Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Few auto companies can match the prestigious heritage of England's Bentley Motors, where a tradition of creating fast and elegant cars dates back to 1912. Until recently, however, the Bentley dealer network was decidedly un-Bentley-like. The system it used to access critical AS/400 applications was slow, unreliable, and involved a tedious sign-on process. It took Bentley a couple of tries, but it eventually found a solution that fit.

For a company accustomed to high quality, it's no wonder Bentley chose a computer like the AS/400 to run its core business systems. However, since its acquisition by Volkswagen, the Crewe, England, company has embarked upon a Microsoft Windows-centric development program and is phasing out its "legacy" AS/400 systems. Despite the Windows creep, the Bentley dealer network continued to rely on the AS/400 to access two home-grown applications--one provides customer service history and the other warranty management--and one packaged AS/400 application that does spare-parts management. The dealers were familiar with these applications, and they worked well. The problem was how the dealers accessed these AS/400 applications.

Originally, dealers accessed the AS/400 applications over an X.25 frame relay network. The X.25 network was secure, but it was slow and expensive. It also forced some dealers to pay upward of $1,000 pounds per month in networking charges, and required dealer installation and maintenance of a thick-client emulation program called RUMBA, an off-the-shelf application from its third-party vendor NetManage.

Mike Mayer, technical support manager for Bentley's IT department, inherited the X.25 network and had to deal with users who were very vocal about their problems with it, which were principally the issues of reliability and cost. "In the U.S., every dealer had Internet access, and they were asking us to put all our dealer systems on the Internet, rather than on our private network," he said. "The existing solution just didn't work for them."

In 1999, Bentley made its initial attempt to solve the problem. The company switched to a virtual private network (VPN) that its dealers could access using regular dial-up Internet accounts, and they added Citrix emulation in addition to the RUMBA software. This took care of some of the speed and expense issues that dealers were experiencing, but it didn't address the fact that the dealers still had to configure and maintain RUMBA themselves, which was becoming a major hassle. Users didn't like the multi-step sign-on and authentication process to access the AS/400 applications.

Mayer and his colleagues began looking for a replacement for the VPN. They wanted to take a pure Web-based approach, in which the system could be centrally maintained from Bentley's IT headquarters in Britain and dealers would need nothing but a Web browser and Internet access. This would eliminate the need for dealers to configure and maintain the emulation software and connectivity themselves.

There are many ways that Bentley could have gone about this. But one of the company's top requirements was that the AS/400 interface wouldn't change. While the conversion of 5250 applications into HTML-based GUIs that could be displayed in Web browsers was gaining popularity, Bentley didn't want any of it.

"Lots of the other vendors tried to sell us products based on making the AS/400 application look like a Web page, by merging screens and merging fields. That's exactly what we didn't want," Mayer said. "We didn't want to put any development effort in, because of investment and dealer retraining. For us, it's a big advantage that they're still green screens."

Bentley had several other criteria it was looking to meet in its new Web-to-host solution. First, it had to be secure, but perhaps most important was that the software had to be compatible with Bentley's warranty printing system.

Mayer admits that Bentley's warranty printing system is a unique one. "We have a very interesting way of doing warranty printing," he says. To be compatible with Bentley's warranty printing system, the Web-to-host solution had to support the Multi-Protocol Transport Network (MPTN), an architecture IBM developed that allows programs developed to communicate using a certain network protocol, such as TCP/IP, to also support other protocols, such as Systems Network Architecture (SNA).

Mayer looked at the Web-to-host offerings of several vendors, including IBM's, but didn't find what he was looking for. It wasn't until he took a closer look at NetManage's successor to RUMBA, a host publishing system called OnWeb, that Mayer found something he could work with.

"There were many HTML Web-to-host-type products, but none of them could be manipulated to do our warranty printing," Mayer says. A key differentiator of OnWeb was that Bentley could alter it to support its unique warranty printing system. "It was the fact that you could program and manipulate OnWeb that allowed us to do the warranty printing," he says.

In 2001, Bentley installed OnWeb on a modest uniprocessor Windows NT server, a Compaq ProLiant 1600 running at 900 MHz and 512 MB of RAM. Bentley's dealers got rid of the RUMBA emulators and, instead, pointed their Web browsers to the OnWeb server, where they could access the AS/400 applications much quicker, because they no longer had to enter multiple user IDs and passwords to get through the Windows server and then to the AS/400 applications.

OnWeb provided a satisfactory approach to Bentley's warranty printing requirement. Today, Bentley's AS/400 generates documents in the PDF format and then places them on a Windows NT file server that is accessible to dealers after clearing an RSA Security authentication process. The dealer then uses a customer OnWeb application to open and print the documents from the PC over the Internet. Although warranty printing is a relatively low-volume task for dealers, Mayer says it would have taken extensive customization to develop this working solution using other products.

Mayer says the OnWeb system had an immediate impact on Bentley's communication costs. The first year, OnWeb reduced Bentley's communication costs by $250,000 pounds. Considering that the OnWeb system cost about one third of that, Bentley got its return-on-investment for that project in about four months. Overall, OnWeb provided Bentley with the capability to extend its AS/400 applications over the Internet, thus cutting its communication costs without incurring high development costs on a platform they were phasing out anyway.