integration
solution. Now, automated order entry
helps eliminate human errors and time
previously required for manual entry. The
Seagate Business Exchange also provides
a gateway for exchanging transaction data
with Seagate’s partners, offering a real-time
view of inventory, orders, and shipments.
Seagate also used TIBCO’s enterprise
portal solution to link employees and
customers to its network of information
via the Internet. To further serve its supply
chain, Seagate plans to extend Web-based
access to its network of suppliers.
Efficiency at Seagate gives customers
a point of differentiation
Now that manufacturing and distribution
processes at Seagate have become more
efficient, Seagate customers are reaping
significant benefits. Seagate now provides
customers with one resource for ordering
products, requesting prices, checking credit
status, tracking orders, accessing collateral,
and reviewing corporate news. Because
Seagate empowers its customers to
manage their own business processes
more effectively with real-time information,
these OEMs and distributors can market
their own products faster. This knowledge
gives Seagate customers a competitive
advantage in their own markets.
Using real-time access to critical data,
Seagate can help its suppliers become
more efficient. The TIBCO-based solution
tracks orders with precision, so Seagate
suppliers can control their own inventory
costs better than in the past.
Real-time integration maintains
Seagate’s competitive edge
TIBCO’s solution helped Seagate
revolutionize its business. First, integration
has paved the way for automated processes,
which dramatically streamline administrative
and IT costs. Second, because Seagate’s
information infrastructure is now based
on a flexible, open architecture, upgrades
and system additions are as simple as
connecting them to the platform. “We
no longer need to allocate dozens of IT
people over several weeks to integrate new
applications. We plug them into the TIBCO
platform and they can communicate with
every application on the network,” Luczo
says. “Seagate can leverage this capability
to grow without any IT restraints.” In fact,
Luczo adds, Seagate has enjoyed steady
transaction volume growth of 160 percent
per year without any performance problems.
More effective communication with
customers and partners has improved the
experience of conducting business with
Seagate. In fact, in the third quarter of its
fiscal year 2002, Seagate increased its
personal computer market share to 31
percent and raised its enterprise systems
market share to 58 percent. “In the effort
to improve operational efficiency, enhance
our value proposition to customers and
partners, and become a real-time Webenabled enterprise, we also revitalized the
Seagate brand,” Luczo says. All of those
benefits, he adds, enable the most
important mission of a leading company
in a sink-or-swim market: differentiation.
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration solution
powers the Seagate Information Bus
by providing comprehensive enterprise
application integration (EAI) and
business process management (BPM)
capabilities. It integrates Seagate’s
diverse applications and systems, and
supports a worldwide global order
fulfillment system.
TIBCO’s business-to-business integration
solution links more than 100 Seagate
partners through an XML gateway,
allowing the real-time exchange of
transaction data. It is also being
implemented in a vendor managed
inventory project using third-party
logistics.
TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution feeds
real-time and personalized company,
business unit, and product performance
information to Seagate employees.
TIBCO’s solution also powers a portal
for partners and customers.
TIBCO harnesses
the Power of Now
®
“When our customers submit a service request, they need answers and they need
them immediately. TIBCO's business activity monitoring solution has enabled us
to dramatically reduce initial response times, better track customer satisfaction
levels, and generally become a more efficient organization.”
—Don St. Onge, VP of customer support, TIBCO
TIBCO SOFTWARE
The leading independent business
integration software company in the world
Industry
Geographies
SOFTWARE
GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■ TIBCO integrated several best-of-breed
applications using its business integration
solution
■
TIBCO’s business-to-business (B2B) solution
enables the company to exchange data
with its order fulfillment partner in real time
■
TIBCO’s business process management
(BPM) solution automates new-employee
provisioning and TIBCO™ BusinessFactor
enables real-time monitoring of customer
support activity
■
Using its portal solution, TIBCO built an
employee portal—“insideTIBCO”—that
provides a single point of access to critical
enterprise data and internal applications
Benefits
Real-time transfer of data turns support
calls into up-sell opportunities, which
have enabled TIBCO to earn an additional
US$2–3 million in the first year of
implementation
■
■
Process automation with order fulfillment
partner shortens billing cycles by 15 days,
enabling TIBCO to collect revenues faster
■
Real-time monitoring of customer support
activities helps staff meet service level
agreements (SLAs) and enables TIBCO
to serve its customers more effectively
■
Employee portal increases employee
productivity and enables delegation of
content management, which has reduced
demand for content management services
from IT by 75 percent
TIBCO Software Inc., a leading
enabler of real-time business, offers
a comprehensive array of integration
solutions to help companies become
more cost-effective, agile, and efficient.
