Cost-Effective, Efficient Delivery of Software to Multiple Devices With SourcePro
TIE Kinetix is a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce 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 ecommerce, TIE Kinetix remains a key contributor to the development and implementation of global e-business standards.
SourcePro Helped Them
Improve Developer Productivity
Save Time and Lower Cost of Migrations
Increase Performance of Legacy Apps
to support multiple platforms and databases without it. As the market changes and our customers ask for new platforms, SourcePro always has the libraries we need and we never have to worry because we just know they’ll work.”
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 databases, 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 SourcePro. TIE Kinetix needed to be able to quickly develop portable versions of eVision in order to keep pace with the rapidly changing B2B ecommerce 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 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, SourcePro already supported those platforms, so it was simply a matter of using the new 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 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 Perforce 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 SourcePro libraries just work,” said Bob Dixon, manager of software development at TIE Kinetix.
In the rare instances when TIE Kinetix has utilized Perforce support services, they’ve received very timely and helpful responses. “The 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 SourcePro 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.
Build Once, Deploy Anywhere
SourcePro C++ libraries provide the fundamental building blocks for your applications. With SourcePro, you write your code once and deploy it on any platform. This helps you reduce time-to-market, increase reliability, and extend the life of your applications.