Success Stories

" We spend a great deal of time looking at developments in the e-commerce arena. We participate in forums, and keep track of which vendors are providing plug-and-play solutions - solutions specifically tailored to e-commerce and B2B. We clearly believe Sun is a leader in these dot-com solutions."

In the traditional world of distribution of goods and services, there are key features a supplier or distributor must provide to remain profitable: timely delivery, technical assistance on tools and products offered, and a positive track record with the customer. With e-commerce exploding, distribution is now hitting the Internet. Traditional distributors typically offer only local coverage, varied pricing and usually can't provide comprehensive supply management. In addition, few offer an e-business solution. Conversely, Dot-coms clearly have e-commerce technology, but what they often don't offer is true end-to-end supply chain management. A new dot-com, procurement company often has difficulty offering timely delivery, can't negotiate pricing with leading manufacturers and, because of its relative newness as a business, doesn't have a proven track record.

supplyFORCE.com combines the best of e-commerce transaction and networking capability with the expert product support and timely, local delivery of the county's largest distribution network. This marriage opens doors to distributors and customers alike, both benefiting from expanded reach and choice.

The Business Challenge

Sun™ Infrastructure Marries e-commerce and Supply Chain Management

Partnering For Success

supplyFORCE.com's production environment is being housed at Digex, a leading web and application hosting service provider. Digex will provide the facility and key Internet hosting services such as security, connectivity, monitoring, and backup for supplyFORCE.com. Z-Cubed specializes in technology management and consulting services for process engineering, project management, applications development, systems integration, systems management, training and technical staff augmentation. Z-Cubed will provide the expert resources to manage supplyFORCE.com's production technology environment.

Peter Chakales, CEO and President of Z-Cubed explains its role. "Basically, the concept behind Z-Cubed is our attempt to fulfill a segment in the market that we saw as a gaping hole from the current supplier of managed services and ASPs. supplyFORCE.com has a unique requirement for its overall product suite. It has JD Edwards, webMethods, Requisite Technologies, and a host of in-house developed applications. Traditional ASPs can't really address this complexity because they are usually focused on one particular product suite. Z-Cubed is focused on the entire solution. We provide managed services from the facility and network through the operating system and database. We wrap traditional old-world production control procedures around the new economy."

In-house, supplyFORCE.com has its test and development environment. Z-Cubed, through Digex, will provide the production environment as well as its disaster recovery solution at its managed technology center. "When we designed supplyFORCE.com's production environment, we looked at it from the ground up in terms of a highly available configuration. We implemented Sun clustering along with high availability features such as mirrored cache and alternate paths on the Sun StorEdge A5100 arrays. The goal from the onset was to keep supplyFORCE.com highly performant and highly available for its customer base. We did this through tried and tested Sun products - the Sun's Solaris™ Operating Environment and Sun Enterprise™ 4500 servers and Sun StorEdge™ A5100 storage arrays. We also are using a Sun StorEdge L3500 tape library for the production system, and a Sun StorEdge L1000 tape library at the Z3 hot site," indicates Chakales.

supplyFORCE.com took a very methodical approach to building an architecture that would meet its performance and availability requirements and sustain rapid growth. Selecting the solution involved a number of considerations. "One of the things we wanted to be certain of is that all the components would absolutely work together. We're moving very quickly so we don't want any surprises. A generic solution with multiple hardware and software platforms would definitely not work for us. When we looked at the various choices a key consideration was how well our primary Oracle database would run on each platform. We wanted a vendor that could deliver an open, standard environment with excellent availability, scalability, and reusability yet still allow us to maintain a certified cluster platform. Sun was an obvious choice," states David Gray, Director of Infrastructure at supplyFORCE.com. Sun designs flexibility into its product architectures that enables customers to adapt quickly to the changing internet environment.

In making its selection, supplyFORCE.com looked at a variety of platforms - both UNIX® and other platforms. Major benchmarks such as TPC and SPEC were evaluated. In addition, supplyFORCE.com consulted with other large companies and customers to obtain their input and experience with platform providers. "Several factors influenced our decision to go with Sun. We wanted a homogeneous system for obvious reasons like maintenance and service. A single-vendor solution allows us to cut down on our training cost, staffing becomes easier, and the certification process is much more straightforward. Spare parts aren't an issue, and you have the flexibility to mix and match, as needs dictate. The real value for us comes with reducing our implementation time. The Sun/Oracle relationship was also important. Because so much of Oracle is deployed on Sun and a lot of Oracle development is done on Sun, we were able to get very clear benchmarking and performance information," indicates Gray. Commenting specifically on the Sun StorEdge A5100 arrays Gray remarks, "We have around 1 terabyte of Sun StorEdge A5100 storage. The A5100 represents proven technology with advanced features such as, Fiber Channel connectivity - which Sun has been a leader in for many years. Performance, scalability, and availability are critical to our supply chain management applications and the A5100 meets our current requirements with plenty of room for growth."