As TIBCO was implementing its best-ofbreed applications, including a PeopleSoft®
application for the human resource
information system (HRIS), an Oracle®
application for enterprise resource
planning (ERP), and a Siebel® application
for customer relationship management
(CRM), the company used its own
solutions to integrate them—allowing
TIBCO to realize the benefits of real-time
data sharing across the enterprise and
beyond. In addition to a three-phase
integration project, the company
implemented TIBCO’s business activity
monitoring solution to optimize customer
support activities, while the TIBCO
enterprise portal solution was used
to build the employee portal called
“insideTIBCO.”
HRIS integration saves money by
making new employees productive fast
When new employees are hired,
information about them is entered into
the PeopleSoft HRIS system. Previously,
it would take as long as two weeks for
that information to trickle into other
systems, keeping workers from accessing
the information and services they needed
to do their jobs. Using its own integration
solution, TIBCO quickly integrated its
core applications, so new employees now
have almost instantaneous access to
information and services from systems
across the company.
“Before integrating our systems and
processes, we had a typical HRIS
nightmare,” says Marc Masnik, senior IT
manager at TIBCO. “Now, within seconds
of entering a transaction in PeopleSoft,
the information appears in Oracle. A
return on investment (ROI) study that we
conducted showed that our increased
efficiency in this area saves us
approximately US$1,500 per new hire.”
TIBCO also has used its business process
management (BPM) solution to automate
the process by which equipment and access
are allocated, so new employees more
quickly receive security badges, computers,
office keys, and other essential items. “We
used to send out an e-mail and hope
everything happened, so the process could
take as long as a week and things could
easily fall through the cracks,” Masnik says.
“Now the system knows who needs to do
what and when. It’s standardized, we get
metrics, and people are held accountable.”
Better up selling generates millions
in new revenue
When TIBCO first deployed its new
applications, customer order information
in the Oracle system was not shared with
the Siebel support system. As a result,
TIBCO SOFTWARE
SOFTWARE
employees taking support calls were not
aware of customer orders and entitlements
recently entered in Oracle. Now, new
information in Oracle is automatically
shared with the Siebel system so support
representatives always know exactly what
products and services each customer
owns—enabling TIBCO to turn support
calls into up-selling opportunities.
“We’re going to take care of our
customers regardless of whether they
have paid for a support service,” Masnik
says. “But now, when a customer asks
for Gold Level Support but doesn’t own it,
we are aware of that and can sell the
support. Our ROI study showed that we
earned US$2–3 million in up selling and
savings on support in the first year we
went live with this project.”
Rapid order fulfillment shortens
billing cycles
Previously, when a product was purchased,
a series of manual and paper-based steps
had to be performed before customers
could download the products they
had purchased. Because of this timeconsuming and error-prone process, the
electronic delivery process typically took
up to two weeks.
“Now, our B2B integration solution instantly
transmits orders to our fulfillment partner
through simple object access protocol
(SOAP) Web services. The system is
extremely fast—the first time we used it, we
thought it was a mistake because the order
appeared on the other side so quickly!”
Masnik says. Giving customers the ability to
download a product as soon as they
purchase it works well for customers and
for TIBCO. Streamlining the fulfillment
process from days to minutes has increased
customer satisfaction and reduced TIBCO’s
billing cycles by a full 15 days.
Monitoring improves efficiency
of customer support
TIBCO implemented its business activity
monitoring solution to enable the
company’s support group to monitor
traffic and key performance indicators
related to inbound support requests. The
status of these requests is displayed on
a large-screen monitor in the support
department, providing up-to-the-minute
updates on all incoming service requests.
