NT Innovators

No matter how technologically advanced a product is and no matter how much money a vendor spends marketing it, no product can be successful unless customers adopt it and use it in real-life situations. Deployment is the true mark of success for any product, including Windows NT. Therefore, in recognition of the customer's important role in determining the success or failure of a product, we are pleased to present the NT innovators­companies that have adopted NT-related technology and applied it to their real-life business problems in creative and innovative ways. The Windows NT Magazine editorial staff solicited the magazine's readership for nominees and selected the top NT innovators from the candidates submitted to our Web site.

AMERICAN CREDIT INDEMNITY
NT LAN/WAN, EDI, and a BackOffice Solution
Conversion from VAX and IBM mainframes to an all-Windows NT solution that relies entirely on the BackOffice suite, provides Internet-based EDI, and gives users universal desktop fax capability--yes, that sounds pretty innovative. As the oldest and largest business credit insurer in the US and Canada, American Credit Indemnity (ACI) needs to access, analyze, and communicate credit information quickly. Based in Baltimore, Maryland, ACI has a staff of field agents, credit specialists, and underwriters in 40 offices across the US and Canada.

To leverage the latest technology and provide the best customer service, ACI decided to convert its VAX host and VT320 terminals and IBM hosts and 3270 terminals to a client/server solution. In 1993, ACI began to re-architect the company's network backbone and started looking for a network operating system. Although ACI had some experience with Novell NetWare and Digital Equipment's PATHWORKS, because of ACI's future client/server plans and NT's total desktop functionality and integration, the company decided to go with NT.

In December 1993, ACI installed NT 3.1 and spent the next 18 months re-architecting the network and building a client/server system with no ties to the company's legacy mainframe applications for processing. Today, ACI is a total NT shop. ACI has more than 30 NT servers, 300 Windows 95 workstations, and 40 NT 4.0 workstations throughout the US and Canada. The entire NT backbone connects each site through a direct connection at the home office, via frame relay at the regional offices, or via dial-up connectivity with Remote Access Service (RAS).

ACI uses Microsoft's entire BackOffice solution. SNA Server 2.1 lets ACI use EDI to connect to Dun & Bradstreet's mainframe computers and deliver reports to ACI's underwriters while simultaneously storing the reports in ACI's SQL Server 6.5 database.

ACI relies on Systems Management Server (SMS) 1.2 for inventorying, remote Help desk, and software distribution. Microsoft Exchange 4.0 provides ACI with corporatewide messaging and public folder replication. ACI uses Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) 2.0 and a Raptor Systems Eagle NT firewall for Internet access. The company is in the process of implementing SQL Server and SNA Server EDI links to let its customers connect to its Web site and conduct business over the Internet with ACI's internal backbone.

To ensure that virtually every desktop in the enterprise can fax from the company's key software products (Word, Excel, Query Tools, and Exchange), ACI has taken an innovative approach. Omtool's Fax Sr. for NT 1.2.1 software examines the area code for the destination fax phone number and routes the fax over ACI's WAN to the geographically closest of nine fax servers. From there, the fax is sent as a local phone call. This approach lets ACI significantly save on long-distance charges and reduce paper handling. ACI can even schedule most faxes to go out at night to take advantage of low evening phone rates.

The same desktop faxing technology lets ACI automatically process hundreds of daily decision reports that the company previously printed in its data center, manually addressed, and faxed during the day. The new process, which ACI developed internally with the Omtool product, requires no human intervention. Now ACI can deliver reports to its policyholders first thing in the morning instead of late in the day.

BELL MOBILITY
CTI, Smart Terminals, and Clusters
For Bell Mobility of Toronto, Canada, innovation means designing a dramatic clustering solution based on Citrix's WinFrame (a multiuser implementation of Windows NT) and using computer telephone integration (CTI) to automatically access customer information. In the highly competitive world of cellular service, Bell Mobility is using NT to add features and service for its customers. The company runs advanced applications developed in PowerBuilder and Visual Basic (VB) in its Activations and Customer Service call centers. The Activations applications let Activation representatives transcribe incoming faxes, without ever touching paper, to establish cellular phone service for customers, and the Customer Service applications provide an interface for Customer Service representatives to view customer information. Advances in application design and increased demand for more robust applications led the company to consider a 32-bit platform, and Bell Mobility chose NT.

The company decided to move its Automatic Activation Processing System (AAPS) to NT in late 1995 to handle increased volume and alleviate stress on its systems and to provide a better platform for supporting additional software features. As part of its 32-bit solution, the company began using Citrix's WinFrame multiuser NT extensions for its corporate dial-in. Bell Mobility was concerned about WinFrame's ability to scale in a demanding environment, but the company was so impressed with the software's performance and robustness that it set up a trial WinFrame clustering solution for AAPS.

The company's application environment, which intermittently uses lots of processor cycles, was ideal for the WinFrame solution. Bell Mobility established scaleability by spreading its user base across additional WinFrame servers when the application load increased. Using Ghost Software's Ghost, Bell Mobility cloned and rolled out system drives on the multiple WinFrame servers. The company then used Octopus Technologies's Octopus to keep the application drives in synch and to distribute application updates in realtime.

One of the most noticeable benefits of the WinFrame solution has been the Help desk's ability to shadow the users. Now the Help desk can resolve many problems over the wire on the first call and minimize desktop visits.

Bell Mobility determined it can have 15 users per WinFrame server (Dual Pentium Pro HP Vectra XUs and Dell Optiplex GX Pros) with excellent performance. The Toronto center started with 7 WinFrame servers. Each had 256MB of RAM and a license for 25 users. To access a WinFrame server, a cluster controller finds the WinFrame server with the lightest load. The process is transparent to the user and works well, company representatives said.

Bell Mobility's applications are compute bound, so the company can use high-end desktop systems and apply more processor cycles per user with lower costs. To minimize downtime, the company performs a preemptive reboot at 2:00 a.m. daily. This approach helps ensure that if a WinFrame server goes down during the day, Bell Mobility loses only the 8 to 15 users on that particular server. With the cluster in place, the down server quickly ages out of the clustering browser table and the users can log straight back on to another WinFrame server.

Because of the initial success of the WinFrame project, Bell Mobility installed five additional WinFrame servers in its Montreal, Canada, Activations center and has just finished implementing a similar approach for its Customer Service call centers. Today, Bell Mobility's WinFrame configuration is completely clustered. The company has a production cluster of 32 WinFrame servers in Toronto and 22 in Montreal.