"Z-Cubed is on the messy side of the equation. It's our job to keep supplyFORCE.com up and running. A Sun storage solution connected to a Sun server platform running clustering is much more preferable to a third party solution just from pure management. We have a lot of strong experience with Sun and we're confident with its technology and reliability. Looking forward at things like Jiro™ technology, there is constant movement and innovation by Sun with its platforms and that certainly makes you feel comfortable," adds Chakales.

CTO, Diane Mirvis cites another contributing factor to Sun's selection. "Benchmarking statistics, a single-vendor solution, and recommendations by some of our large distributors definitely influenced our decision to select Sun. However, Sun's leadership position in e-commerce solutions was also a primary factor. supplyFORCE.com is not trying to bet its business on technology that hasn't been in use for quite some time. Sun has been a pioneer in developing best-of-breed e-commerce technology. It not only has products that can be tailored for e-commerce, it also offers the technical expertise and services to ensure its solution works. We spend a great deal of time looking at developments in the e-commerce arena. We participate in forums, and keep track of which vendors are providing plug-and-play solutions - solutions specifically tailored to e-commerce and B2B. We clearly believe Sun is a leader in these dot-com solutions."

Service Experience

Good Value Means Explosive Growth

"Customer satisfaction is a primary goal. We have a technologically superior e-commerce supply chain management solution that gives customers a one-stop-shop. A customer can visit our web site and be routed to the distributors in the four verticals we service. They can specify the distributors or we can help them select a supplier. They'll have consolidated invoicing and a normalized way to search across a very large number of SKUs. We currently have 500,000 SKUs in our catalog. That number will grow to a million by the end of the year. We control and manage the workflow to the distributors but it's virtually transparent to the customer. We still offer the traditional customer relationship such as technical assistance, timely delivery - 75 percent of deliveries are made the same day - and a proven track record, but we've enhanced it with the power of e-commerce," says Mirvis.

More than a Web Store

Business Advantages

• Highly available infrastructure: supplyFORCE.com is delivering a unique 'clicks & mortar,' B2B supply chain management solution by marrying the strengths of traditional distribution with the strengths of e-commerce. Its IT infrastructure is based on certified clustered Sun Enterprise™ 4500 servers with highly redundant Sun StorEdge™ A5100 disk arrays. This infrastructure allows supplyFORCE.com to deliver maximum performance and availability to its customers, manufacturers and distributors. The Sun Enterprise server family is the industry's only single, binary-compatible product line featuring a range of servers that scale from 1 to 64 processors providing customers with flexibility, investment protection and an unparalleled growth path.

  "We have around 1 terabyte of Sun StorEdge™ A5100 storage. The A5100 represents proven technology with advanced features such as, Fiber Channel connectivity - which Sun has been a leader in for many years. Performance, scalability, and availability are critical to our supply chain management applications and the A5100 meets our current requirements with plenty of room for growth."

• Open, integrated technology: supplyFORCE.com is melding technology from a variety of vendors including Sun, Requisite, webMethods, J D Edwards, and Oracle. Sun's server and storage solutions and Solaris™ Operating Environment provide the open and standard operating foundation to facilitate the integration of the various software applications. The result is a flexible, robust, and seamless e-commerce supply chain management solution.

• Reduced administration and maintenance: Sun's single-vendor solution eases the burden of system maintenance and administration. Z-Cubed supplies the management and consulting services to keep supplyFORCE.com's production system operational. Because the server and storage components are both supplied by Sun, Z-Cubed can more easily manage and tune the systems.

• Scalability for rapid growth: supplyFORCE.com's solution eliminates the barriers of geography and technology for its distributors. With supplyFORCE.com's e-commerce functionality and single-source, single-invoice, supply chain management capability, local distributors can now reach a national audience. This will mean explosive growth in terms of both customers and products maintained in the online catalogs. To meet its anticipated growth, supplyFORCE.com has architect a server and storage solution based on Sun Enterprise 4500 servers and Sun StorEdge A5100 storage arrays. The scalability afforded by these products provides supplyFORCE.com with the performance and capacity required today and positions it for rapid expansion. The systems can be added to as needed while still maintaining complete availability and software compatibility.