CASE STUDY: TIE KINETIX
Cost-effective, efficient delivery of software to multiple devices
INDUSTRY
e-commerce software
WEBSITE
tiekinetix.com
SOLUTION
SourcePro
“We’ve been using SourcePro for more
than 10 years and would not be able
to support multiple platforms and
databases without it. As the market
changes and our customers ask for
new platforms, Rogue Wave always
has the libraries we need and we
never have to worry because we just
know they’ll work.”
Bob Dixon, manager, software
development, TIE Kinetix
TIE Kinetix is a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce
software that bridges the gap between online and traditional business,
enabling companies of all sizes to automate the exchange of business
information electronically. TIE Kinetix delivers a powerful electronic framework
for business collaboration with software solutions for business-to-business
integration, master data management, supply chain collaboration, digital
channel communications, financial reporting, and analytics. With over two
decades of experience in e-commerce, TIE Kinetix remains a key contributor
to the development and implementation of global e-business standards.
More platforms and databases without more development resources
TIE Kinetix eVision software is a component of the TIE Kinetix Platform, a
comprehensive software platform that stretches the limits of electronic
business collaboration. eVision provides advanced workflow, transaction, and
data transformation management and is scalable for medium to large
companies. Its powerful EDI/XML translation engine coupled with TIE
Integrator’s data integration functionality enables greater collaboration
between trading partners in the supply chain by enabling data to be exchanged
in any format and by providing a fully automated and integrated system.
To help expand the market for TIE eVision software, TIE Kinetix wanted to give
its customers the choice to deploy eVision on multiple different database,
hardware, and operating system environments.
In addition to their need to support multiple platforms and databases,
TIE Kinetix also had other important requirements. Improving developer
productivity was a key reason for choosing Rogue Wave SourcePro. TIE Kinetix
needed to be able to quickly develop portable versions of eVision in order
to keep pace with the rapidly changing B2B e-commerce software market.
And they wanted to deliver new product advancements without having to
increase the size of their development team. Secondly, eVision supports EDI
transactions in some very large mission-critical deployments, making high
performance and high reliability critical to the product’s success.
By utilizing Rogue Wave SourcePro, TIE Kinetix has saved a lot of time and
cost in supporting and migrating to new platforms and databases. The libraries
insulate eVision code from the details of the platforms and databases, thus
enabling much greater developer productivity and keeping developers focused
on application features that add value to TIE Kinetix customers.
“When estimating the time and cost
of a software update such as adding
two new fields to the database, we
could estimate it for a single platform
and database and not have to
multiply by seven to support all the
other platforms. A simple recompile
for each of the other environments
would generally be sufficient. This
allowed us to continue to advance
our product with a relatively small
team of developers.”
Bob Dixon, manager, software
development, TIE Kinetix
The libraries also help TIE Kinetix react more quickly to their customer needs.
When customers began asking for support for HP Itanium and Solaris on AMD
Opteron platforms, Rogue Wave already supported those platforms, so it was
simply a matter of using the new SourcePro libraries. TIE eVision was ported to
the new platforms in a matter of weeks and ongoing support costs remained
virtually unchanged. Similar results have been achieved when supporting new
database versions or additional database choices for a specific platform.
Today eVision is available on four different types of UNIX platforms and five
different types of Microsoft operating systems. Customers can run Oracle,
DB2, or SQL databases on various combinations of these platforms. This would
have been very difficult to achieve without SourcePro. TIE Kinetix estimates
that they would have needed additional development resources on their
project team if they had tried to support this many platforms and databases
without SourcePro.
High performance and extreme reliability
TIE eVision is a mature product that has a regular release schedule in which
parts of the code are updated and other parts remain unchanged. Having
highly reliable libraries from Rogue Wave helps improve quality by reducing the
number of lines of code that TIE Kinetix must maintain. TIE Kinetix developers
can focus on the application business logic and they can rely on Rogue Wave to
deliver the reliability for the code that is specific to each platform or database.
The SourcePro libraries have been proven across a large install base. “Simply
put, the Rogue Wave libraries just work,” said Bob Dixon, manager of software
development at TIE Kinetix.
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GERMANY
UK
JAPAN
800-487-3217
+33 (0) 1 46 93 94 20
+49 (0) 6103 5934 0
+44 (0) 8450 549950
+81 (0) 3 5211 7760
www.roguewave.com
© 2015 Rogue Wave Software, Inc. All Rights
Reserved
Rogue Wave provides software development
tools for mission-critical applications. Our
trusted solutions address the growing
complexity of building great software and
accelerates the value gained from code across
the enterprise. The Rogue Wave portfolio of
complementary, cross-platform tools helps
developers quickly build applications for
strategic software initiatives. With Rogue Wave,
customers improve software quality and ensure
code integrity, while shortening development
cycle times.
In the rare instances when TIE Kinetix has utilized Rogue Wave Software support
services, they’ve received very timely and helpful responses. “The Rogue Wave
support team even helped us track down a problem that was in one of the
databases,” said Bob Dixon. “We don’t reach out for support often, but when
we do, we get the help we need.”
There are also performance advantages to using SourcePro. The libraries are
written by experts and have been closely scrutinized to squeeze out every
possible performance gain. In addition, the libraries help simplify development
and make it easier to optimize the code for specific deployment configurations.
In some cases, significant performance gains of up to tenfold have been achieved
by replacing legacy code with code that uses the Rogue Wave libraries to more
efficiently manage database queries using SQL.
TIE Kinetix has been able to support multiple platforms and databases without
the traditional costs and risks associated with performing all of the work
in-house. TIE Kinetix customers have benefited by getting high performance
and reliability as well.