“When our customers submit a service
request, they need answers and they need
them immediately,” says Don St. Onge, VP
of customer support at TIBCO. “Real-time
monitoring of service requests is critical to
being responsive and achieving a high level
of customer satisfaction. TIBCO’s business
activity monitoring solution has enabled us
to dramatically reduce initial response
times, better track customer satisfaction
levels, and generally become a more
efficient organization.”
TIBCO portal optimizes
employee productivity
TIBCO’s intranet evolved as a series
of disparate Web sites run by individual
departments—which made it difficult for
employees to access information and
services in a timely manner.
Deploying a central employee portal has
increased productivity by giving employees
a single point of access to critical enterprise
data and internal applications. The portal
maximizes the company’s enterprise
software investments and centralizes IT
administration. The solution’s content
management capability has allowed IT
to delegate content publishing and
maintenance to individual departments,
eliminating IT bottlenecks and enabling
real-time updates of portal content.
“Our employee portal, called ‘insideTIBCO,’
has enabled us to create a collaborative,
community-based work environment for
sharing and storing critical business
knowledge,” says Steve Fister, corporate
Webmaster at TIBCO. “The solution’s
built-in content management capability
has reduced the time that IT spends
managing content by 75 percent so we
can spend more time on critical projects.”
Stable, standardized TIBCO solutions
provide solid platform for growth
TIBCO’s own integration solutions
have provided the company with the
opportunity to standardize on one solution
and monitor it effectively. The platform
supplies both stability and flexibility.
“TIBCO offers the technologies that
enable companies to grow, move forward,
and build on what they have,” Masnik
says. “TIBCO's solutions provided us the
tools we needed to realize our long-term
vision of becoming a real-time business.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO Software Inc., a leading enabler
of real-time business, offers a
comprehensive array of integration
solutions to help companies become
more cost-effective, agile, and efficient.
As TIBCO was implementing its bestof-breed applications, including a
PeopleSoft application for HRIS, an
Oracle application for ERP, and a Siebel
application for CRM, the company used
its own solutions to integrate them—
allowing TIBCO to realize the benefits
of real-time data sharing across the
enterprise and beyond. In addition, the
company implemented TIBCO’s
business activity monitoring solution to
optimize customer support activities,
while TIBCO’s enterprise portal solution
was used to build the employee portal
called “insideTIBCO.”
TNT LOGISTICS
T R A N S P O R TAT I O N / L O G I S T I C S
TNT Logistics delivers supply chain
access using TIBCO's portal software
“TIBCO’s architecture was a very close match to our existing architecture.
Within two weeks, we were able to unplug our messaging infrastructure and
plug in TIBCO. We also liked the fact that TIBCO was more than a messaging
company, and they had a vision for EAI, process automation, B2B technologies,
and a portal solution.“
—Terry Tutt, senior manager and enterprise architect,
TNT Logistics, North America
TNT LOGISTICS
A leading provider of supply-chain
management and distribution support
solutions to companies in the automotive,
retail, electronics, utilities, telecommunications,
consumer goods, heavy machinery, and
rail industries
Industry
Geographies
T R A N S P O R TAT I O N /
LOGISTICS
GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■ New system replaces proprietary
supply-chain management system
■
Platform seamlessly integrates
proprietary systems based on disparate
operating systems
■
Web-based portal allows customers and
partners secure, personalized, “anywhere,
anytime” access to supply chain
■
Solution encompasses messaging,
enterprise application integration (EAI),
process automation, partner management,
and portals from a single vendor
Benefits
Real-time demand chain handles more
customers more rapidly
■
■
Solution preserves previous IT investments
■
Messaging solution improves scalability and
reduces server bottlenecks
■
Open architecture offers portability to
multiple platforms
■
Portal access gives customers and partners
improved visibility into the supply chain
TNT Logistics, North America Inc.,
provides logistics support for some of the
most demanding manufacturers in the
Fortune 500. From its operations center
in Jacksonville, Florida, TNT Logistics
provides both real-time inbound supplychain support and outbound distribution
support for a wide range of companies,
including DaimlerChrysler, Ford, General
Motors, Goodyear, Hewlett-Packard,
Home Depot, John Deere & Company,
and Union Pacific. TNT Logistics’ range
of services includes transportation,
warehousing, subassembly, and inventory
control—virtually all aspects of supplychain management.
