UNIX/NT in Business-to-Business E-Commerce

While analysts continue to debate whether UNIX or NT will become the operating system of choice in corporate America, the users are making it clear that they want mixed environments with NT and UNIX running side by side for their Internet/Web strategy. This is because most corporations today are taking a broader view of their Internet/Web strategy as an integral part of their electronic commerce activities.

Electronic commerce covers a wide range of activities such as electronic data interchange (EDI), electronic payment systems and order management. It also includes linking solutions in both business-to-business and business-to-consumer applications as well as information delivery and product support/service.

Businesses of all types and sizes are using E-commerce to improve the quality and timeliness of information exchange, increase productivity, enhance data accuracy, reduce costs, promote trading partner loyalty and facilitate just-in-time inventory management. For example, an electronic catalog that is enhanced with Internet EDI capabilities provides a virtual link between the vendor, distributor and reseller. With this link, products move through the channel quickly, reducing the need for higher than necessary physical stock requirements.

The Best of Both Worlds

The information these business partners exchange is generated by various departments (inside and outside the enterprise) ... departments that have developed a preference for one platform over the other. Forcing them to standardize on a single operating system is impractical and counter-productive.

UNIX, the operating system of choice for large Web sites, is the workhorse that Windows NT has been trying to emulate. Widely recognized for its flexibility and scalability, UNIX requires more understanding than NT but has the edge when it comes to security and managability.

Less costly than UNIX in terms of hardware and maintenance, Windows NT has gained acceptance for workgroup and departmental applications, and is becoming increasingly popular as a Web page development platform because it is easy to use and provides the familiar appearance of the Windows interface.

While most of NT's anticipated growth is in the Web enterprise market, it is still striving to gain acceptance in the Web world.

A few months ago, using a 64-bit NT operating system, the Microsoft Sphinx SQL Server, which is scheduled for release in mid-1998; and application software that also isn't available yet, Microsoft gave a demonstration designed to show that Windows NT is capable of scaling up from file and print services to database services. While NT's scalability is currently seriously questioned, it is improving and other issues such as reliability and security are being addressed. However, most organizations are not ready to make an exclusive commitment to NT for their E-commerce activities.

Even when the higher-performance NT solutions are released for general distribution, it is doubtful that NT will replace UNIX. Organiza-tions hang on to their legacy systems; and according to International Data Corp. (IDC), in Framingham, Mass, UNIX has 80 percent of the enterprise server market and will continue to have an annual growth rate of 20 percent for the next several years.

Tier 1 Internet service providers (ISPs), the organizations that host multimillion-hit Web sites and provide other ISPs with direct connectivity to the Internet backbone, are also not ready to risk the security and reliability of their services to make the switch from UNIX to NT for their backbone. At the same time, however, the leading providers are recognizing that both platforms have their own set of features and benefits and that customers want the opportunity to mix and match solutions based on the task at hand.

If you think you'll be adding mixed platform E-commerce activities to your Web site in the future, make certain that your ISP offers fully integrated UNIX/NT services, not just UNIX or NT services.

Integration, Not Migration

Network and database managers, as well as engineers prefer the flexibility and scalability of UNIX's conditional processing commands; but marketing, sales and human resource departments want the familiar GUIs (graphical user interfaces) that Windows provides. As a result, in a recent survey of large companies conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., Cambridge, Mass., 76 percent of the IT managers surveyed said that they will continue to buy both UNIX and NT well into the future. Only 24 percent plan to standardize on NT.

A growing number of businesses and Web site developers are showing a preference for Windows NT for site development, enhancement and updates, but still want the security of having their content delivered from UNIX-based systems.

Many companies have already gone beyond simply publishing marketing and sales information on their Web site and have re-engineered their business processes so they can be tightly integrated into an on-line solution. These organizations want to combine applications such as catalogs that have been developed on an NT platform with UNIX-based databases for handling on-line transaction capture and analysis.

This combination takes advantage of UNIX's superiority for very large projects and NT's ease-of-use features.

Of course, every time you add another environment, you add another layer of complexity. The easiest and most cost-effective way to handle the interoperability issues is to find an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that offers a fully integrated UNIX/NT solution. One that is transparent to the user but does not sacrifice security, availability or performance. A few Tier1 providers offer services designed to leverage the best features of both operating systems. Simply stated, they allow organizations to run UNIX applications in Windows NT environments and Windows NT applications in UNIX environments.

A solution that is integrated at the physical, network and system levels can tie the application server and database server tightly together over high-speed links for maximum performance. It also provides organizations with the flexibility of bringing additional machines and resources on-line without having to change any content.

Keep in mind that when new E-commerce capabilities are added to the system, more throughput and capacity is required. Fast, reliable access and security are two compelling reasons for outsourcing the hosting of your Web sites with a major ISP that offers direct connection to the Internet and a fault-tolerant infrastructure.

Fault-tolerant, Global Content Delivery

Because a secure Web site is absolutely essential for E-commerce activities, the sites are usually located outside the individual company's own network at a highly-reliable Web hosting facility. The secure commerce servers used by these facilities encrypt and authenticate transactions and messages sent over the Internet. This makes it easy to work interactively with a large number of constantly changing vendors, distributors, channel partners and customers.

In addition to offering secure, multi-platform support without the associated hardware, software or maintenance costs; a few ISPs are utilizing distributed file systems and intelligent load balancing to optimize the performance and availability of their customers' Web sites.

The new service options, which are available for Unix, NT and mixed Unix/NT platforms, utilize three key distribution technologies. Replication and local caching are used to improve site availability and speed delivery. Intelligent load balancing is used to match server capacity with demand; requests are transparently routed to the nearest, most responsive servers. With this type of fault-tolerant global content delivery infra-structure in place, Web site access requests can be transparently rerouted among geographically dispersed Web servers to balance site traffic loads and ensure that there is virtually no point of failure. It's business as usual, even when the server is down for maintenance.

Products that perform one or more of these tasks include IBM/Transarc's Distributed File System (DFS) for Windows, OS/2, Unix and IBM Mainframe platforms; Microsoft's Distributed COM for Windows NT 4.0 environments; and Sun's Network File System (NFS) for Unix and PC systems. All of these applications are readily available, however, it's more cost-effective and less time-consuming to simply select an ISP that provides and maintains them.

Plan for the Future

When businesses provide visitors with fast, reliable access to their site, it becomes a valuable tool for lowering the cost of doing business. For the price of a local phone call, Web-based E-commerce capabilities allow business partners around the globe to process purchase orders electron-ically, saving an estimated 80 percent over manual processes. Lower costs translate into higher profit margins.

With links to the electronic purchase orders, organizations can also reduce the processing time involved in invoicing. In addition, these links can be used to provide delivery schedules and gather valuable sales/usage data to improve marketing efforts and customer relationships.

In spite of the benefits E-commerce provides, most organizations are cautious about integrating the full range of capabilities all at once. Developing a plan and implementing the various electronic commerce applications in stages gives users the opportunity to master one capability before another is added.

The model for a successful business-to-business E-commerce plan includes more than schedules for implementing applications that allow customers, vendors and business partners to access vast amounts of current information and process transactions much faster than ever before. How that information is going to be captured and delivered should also be part of the plan.

According to Forrester Research's Business Trade & Technology Strategies, a research service that specializes in the analysis of business-to-business electronic commerce, getting a company's marketing and IT groups--non-traditional partners--to work together effectively is one of the hurdles in implementing E-commerce. Organizations are turning to mixed environments with NT and UNIX running side by side to resolve this issue and provide the interoperability they need for future business transactions on the Internet.

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Researched and developed for TCG CERFnet, Inc.