Customer Fails to Break EXTOL's Latest EDI Software

Published: June 26, 2012

by Alex Woodie

EXTOL International put the new release of its IBM i-based EDI software to an interesting test: it asked a customer to break it. But despite the transactional deluge that EXTOL EDI Integrator for i version 6.3 received at the hand of an insurance company client, the software kept on ticking.

EXTOL says it made several changes to the latest release of EXTOL EDI Integrator for i (EEI), which was unveiled a month ago, that give the product higher throughput, including advanced pipelining, improved enveloping, and log purging enhancements.

As part of the beta test of EEI 6.3, EXTOL handed the product over to Delta Dental of Wisconsin, a non-profit organization that provides dental insurance coverage to 1.25 million Wisconsin employees and their families, making it the largest dental insurer in the state.

Mike Dorn, an IT systems analyst at Delta Dental of Wisconsin, explains what his organization did to the EDI translator and how it responded.

"As we completed our EEI implementation, we asked our partners to send us transactions as fast as they could and all at once in an attempt to break the software," Dorn says in a press release. "EEI pushed through that blitz of between 20,000 and 30,000 transactions without its average response time falling off."

It's well known that the IBM i server is extremely scalable and capable of handling humongous workloads. All too often, though, poor software design does not take full advantage of the underlying hardware's capability. It appears that this is not so in the case of EEI. EXTOL, which develops and sells a native IBM i EDI translator and another Java-based one, knows and understands the benefit of keeping the software as close to the iron as possible.

"EEI 6.3 extends the scalability, performance, and robust features of the System i platform to EDI integration, for businesses with strict requirements for throughput, accuracy, and high customer service levels," says Reeve Fritchman, EXTOL's new chief strategy officer, in a press release. "We see many opportunities in the System i marketplace for products like EEI that help companies contain costs and boost process efficiency."

EEI 6.3 also sports an improved dashboard that provides users with better access to the product's activity monitoring and reporting functions. The dashboard also features a new "mailroom subsystem" for EDI administration, new reports, the capability to drill down from graphical views into transaction details, and role-based security for controlling access to dashboard features.

For more information, see the company's website at www.extol.com.

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