Thanks to its expertise in supply-chain
management, TNT Logistics was able to
construct its own supply-chain management
system more than seven years ago.
Vector 21, a real-time transportation and
warehouse management system, was
written in C++. Its real-time supply-chain
architecture uses the Microsoft® Windows
NT® operating system to interconnect a
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database; a
proprietary event engine and tracking
application; an IBM® eServer™ iSeries™based enterprise resource planning (ERP)
suite to handle warehouse management,
financials, and accounting; and a
transportation manager/transportation
optimizer to manage dynamic shipments
and other carriers.
System architects at TNT Logistics designed
the system using a hub-and-spoke model: a
distributed client base running applications
from a central server. A proprietary
messaging system was responsible for
exchanging real-time transaction information
between the server and the clients, so users
had up-to-the-second information about the
status of deliveries, shipments, inventory, and
related supply-chain activities.
The Vector 21 system tracks execution at
all stages of the supply chain, using realtime messaging to reconcile events and
milestones received from a variety of
sources such as electronic data interchange
(EDI), interactive voice response, and
wireless devices. These messages can also
trigger events such as “proof of delivery”
for the transportation system or invoices in
the ERP systems.
The challenges facing the Vector 21
architects were scalability and portability.
As the company added more systems to
its infrastructure, the server became a
bottleneck—the existing messaging system
simply could not scale to handle the
increase in traffic. In addition, the entire
messaging infrastructure was written in
C++, which made it difficult to develop
interfaces for other platforms.
“Our system was in danger of becoming
overextended,” says Terry Tutt, senior
manager and enterprise architect at TNT
Logistics, North America. “We had reached
the limits of the architecture and our
proprietary infrastructure, so we were at a
decision point.”
TNT LOGISTICS
T R A N S P O R TAT I O N / L O G I S T I C S
Supply-chain experts turn to an
integration originator
Because developing real-time messaging
was not part of the TNT Logistics core
competency, the system architects elected
to abandon their proprietary messaging
software and seek a third-party solution
to power the Vector 21 supply-chain
management system. TNT Logistics
needed a new, standards-based solution
that was scalable, extensible, and
sufficiently open to integrate with a multiplatform global supply-chain infrastructure.
First, TNT Logistics evaluated real-time
messaging solutions from various vendors.
System designers realized they needed a
solution that could go beyond Java™
Message Service and support legacy C++
applications, as well as the IBM OS/400®
operating system, and the Microsoft
Windows NT operating system. TNT
Logistics turned to TIBCO Software Inc.,
a leading enabler of real-time business.
“TIBCO’s architecture was a very close
match to our existing architecture. Within
two weeks, we were able to unplug our
messaging infrastructure and plug in
TIBCO,” Tutt says. “We also liked the fact
that TIBCO was more than a messaging
company. TIBCO had a vision for EAI,
process automation, business-to-business
(B2B) technologies, and a portal solution.”
Integration sets stage for expansion
TIBCO’s business integration and business
optimization solution meets TNT
Logistics’ real-time messaging demands
and provides a common platform to
exchange data from the central server
without creating a bottleneck.
By integrating its supply-chain
infrastructure using an open, real-time
messaging platform, TNT Logistics was
able to preserve investments in its
legacy systems—including those
proprietary applications written in
C++—and establish a foundation for
future expansion.
By clearing the real-time messaging
logjam, TNT Logistics increased system
capacity to handle more customers.
And by adding a secure Web portal,
partners, customers, and other business
units can access TNT Logistics’ supplychain systems anytime, from anywhere.
Now that TNT Logistics has a real-time
infrastructure in place, the company
stands head and shoulders above the
competition in terms of its supply-chain
support capability, and its ability to
support vertical and horizontal supplychain networks.
Secure portal links customers,
employees, and partners
TNT Logistics’ next step was to extend
the integrated system worldwide through
a Web-based portal. Using TIBCO’s
enterprise portal solution to power
MyVector.TNTLogistics.com, TNT
Logistics can deliver a personalized,
secure supply-chain database to
customers, employees, and partners
anytime, from anywhere.
