Developing and deploying a Web service-connected information technology (IT) architecture is no small task. To that end, the Microsoft .NET Framework provides what a business might need: smart clients, servers to host Web services, the development tools and applications to create and use them, and a global network of over 35,000 Microsoft Certified Partner organizations to provide help for users.
Part Four of the series Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement.
For a general discussion of the evolution of system architecture, see Architecture Evolution: From Mainframes to Service-oriented Architecture. For a definition of how the Microsoft .NET environment addresses the situation, see Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement.
Example One: Intuitive Manufacturing Systems
The first example of a .NET-managed product is Intuitive Manufacturing Systems, a Kirkland, Washington (US)-based provider of extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and midsize discrete manufacturers (Intuitive Manufacturing Systems Shows Maturity in Adolescent Age). The company was recently acquired by ravenous (lately, anyway) fellow mid-market vendor Made2Manage Systems (see Made2Manage Systems One Year After: Reenergized and Growing). Intuitive's .NET technological prowess was cited as one of major attraction points, given that most of Made2Manage's ERP product lines were (at best) somewhere between the .NET-compatible and .NET-enabled evolutionary steps at the time.
Intuitive recently announced the milestone release of Intuitive ERP 8.0, which represents the completion of a major rewrite of Intuitive ERP functionality using .NET-managed code, which started a few years ago. With this release, all major manufacturing processes have been converted to the new architecture. Additionally, several areas of new functionality are now offered in Intuitive ERP 8.0, including new engineering change order (ECO) processes to support new product introduction (NPI) as well as engineering change requests (ECR) to facilitate getting improved product to market faster.
There are also approved supplier tools designed sppecifically for the growing contract manufacturing industry, which replace the commonly used but inefficient and mistake-prone spreadsheets. Last but not least, to support the demand-driven supply chain, material and capacity requirements planning runs now typically take minutes, eliminating those traditional long planning runs, and thus allowing on-demand planning. Version 8.0 was available to new customers in May 2006, and existing customers will be able to upgrade to Version 8.1, (scheduled for late 2006), when the migration tools should be available.
One should note that Web services are created naturally as a by-product of .NET-managed software, although they are also created naturally as a by-product of the Progress OpenEdge .NET support in, for example, Epicor Vantage (which has not been completely rewritten in pure .NET-managed code). To that end, Intuitive has componentized the business logic into granular .NET objects, whereby all transactions occur in extensible markup language (XML). This means, for one thing, that at Intuitive a Web service is different than elsewhere: many other mid-market vendors have chosen to add "wrappers" to whole legacy applications (such as customer resource management [CRM] or purchasing) , and advertise the ability of these applications to run on an ERP backbone as a composite application or service-oriented architecture (SOA). Some market research surveys show that although this may play well to complex and diverse tier one environments, the concept will not necessarily be embraced by mid-market manufacturers with more homogenous software platforms. Instead, Intuitive has worked hard to split up its applications into usable pieces of functionality that make business sense.
In fact, Web services is simply a "neat" technology until it is actually used. Applying this concept to the demand-driven supply chain, a real-world example of a granular business application is the available-to-promise (ATP) or capable-to-promise (CTP) Web service available in Intuitive ERP 8.0. To make it even more valuable, an Intuitive ERP user will be able to provide key customers with access to the ATP and CTP Web services through Microsoft Office Outlook (with the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2007) for what-if planning scenarios, thus providing practical supply chain collaboration in real time. Supply chain partners will be able to make decisions quickly based on delivery dates and quantities from current production or stock (using ATP) and from new production plans (using CTP) without having to wait for a return call or e-mail.
Furthermore, the source of a transaction remains transparent in the innovative Intuitive Framework. In other words, whether the transaction comes from Intuitive ERP users who are interactively entering it on their computer, or from the outside world (as a Web service), the framework uses a single set of business logic. This should eliminate the gamut of problems that traditionally exist in other applications, where duplicate sets of code are required for different sources of transaction requests and data. Web services technology is still fairly young, and not as robust as it needs to be to fulfill its promise, and .NET-managed makes it easier to write, deploy, and consume Web services. Unfortunately, many of the other huge benefits of the .NET-managed environment (such as coherence of an integrated environment) are getting drowned out in all the ongoing hype surrounding Web services and SOA.
Another provider of an ERP solution that uses .NET Framework-based SOA and .NET-managed code is Andover, Massachusetts (US)-based Visibility Corporation. Since 1980, its suite VISIBILITY has been used by about 150 manufacturers of engineered products, and by other companies with project-oriented concerns. Now in its seventh generation, with the product dubbed VISIBILITY.net, the company elected to forego the use of wrappers to deliver .NET Framework-based functionality. To that end, the vendor has invested the last four years performing a complete conversion of the core client/server-based application to make use of a pure .NET-managed code architecture enabled via the use of Web services and Active Server Page (ASP).NET forms. The approach used here has provided clients with a true zero-footprint client for deployment, where no component other than a browser is required on the client workstation.
