News Briefs and Product Shorts

Raytheon Aircraft Set for Smooth Flight with Customer Service, Supply Chain Enhancements

European airplane mechanics will gain faster access to Beechcraft and Hawker airplane parts as a result of a new warehouse outsourcing agreement Raytheon Aircraft Company has formed with PFSweb, a Plano, Texas, business process outsourcing provider. As part of the agreement, PFSweb's Belgium subsidiary, PFSweb B.V., will stock approximately 10,000 different parts for RAC's Beechcraft and Hawker aircraft at a warehouse located near the Liege (Belgium) Airport, which is served by several air express cargo companies. PFSweb officials say that the five-year-old Liege facility, which uses advanced "pick-to-light" shipping techniques and an iSeries-based J.D. Edwards warehouse management system, is a model of speed and accuracy. "Our new distribution site in Liege will raise the standard for aircraft parts delivery in Europe," Raytheon's vice president of customer support Ed Dolanski says. "With PFSweb handling the warehoused inventory, and express carriers providing same-day and next-day shipping, our customers throughout Europe will see a dramatic improvement in parts availability." Also, Raytheon last week announced that its subsidiary Hitachi Consulting has completed a 16-week implementation of Siebel Systems CRM software. The Siebel implementation involved extensive integration with internal systems, including AS/400 and FoxPro applications, as well as external systems run by the Federal Aviation Administration and JetNet. The new CRM system provides Raytheon's call center and technical service personnel with faster access to customer information, such as plane ownership, service calls, and details about the aircraft, such as parts, order history, and warranty data.

LXI Tracks Tape Movement with New Wireless Scanner

Backup and recovery software specialist LXI Corp. is now offering a handheld scanner to improve users' tape control processes. The new AML M7100 wireless handheld scanner works with LXI's cross-platform media management product, Tape Tracker, to reduce the potential for errors whenever tapes are loaded for backups, are sent offsite for disaster recovery purposes, or are moved for any other reason. "The key to implementing compliant offsite media management practices is to develop procedures and controls that ensure the integrity of the movement process," says LXI product manager Tim Kormos. The AML M7100 is manufactured by American Microsystems and features a 133 MHz Intel StrongARM processor, 16 MB of RAM, 802.11b wireless networking, and an optional 5250 emulator. Kormos says that several Tape Tracker customers have implemented their own media movement control processes using wireless barcode scanners, and that the partnership and integration with American Microsystems has simplified the delivery of this solution. LXI's cost for the ML 7100 alone is about $2,000, but full implementations cost about $10,000.

UCCnet Offers Free Utility for Product Data Registration, Synchronization

UCCnet last week launched a free utility to help smaller companies get started with registering and synchronizing their product data with UCCnet's GLOBALregistry. The new UCCnet Sync Utility, which is available to UCCnet members small enough to qualify for the $100 per year UCCnet subscription fee, requires just a standard PC with an Internet connection and no other hardware, software, or services. The free utility walks users, step by step, through the process of entering their product, location, and company information, ensuring the data follows EAN-UCC standards, and completing the synchronization processes by allowing companies to publish their product data to its trading partners. The UCCnet was formed in 1998 to help reduce product data errors that cost the retail and consumer processed goods industry billions of dollars per year.

WRQ Enables OS/400 Hosts to Play in Plumtree's Portal

Host integration provider WRQ and Plumtree Software have formed an alliance to provide Plumtree portal users with access to OS/400, mainframe, Unix, OpenVMS, and HP3000 hosts, the two companies announced last week. The alliance calls for WRQ's Reflection emulation and Verstream integration software to be used to let companies expose logic and data from these "legacy" green screen systems as Web services, which are then assembled and published as portlets, using Plumtree's software. Plumtree says the partnership with WRQ is critical in its strategy of "radical openness." "Our strategy of radical openness requires our suite to be open to all systems, including mainframe green-screen applications," says Jay Simons, Plumtree's director of applications. Organizations are increasingly turning to portals to try to simplify and consolidate users' access to disparate computer systems and data sources. Plumtree says that about 600 organizations use its software, including Boeing, Ford, and the U.S. Navy. WRQ claims its software provides host access to more than 6,000,000 people around the world.

"Mushroom"-Like Growth of Web Services Leads to X-Registry

Infravio last week launched X-registry, a software repository that provides consumers of Web services with important information, such as a description of the Web service, pricing, and service level agreements. Infravrio, a consultancy that specializes in developing Web services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs), says the number of Web services is growing quickly, and companies that have implemented SOAs need more sophisticated tools for managing their Web services, or "WSDLs" (which stands for Web Services Description Language). The company developed X-registry with feedback from one its clients, Sabre Holdings, the parent company of travel services provider Travelocity, which is selling access to car, hotel, and airplane reservation systems through 50 WSDLs and expects to add another 50 WDSLs by the end of the year. Sabre found existing Web services repositories, such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)--which was supposed to provide a "white pages" of available Web services--lacking, and it contracted with Infravio to develop a more robust way to promote Web services among its business partners, and for allowing partners to enter into a contract. X-registry ships this month and costs $35,000.

Vanguard Enhances Single-Sign-On Software

Administrators gain new deployment options with the Version 5.2 release of Vanguard Integrity Professionals' ez/SignOn, a password consolidation utility that lets users sign on to OS/400, mainframe, Unix, Windows, and Linux hosts with a single password. With this release, administrators can selectively deploy ez/SignOn to certain computers in their network, an improvement over previous releases, which, upon rebooting, would automatically deploy the software to all servers and workstations from the root domain controller. The new release of ez/SignOn is one component of the Las Vegas-based company's security software suite, called Vanguard Security Solutions, and it also includes ez/Integrator, which extends mainframe authentication, authorization, and auditing to other platforms; PasswordReset; Administrator, a reporting tool for mainframe RACF security; Advisor, which provides analysis, reporting, and electronic report distribution; the Analyzer auditing tool; the Enforcer for mainframe intrusion detection; the INCompliance auditing and testing tool; and the SecurityCenter Windows GUI for Administrator. There are 23 enhancements in the new release, Vanguard says.