“We looked at other solutions, but were
heavily weighted toward TIBCO because
of our favorable experience with TIBCO’s
business integration solution and because
we wanted to limit the number of vendors
we had to deal with,” Tutt says. “TIBCO
gave us the solutions we needed.”
TNT Logistics North America is now
working with other TNT Logistics global
divisions throughout Asia and Europe to
train them to use Matrix TNT Supply
Chain Technologies™. The company
continues to grow its logistics support
infrastructure and creates B2B interfaces
with new TNT Logistics customers to
provide better support as it grows.
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration solution
replaces TNT Logistics’ proprietary
messaging software and seamlessly
integrates proprietary systems
throughout the infrastructure to
power the supply chain management
system. The real-time supply chain
handles more customers more rapidly,
improves scalability, and reduces
server bottlenecks. The open nature of
TIBCO’s solution enables TNT Logistics
to utilize multiple disparate platforms
and preserve its previous technology
investments.
TIBCO's enterprise portal solution
is a Web-based portal that allows
customers and partners to have
secure, personalized, “anywhere,
anytime” access to the TNT Logistics
supply chain, providing the benefits of
greater visibility to all involved.
T- S Y S T E M S
COMPUTER SERVICES
TIBCO portal helps raise T-Systems
productivity and cut cost
“Having a single portal for T-Systems employees helped us to build a
consolidated corporate identity and enabled collaboration from any
location—which effectively supports our international growth objectives.”
—Ellen Walther-Klaus, senior EVP of Web enabling and relationship management,
T-Systems
T- S Y S T E M S I N T E R N AT I O N A L
A leading provider of information and
communications technology solutions
and services
Industry
Geographies
COMPUTER SERVICES GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■ The portal enables employees to sign in
once so they can efficiently interact with the
applications they use to perform their jobs
■
Employees can completely personalize
their view of information and interfaces to
meet their work requirements and personal
preferences
Benefits
■ The new portal increases employee
productivity by providing fast and easy
access to the applications employees use
to perform their jobs
■
■
Employee access to more complete and
timely information improves customer
service and decision making
The portal also improves efficiency by
enabling geographically dispersed
employees to collaborate, eliminating
duplication of effort
T-Systems International GmbH is one of
Europe’s leading information and
communications technology (ICT) service
providers. The company is a whollyowned subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom,
and is responsible for the delivery of
leading-edge IT and telecommunications
solutions to the group’s largest customers.
It plays a key role in Deutsche Telekom’s
core business and is a stable source of
group revenue. T-Systems’ service
portfolio includes the integration of new
ICT solutions into existing systems; the
implementation and operation of desktop
systems, data centers, and networks; as
well as telecommunications products and
services for international carriers.
T-Systems creates value for its customers
by optimizing IT systems and building
communication infrastructures that
improve efficiency, but the newly created
company had a few inefficiencies of its
own to overcome. The two companies
that had merged to produce T-Systems
each had business units around the
world—and their incompatible IT
infrastructures did not facilitate employee
collaboration and information-sharing.
“T-Systems wanted to improve the
capability of employees to collaborate—
especially geographically dispersed
teams—and improve the quality and
availability of data,” says Bernd Brand,
senior partner manager, who is responsible
for project requirements and conception.
“We saw that we needed an open,
modular, standards-based portal platform
to provide role-based security with single
sign-on capability, content management,
and personalization services that would
give workers convenient access to
information and applications, Web-based
or not,” says Brand.
“TIBCO’s portal software is flexible, easy
to use, and supports open standards. The
total cost of ownership for deployment,
operation, and support was good, and so
was the time frame to deploy TIBCO’s
software,” adds Ellen Walther-Klaus,
senior EVP of Web enabling and
relationship management at T-Systems.
TIBCO enables advanced document
and content management
The portal integrates applications and
provides employees with an integrated,
personalized set of real-time content and
interactive services. Employees are now
able to search for information more
efficiently—and the content retrieved
from these searches is more likely to be
up-to-date than in the past.
TIBCO’s portal software also enables
employees to manage and post Web
content using standard templates created
by the IT department. This process
improves the quality as well as the
quantity of Web content.