The benefits of the approach used in the VISIBILITY.net application are multiple, including a significant reduction in the amount of code required to deliver the more than 1,000 new distinct functions; a reported threefold to fourfold increase in transaction performance and associated scalability; and a reduction in the cost of deployment and management, as the application can be run by any client capable of running Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) v5.5 SP2 or later as its browser. By abstracting the application model to make use of managed code and Web services, which distinctly deploy the form, business logic, and data connection layers, Visibility has reportedly gained ability in affecting database independence, improved run time performance, and application extensibility in relation to other applications which make use of a well-formed SOA.
Example Three: Epicor for Service Enterprises
The last example of a Microsoft-only stack product containing pure .NET-managed code and "militantly" componentized Web services, is Epicor for Service Enterprises, a brand new enterprise service automation (ESA) solution. This product aims at providing a single source for managing and automating most aspects of the project-focused organization. The product is written completely in .NET-managed code, and on the very latest Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, VS.NET 2005, and Web services. To be precise, the latest version (8.1.1), which became generally available just a few weeks ago, runs on SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework 1.1 and VS.NET 2003. Certification for the move to .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005 is in progress, and is expected to become available in the next few months along with Microsoft Project 2007 support as part of Epicor's commitment to support the latest Microsoft stack at all times. In any case, this application did take several years to write from scratch (the initial release was in June 2003, and currently has more than 70 customers and 25,000 seats) and, contrary to its brethren within Epicor, is limited to only Microsoft technology because of the approach—but it also has the benefits of .NET as mentioned above.
Furthermore, the product is backed up by the Epicor Internet Component Environment (ICE), which is a standards-based framework written with Microsoft VS.NET and running on top of the Microsoft .NET Framework. It offers an application development environment (customization and extensibility tools for assembly, deployment, execution, and maintenance of applications) with a feature-rich (albeit thin client) user interface (UI), and pure web access to clients. Using Web services for nearly all application logic, Epicor ICE provides a detachable and vastly configurable UI that is simple to deploy and easy to maintain.
Part Four of the series Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement.
For a general discussion of the evolution of system architecture, see Architecture Evolution: From Mainframes to Service-oriented Architecture. For a definition of how the Microsoft .NET environment addresses the situation, see Subtle (or Not-so-subtle) Nuances of Microsoft .NET Enablement.
Example One: Intuitive Manufacturing Systems
The first example of a .NET-managed product is Intuitive Manufacturing Systems, a Kirkland, Washington (US)-based provider of extended enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions for small and midsize discrete manufacturers (Intuitive Manufacturing Systems Shows Maturity in Adolescent Age). The company was recently acquired by ravenous (lately, anyway) fellow mid-market vendor Made2Manage Systems (see Made2Manage Systems One Year After: Reenergized and Growing). Intuitive's .NET technological prowess was cited as one of major attraction points, given that most of Made2Manage's ERP product lines were (at best) somewhere between the .NET-compatible and .NET-enabled evolutionary steps at the time.
Intuitive recently announced the milestone release of Intuitive ERP 8.0, which represents the completion of a major rewrite of Intuitive ERP functionality using .NET-managed code, which started a few years ago. With this release, all major manufacturing processes have been converted to the new architecture. Additionally, several areas of new functionality are now offered in Intuitive ERP 8.0, including new engineering change order (ECO) processes to support new product introduction (NPI) as well as engineering change requests (ECR) to facilitate getting improved product to market faster.
There are also approved supplier tools designed sppecifically for the growing contract manufacturing industry, which replace the commonly used but inefficient and mistake-prone spreadsheets. Last but not least, to support the demand-driven supply chain, material and capacity requirements planning runs now typically take minutes, eliminating those traditional long planning runs, and thus allowing on-demand planning. Version 8.0 was available to new customers in May 2006, and existing customers will be able to upgrade to Version 8.1, (scheduled for late 2006), when the migration tools should be available.
