Customer Success Story
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Robust Web Portal Thrives on Sun Servers and iPlanet Solutions
"Sun Enterprise Servers and the solutions provided by WATCO and iPlanet E-commerce Solutions' software have enabled us to launch the portal on time and with impressive stage one capabilities. We believe that the combination of Sun servers, the Solaris Operating Environment, and software from iPlanet are the premier infrastructure for Web commerce on the scale we're intending."
Terence McConnell Web Portal for Geophysical Data and ProductsOil and gas exploration is a complex, competitive, and international business. Engineers and geophysicists working for energy companies cover a lot of land and ocean in search of oil and gas deposits. Now, instead of hopping on a plane, they can begin their search online at http://www.geophysicsonline.com. Launched in December of 1999, this business-to-business Web portal is a centralized online trading and resource center for the global geophysics sector. It supplies geophysical surveys of land and ocean areas, specialized maps, industry news, a catalog of nearly 2.5 million industry-related products for purchase and rental, a powerful electronic procurement system, and international financing and financial transaction services. "We cater to a very high tech business sector, " says Terence McConnell, president of GeoCommerce, the company that runs the portal site as well as the http://www.mineonline.com site for the mining industry, built with identical technology. "Previous efforts using electronic data interchange to integrate oil and gas companies with their suppliers were costly and not very successful. But the Web portal is a powerful, elegant solution that unites companies, consultants, and suppliers of many kinds very effectively." Prior Experience with SunGeoCommerce is a division of IDS Intelligent Detection Systems, Inc., based in Toronto, Canada, with 40 years of experience in exploration and mining services. "IDS has another company in Ottawa that is a Sun integrator. We shared with them our requirements for GeophysicsOnline and they suggested Sun for the server platform because of their excellent experience with Sun. Early in development, we purchased one Sun Enterprise 250 server, a Sun SPARCserver 5 and SPARCserver 10, and figured we were up and running. Soon, however, we turned to iPlanet E-commerce Solutions for a much more robust, scalable hardware and software infrastructure, " says Terence McConnell, President, GeoCommerce, Inc. iPlanet E-commerce Solutions and WATCO bring E-business SavvyGeoCommerce, Inc. brought in iPlanet and Canadian e-business consulting firm WATCO to build the GeophysicsOnline portal. WATCO provides turnkey e-business solutions to business and government from offices in Toronto and Montreal. In defining the portal's requirements, GeoCommerce president Terence McConnell said his company identified product catalogs as a key attraction to users. The iPlanet and WATCO team then helped them determine which products were most relevant from an initial pool of 10 million MRO and business essential products, and also helped them with the implementation of an industry-specific catalog. "We're confident the Sun server and iPlanet infrastructure and e-commerce solutions should serve us through tremendous anticipated growth. "
Terence McConnell "We implemented a back office e-commerce engine using an Oracle RDBMS, the Netscape Application Server, and Netscape SellerXpert application from iPlanet for the core selling engine, " says WATCO, Inc. president and CEO Dave Welling. The Netscape Application Server is powerful, proven technology for easily developing, deploying, and managing large-scale e-commerce applications, while providing integration with existing enterprise investments. SellerXpert is a comprehensive packaged application for enterprises seeking to deploy a business-to-business sales channel on the Internet. The SellerXpert product catalog allows customers to load, display, and locate thousands of products quickly and easily. The catalog database was hosted on a Sun Enterprise 450 workgroup server and six Sun Enterprise 250 servers were used to run the SellerXpert application. "We looked at Linux and Microsoft Windows NT, but neither platform was as scalable as Sun's Solaris Operating Environment. In our experience, Microsoft NT deployments of SellerXpert for Netscape Application Server from iPlanet get converted to Sun and Solaris Operating Environment because the Sun platform and environment is so much more stable and scalable. On the Sun Enterprise 250 and Sun Enterprise 450 workgroup servers, double the CPU and you double the performance, " says Dave Welling, CEO, WATCO. Phase one of GeophysicsOnline includes news feeds and the catalog. Phase two will include requests for proposals and information, rental equipment, participation in newsgroups, and job postings. A database will enable users to get a listing of consulting services catalogued by areas of expertise. "Our direction is to become an application service provider in a portal," says Terence McConnell. "We want to serve all of the day-to-day needs of our customers around the world, in purchasing, teleconferencing and videoconferencing, Web publishing, reporting, and research, all via the portal. We're confident the Sun server and iPlanet infrastructure and e-commerce solutions should serve us through anticipated growth." Available free to users, the portal's revenue is generated from transaction and brokerage commissions and from listing and advertising fees. IDS esti- mates the target markets for GeophysicsOnline and MineOnline combined transact more than US$200 billion annually.
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