T- S Y S T E M S
COMPUTER SERVICES
Better communication and
collaboration saves money by
increasing productivity
Within the portal are different
communities in which employees who
perform similar functions can share
documents and access related services.
For example, the sales community has
access to a customer relationship
management (CRM) application and the
latest proposal templates, while employees
who are engaged in the e-government
project receive online subscriptions from
the European Union in Brussels.
The portal also supplies efficient project
management tools, records, and archives
that help departments at T-Systems with
project tracking. People who work on
different teams—even those located in
different regions around the globe—can
more easily communicate about projects,
focus on scope, avoid duplication of
efforts, and create synergies.
“Having a single portal for T-Systems
employees helped us to build a
consolidated corporate identity and
enabled collaboration from any
location—which effectively supports our
international growth objectives,” WaltherKlaus says.
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s portal software provides a
standards-based platform that
integrates applications and systems
and offers a single, convenient point of
access to information, applications, and
services. The portal simplifies
document version control and content
management, improving the quality
and timeliness of available data. The
portal aids communication and
collaboration, enabling even
geographically dispersed teams to
work more productively and manage
projects efficiently.
UTi WORLDWIDE
T R A N S P O R TAT I O N / L O G I S T I C S
TIBCO gives UTi Worldwide the
agility to compete effectively
“Integration is not a new concept to TIBCO, so the technology is very stable.
TIBCO treats each customer as though you are the only customer. You see that
everybody at all levels wants to make you successful. We believe our TIBCO®based EAI platform will enable us to implement our business strategies by
making us more agile and more responsive to customers’ needs.”
—Linda Bennett, senior vice president and CIO, UTi Worldwide
UTi WORLDWIDE
An international, non-asset-based supplychain management company providing air
and ocean freight forwarding, contract
logistics, customs brokerage, and other
logistics-related services
Industry
Geographies
T R A N S P O R TAT I O N /
LOGISTICS
GLOBAL
Deployment Summary
■
■
UTi uses TIBCO’s business integration
software to implement an improved supplychain tracking system for customers
The company migrated its Oracle®-based
intranet to TIBCO’s portal software and
deployed a new portal for 10,000 employees
within four months
Benefits
■ The solution enhanced agility and enabled
UTi to deliver end-to-end custom solutions
to its customers faster and more efficiently
■
Portal software reduced the amount of effort
required to deliver new intranet pages and
functions to users by up to
85 percent
UTi Worldwide Inc. is a supply-chain
management company that provides
freight forwarding, contract logistics,
customs brokerage, order management,
and other logistics-related services to
customers around the world. Operating
from more than 430 offices in 130
countries, UTi optimizes its customers’
supply chains to help these companies
work more productively and costeffectively—enabling them to compete
more successfully in a global marketplace.
Two years ago, UTi examined its
competitive landscape and revised its
business strategy. The company decided
to improve its agility, including its ability
to quickly develop and deliver custom
solutions for its customers. UTi realized
that it would need to upgrade its IT
architecture to better support the
integration and modification of applications
across its business, so at the core of
this plan was the need for enterprise
application integration (EAI) software.
“The EAI platform plays a significant
strategic role, which we believe will enable
us to leapfrog our competition,” says Tom
Wilkinson, vice president of global IT
applications. “We will use TIBCO to build
an entirely new supply-chain tracking
application that will provide the agility we
need to supply customizable services for
our customers.”
TIBCO delivers business agility and
responsive services
Selecting an EAI vendor that could
provide such agility was critical. At the
same time, UTi also decided to migrate
its Oracle-based employee portal to
TIBCO. UTi evaluated EAI and portal
offerings from several vendors, including
IBM, Oracle, Open Text, BEA Systems,
webMethods and Plumtree, and TIBCO.
“TIBCO scored high in agility,
customization, and speed. Most of the
vendors took several weeks to complete a
proof of concept, but TIBCO completed
all of the requirements in just six days,”
says Linda Bennett, senior vice president
and CIO at UTi. “The functionality that
enabled them to perform so quickly and
efficiently is exactly what we needed to
serve our customers in the best way.”
