Boise Cascade: Sun Keeps Office Products Flowing

Boise Cascade Office Products is a premier worldwide business-to-business distributor of products for the office. From distribution centers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Boise provides its customers with a broad range of items, including office supplies, paper, technology products, and office furniture. Servers from Sun have been Boise's exclusive standard for UNIX systems for many years. Sun technology plays key roles in the company's IT infrastructure. Among the mission-critical systems deployed on Sun Enterprise servers is One Boise, an initiative the firm deployed in 2001 to integrate all customer touch points, to personalize and improve the quality of all customer interactions and increase the availability and application of customer information. This solution is powered by Clarify CRM software along with E.piphany campaign management. The Java technology pioneered by Sun plays key roles at Boise. The e-commerce system is written entirely in the Java language. Boise is also planning a Java technology based portal architecture whereby employees and customers can access the DWBI system along with other information important to them, such as human resources data. Boise's One Boise business strategy and system have been so successful in personalizing the customer experience that it received the first Gartner CRM Excellence Award. The One Boise initiative takes the definition of personalized service in the office product industry to a new level, according to Gary Massel, Chief Information Officer for Boise. "The responsiveness delivered by Sun servers is an essential component of the success of all these programs," Massel concluded.

Boise Cascade Office Products (Boise) is fundamentally changing its methodology for running its business to become more responsive to customer needs and industry changes. The company's One Boise strategy has introduced new levels of personalization for customer relationships, and its Key Drivers initiative will deliver the information that business operators need daily, rather than once a month as in the past. Like all UNIX systems at Boise, the servers that support these programs were provided by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Boise recently deployed four Sun Fire servers, which are meeting the high expectations for performance, reliability, and service that made Sun once again the company' s choice for server platforms. The Key Drivers data warehouse/business intelligence (DWBI) system is based on two Sun Fire 6800 servers and a Sun Fire 4800 server, and Boise's award winning e-commerce system is based on yet another Sun Fire 6800 server. These platforms have joined the ranks of over 40 Sun servers that help Boise keep its business strong.

Sun — Boise's Exclusive Standard for UNIX Servers

Boise is a premier worldwide business-to-business distributor of products for the office. From distribution centers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Boise provides its customers with a broad range of items, including office supplies, paper, technology products, and office furniture.

Servers from Sun have been Boise's exclusive standard for UNIX systems for many years. Sun technology plays key roles in the company's IT infrastructure. Among the mission-critical systems deployed on Sun Enterprise servers is One Boise, an initiative the firm deployed in 2001 to integrate all customer touch points, to personalize and improve the quality of all customer interactions and increase the availability and application of customer information. This solution is powered by Clarify CRM software along with E.piphany campaign management.

"One Boise was the first business infrastructure initiative we undertook to introduce a level of responsiveness that was unheard of in our industry," said Gary Massel, Chief Information Officer for Boise. "A subsequent program we're pursuing is our Key Drivers data warehouse, which will fundamentally change the way we do business. In the past, we generated reports for our decision makers on a monthly basis. Now, we've identified the metrics that are most critical to the business and created an enterprise-wide data warehouse that all of our key managers will access to generate reports on a daily basis. With the drill-down and analysis capabilities we're implementing, our business planners will have a far more timely pulse on the business, and will be able to respond with agility that's unprecedented at Boise or anywhere else in the office products industry."

Long History of Success with Sun Technology Leads to Boise's Decision for Sun Fire Servers

To select the server platforms for Key Drivers, Boise conducted a concerted evaluation that compared Sun Fire servers with other UNIX systems. "Even though Sun's history of performance, service, and support to Boise has been excellent, we performed our due diligence carefully before making our decision," said Massel.

"Sun invited us to its iForcesm Ready Center for load testing and to check out Sun's DW Reference Architecture design, which proved very helpful. We brought along our own software and Sun loaded it on Sun Fire servers configured just like those Sun had proposed to us. We examined the Sun Fire architecture, which is based on Sun' s latest foundations — the UltraSPARC III microprocessor and the Solaris Operating Environment. Then, we measured throughput and found that Sun delivered the performance we needed. Sun' s support people at the center were very responsive. The entire experience was tremendous."

In parallel with the server evaluation, Boise selected Oracle as the database product after engaging in a thorough evaluation. "Our two decisions were independent," said Massel, "although the synergy between Sun, Oracle, and VERITAS — our vendor for Net Backup software — gave us an extra reason to choose the Sun and Oracle combination. The three vendors sponsor a Joint Escalation Center (JEC) that relieves us from having to determine the location of a problem that crops up somewhere in the system. They get together, determine the cause, and fix it wherever it lies without our having to be involved at all. The best testimonial to the JEC that I can provide is that we hardly know it's there. It must be working well."

In late 2001, Boise installed the Sun Fire system and commenced development of the DWBI system. One Sun Fire 6800 server stores the detail data for the enterprise-wide data warehouse as in Sun's DW Reference Architecture, and also for the closely related Peak Performance sales compensation and reporting system. A second Sun Fire 6800 server stores data marts extracted from the data warehouse. Yet another Sun Fire 6800 server is used as the database server in the company's e-commerce system, called bcop.com, which also uses Oracle and VERITAS. A Sun Fire 4800 server comprises Boise's development environment for DWBI.

All Sun Fire servers are based on the UltraSPARC III processor, Sun's third generation 64-bit processor, and run the Solaris 8 Operating Environment, the established OS leader for availability, scalability, and security in the Internet age. Each server is protected by SunSpectrumsm support under a corporate- wide three-year plan. For one monthly price, SunSpectrum support provides end-to-end system coverage including hardware and software, along with 24/7 access to resources and tools available through the Sun Online Support Center.

Gartner CRM Excellence Award Winner

The data warehouse is architected such that thousands of users throughout the company, many of whom are not computer experts, can quickly and easily find information they need from data marts designed expressly for them. Raw data is processed and deposited into the data warehouse by Ascential's Data Stage, an Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) tool. Brio analysis and reporting software generates the data marts from the Oracle data warehouse. Because the data warehouse is 3 TB in size, this data mart architecture is essential for fast response to queries.

The Java technology pioneered by Sun plays key roles at Boise. The e-commerce system is written entirely in the Java language. Boise is also planning a Java technology based portal architecture whereby employees and customers can access the DWBI system along with other information important to them, such as human resources data.

Boise's One Boise business strategy and system have been so successful in personalizing the customer experience that it received the first Gartner CRM Excellence Award. The One Boise initiative takes the definition of personalized service in the office product industry to a new level, according to Massel.

"The responsiveness delivered by Sun servers is an essential component of the success of all these programs," Massel concluded.