07/18/2002 — by Alex Woodie

When zipper giant YKK USA decided to build a Web site to provide its customers with real-time information about their orders, the company wanted to host the Web site on a platform that would be stable, secure, and easily upgradeable. For YKK, which has been an AS/400 shop from the get-go, and a S/38 user before that, you'd think the answer was obvious. In a way it was. They chose Linux on iSeries.

YKK USA is one of 13 subsidiaries of YKK Corp. of America, which is headquartered in Marietta, Georgia, and is itself one of 121 companies underneath YKK Corp. of Japan. Among other products, YKK USA manufacturers more than 1,500 different styles of zippers, in 427 colors.

The sales department at YKK USA had received requests, from the companies it does business with, for a Web site that would allow them to get information about their orders and to place and confirm orders online. From the beginning, the development of this new online tracking system was spearheaded by the sales department, with some input from the IT department.

At YKK, the IT group is tied to the manufacturing division, and the development of a new application for the sales department was the sales department's responsibility. "It may seem unusual, but that's the way our company operates," said David Willoughby, a network administrator in the IT department at YKK USA, which maintains a network of Windows computers and an OS/400-based ERP system that the company developed in-house using RPG.

Sara Carnell, the director of operations for YKK USA, led the search and review process for new technology or software products that would give the company what it needed. With assistance from the IT department, Carnell and her team reviewed offerings from several independent software vendors, who proposed solutions to YKK USA based on various technologies, including IBM Lotus Notes, Microsoft software, IBM WebSphere, and Java.

Carnell was impressed with the Web site architecture proposed by eOneGroup of Omaha, Nebraska. eOne Group's flagship application, eOneCommerce, is a Java-based Web site development product that can access real-time data from back-end inventory, order entry, and financial systems. The software is operating-system-independent and supports multi-tiered deployments where the database and application server are running on separate boxes, or even on separate platforms.

It's interesting to note that eOneGroup also provided the software and integration expertise for the only other iSeries Linux customer to be referenced by IBM thus far, clothes maker Tommy Hilfiger (see "Web Infrastructure with Linux, xSeries, and iSeries"). eOneGroup's software is also in use at Omaha Steaks, another satisfied iSeries user participating in the IBM iSeries advertising campaign. When YKK USA narrowed down its list of software providers, the recent successes at eOneGroup eclipsed the competition. The fact that eOneGroup did have experience deploying Web front-ends off of AS/400s was a factor in the decision, Carnell said.

After Carnell and her team made the decision to go with eOneGroup, the next decision was which platform for deployment. Carnell drew up a list of pros and cons about each platform, to help find the best one for the new eOneCommerce-powered Web site. Some of the categories in that list included cost, skill sets required, and availability of future support. Carnell and her group considered various platforms, including OS/400 on PowerPC, Linux on PowerPC, and Linux on Intel. In many of Carnell's categories, the Linux operating system scored well.

eOneGroup also encouraged YKK USA to deploy its new application on Linux, although it wasn't the only software vendor YKK USA dealt with that has come out in support for Linux. "eOne was very fair in what they presented to us," Carnell said. eOne introduced YKK USA to Linux, Carnell said, but all the independent software vendors believed Linux was an attractive alternative. "More developers were more excited about Linux," she added.

At the same time YKK USA was leaning toward Linux, the company was hashing out the pros and cons related to the hardware deployment decision. Would the sales department be able to get by with a cheaper, but less reliable, Intel server, or would they need the higher availability of a PowerPC system such as iSeries, which also carries a heftier price tag? The decision to deploy the Linux application on iSeries hardware instead of Intel hardware rested mainly on reliability, said Willoughby, who oversaw the installation. "Even if they [Intel-based servers] are very good servers, they're not as reliable as iSeries," he said.

So YKK USA moved forward with plans to deploy its new application on Linux on iSeries. By choosing one of IBM's new iSeries Linux Editions, which is based on the iSeries Model 820, the company also pocketed a 10 percent price reduction compared with buying a full-fledged iSeries. The company runs OS/400 on one of the i820's processors, as the primary partition and as a firewall. The other processor, which functions as the secondary partition, runs SuSE Enterprise Linux 7.1, the Apache Web server, and the eOneCommerce software. In mid June, the company went live with the application--a secure Web site that lets customers track their orders. The company hopes to go live with the second stage of the project--online ordering--by the end of the year.

Press Contact:
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Novell, Inc
Phone: +44 (0)1344 326-900
E-mail: juh@novell.com