UTi selected TIBCO for both its EAI
and employee portal projects. “TIBCO
provides a broad set of software, including
EAI, portal, and business process
management. The products are very
integrated and highly stable technologies,
which helps us build a very robust
platform,” says Dave Luce, vice president
of global IT architecture at UTi. “It makes
a big difference to look at the full suite
rather than piecemeal components of it.”
The company deployed the portal for its
10,000 employees within four months with
the assistance of the TIBCO Professional
Services Group (PSG). “One of the
smartest moves we made was to work
with TIBCO Professional Services Group,”
Wilkinson says. “Their tremendous
competence and product knowledge
helped us to see solutions that we
otherwise would not have recognized.
They have been highly responsive and
incorporated a large percentage of our
UTi WORLDWIDE
T R A N S P O R TAT I O N / L O G I S T I C S
requests and recommendations into
roadmaps for future product releases.
TIBCO has really demonstrated—all the
way up to the top of the organization—
dedication to making us successful.”
Powerful TIBCO portal software saves
time by reducing the need for coding
With TIBCO’s portal software deployed,
the IT department at UTi was able to take
advantage of powerful capabilities such as
an integrated Verity® search engine, Jive®
discussion-forum software, and a content
management system. The integrated
content management functionality helped
satisfy a long-term strategic goal at UTi
of freeing IT resources by making users
more self-sufficient.
“Until recently, IT was responsible for
pushing all content into the portal,”
Wilkinson says. “TIBCO gave us an
efficient way to off-load content
management to content owners. TIBCO
also enables users to customize their home
pages so they can access frequently used
content and links. By providing the search
capability that we didn’t have before, this
portal implementation increased the
productivity of our employees significantly.”
The functionality of TIBCO’s portal
software helps employees work more
efficiently, which improves the quality of
customer service. Wilkinson anticipates
that content on the UTi intranet will triple
within the next six months and the
improvements in customer interactions
will accelerate.
TIBCO’s portal software also has enabled
IT to create templates for different types
of content areas so that developers and
users can create new Web pages or
sections on the intranet with minimal
effort. “In the past, building a new
functional area within the portal required
developers to write a lot of code,”
Wilkinson says. “TIBCO saves us a
tremendous amount of time because now
we can reuse templates for similar sections
or pages. Team members reported up to
an 85 percent reduction in effort to deliver
new intranet pages and functions to users.
As a result, we are able to be much more
responsive to our user community.”
TIBCO streamlines interactions
between UTi and its customers
The ongoing EAI project will provide
visibility into different business silos—such
as warehousing, distribution, and freight
forwarding—and enable UTi’s customers
to track their goods as they move around
the globe. “Very few UTi competitors are
able to provide these services to their
customers,” Wilkinson says. The improved
tracking capabilities are expected to improve
customer service and increase revenue
growth as well as operational efficiency.
In addition to business integration and
portal software, UTi uses TIBCO’s business
process management software to improve
the customer experience. One of the first
uses of TIBCO’s process management
software was the automation of customer
request management. TIBCO’s software
determines which office, manager, and
resource should be alerted for each request
and ensures that issues are prioritized
correctly and resolved in an appropriate
time frame. Wilkinson is pleased by the
great flexibility and numerous options for
growth and improvement that TIBCO
products and services provide. The
company is currently deploying a customer
relationship management (CRM)
application using TIBCO and plans to
migrate its other critical applications,
including enterprise logistics management
systems, to the new platform.
“TIBCO has really changed the way our
development staff looks at IT,” Wilkinson
says. “We are no longer limited to solving
issues by writing code. TIBCO has
enabled us to be very creative and
multifaceted in our approach to problems
because we can use TIBCO tools in
different ways to solve our issues. We’re
very pleased with the agility and
competitiveness that ability gives us.”
TECHNOLOGY
Solutions Summary
TIBCO’s business integration software
enables UTi Worldwide to deliver
customized supply-chain solutions to its
customers faster and with more
flexibility. The software provides
visibility into different silos, such as
warehousing distribution and freight
forwarding. TIBCO’s business process
management software coordinates the
customer service request management
process to improve the customer
experience.
TIBCO’s portal software helps reduce
developer coding efforts by up to
85 percent and enables users to selfsufficiently publish content to the portal
and personalize their own home pages.
http://www.tibco.com