One should note that Web services are created naturally as a by-product of .NET-managed software, although they are also created naturally as a by-product of the Progress OpenEdge .NET support in, for example, Epicor Vantage (which has not been completely rewritten in pure .NET-managed code). To that end, Intuitive has componentized the business logic into granular .NET objects, whereby all transactions occur in extensible markup language (XML). This means, for one thing, that at Intuitive a Web service is different than elsewhere: many other mid-market vendors have chosen to add "wrappers" to whole legacy applications (such as customer resource management [CRM] or purchasing) , and advertise the ability of these applications to run on an ERP backbone as a composite application or service-oriented architecture (SOA). Some market research surveys show that although this may play well to complex and diverse tier one environments, the concept will not necessarily be embraced by mid-market manufacturers with more homogenous software platforms. Instead, Intuitive has worked hard to split up its applications into usable pieces of functionality that make business sense.
In fact, Web services is simply a "neat" technology until it is actually used. Applying this concept to the demand-driven supply chain, a real-world example of a granular business application is the available-to-promise (ATP) or capable-to-promise (CTP) Web service available in Intuitive ERP 8.0. To make it even more valuable, an Intuitive ERP user will be able to provide key customers with access to the ATP and CTP Web services through Microsoft Office Outlook (with the upcoming release of Microsoft Office 2007) for what-if planning scenarios, thus providing practical supply chain collaboration in real time. Supply chain partners will be able to make decisions quickly based on delivery dates and quantities from current production or stock (using ATP) and from new production plans (using CTP) without having to wait for a return call or e-mail.
Furthermore, the source of a transaction remains transparent in the innovative Intuitive Framework. In other words, whether the transaction comes from Intuitive ERP users who are interactively entering it on their computer, or from the outside world (as a Web service), the framework uses a single set of business logic. This should eliminate the gamut of problems that traditionally exist in other applications, where duplicate sets of code are required for different sources of transaction requests and data. Web services technology is still fairly young, and not as robust as it needs to be to fulfill its promise, and .NET-managed makes it easier to write, deploy, and consume Web services. Unfortunately, many of the other huge benefits of the .NET-managed environment (such as coherence of an integrated environment) are getting drowned out in all the ongoing hype surrounding Web services and SOA.
Another provider of an ERP solution that uses .NET Framework-based SOA and .NET-managed code is Andover, Massachusetts (US)-based Visibility Corporation. Since 1980, its suite VISIBILITY has been used by about 150 manufacturers of engineered products, and by other companies with project-oriented concerns. Now in its seventh generation, with the product dubbed VISIBILITY.net, the company elected to forego the use of wrappers to deliver .NET Framework-based functionality. To that end, the vendor has invested the last four years performing a complete conversion of the core client/server-based application to make use of a pure .NET-managed code architecture enabled via the use of Web services and Active Server Page (ASP).NET forms. The approach used here has provided clients with a true zero-footprint client for deployment, where no component other than a browser is required on the client workstation.
The benefits of the approach used in the VISIBILITY.net application are multiple, including a significant reduction in the amount of code required to deliver the more than 1,000 new distinct functions; a reported threefold to fourfold increase in transaction performance and associated scalability; and a reduction in the cost of deployment and management, as the application can be run by any client capable of running Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) v5.5 SP2 or later as its browser. By abstracting the application model to make use of managed code and Web services, which distinctly deploy the form, business logic, and data connection layers, Visibility has reportedly gained ability in affecting database independence, improved run time performance, and application extensibility in relation to other applications which make use of a well-formed SOA.
Example Three: Epicor for Service Enterprises
The last example of a Microsoft-only stack product containing pure .NET-managed code and "militantly" componentized Web services, is Epicor for Service Enterprises, a brand new enterprise service automation (ESA) solution. This product aims at providing a single source for managing and automating most aspects of the project-focused organization. The product is written completely in .NET-managed code, and on the very latest Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, VS.NET 2005, and Web services. To be precise, the latest version (8.1.1), which became generally available just a few weeks ago, runs on SQL Server 2005, .NET Framework 1.1 and VS.NET 2003. Certification for the move to .NET 2.0 and VS.NET 2005 is in progress, and is expected to become available in the next few months along with Microsoft Project 2007 support as part of Epicor's commitment to support the latest Microsoft stack at all times. In any case, this application did take several years to write from scratch (the initial release was in June 2003, and currently has more than 70 customers and 25,000 seats) and, contrary to its brethren within Epicor, is limited to only Microsoft technology because of the approach—but it also has the benefits of .NET as mentioned above.
Furthermore, the product is backed up by the Epicor Internet Component Environment (ICE), which is a standards-based framework written with Microsoft VS.NET and running on top of the Microsoft .NET Framework. It offers an application development environment (customization and extensibility tools for assembly, deployment, execution, and maintenance of applications) with a feature-rich (albeit thin client) user interface (UI), and pure web access to clients. Using Web services for nearly all application logic, Epicor ICE provides a detachable and vastly configurable UI that is simple to deploy and easy to maintain.
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