IBM Honors eOneGroup

There's no better illustration of the success Linux business partnering can bring than to look at the winner in the "Hot Linux Solution" category of this year's IBM PartnerWorld Beacon Awards. (For the record, yours truly was a judge in that category.)

The honoree, eOneGroup, an IBM business partner based in Omaha, Neb., has built an expanding operation around eOneCommerce. The e-business application has been used to deploy customized e-commerce Web sites for high-profile customers, such as Tommy Hilfiger and Omaha Steaks.

"It's a 100 percent Java application that centers around CRM, including customer service and taking orders," explains Dan Watson, co-founder of eOneGroup.

Built in Java, eOneCommerce sits atop IBM's WebSphere Application Server, running under Linux. "We use XML front and back--in the presentation layer and in the application-programming interface--and we use Java for the application," Watson says.

IBM's DB2 Universal Database is used as the repository of catalog and customer information. Deploying the solution so that it's ready to handle mission-critical order processing at customer sites requires about 20 percent worth of custom work to the application.

"The customization is usually centered around how we access and present the data for a customer's particular implementation," Watson explains. "With XML tagging for the presentation, the way our architecture is, we can implement functionality in pages without doing any coding."

Additional tweaking can be handled by assembling JavaBeans together and putting a graphic design on top.

While Linux isn't necessarily what sells customers on the application, the stability of the underlying operating system is critically important to eOneGroup's success stories. "Most of our customers are running Linux, and the reason they are is because we recommended it," he says.

For some other solution providers, perhaps the biggest lesson eOneGroup's experiences provide is how to leverage past accomplishments into future marketing achievements. "It's called reference selling," Watson explains. "When we did our presentation to Pure Fishing, we brought up Tommy Hilfiger and showed them what we did from an order-entry, tracking and customer-service standpoint. They said, 'That's exactly what we're looking for.'"

The upshot was that Pure Fishing, a 1,400-employee supplier of tackle based in Spirit Lake, Iowa, signed up eOneGroup to set up an extranet to enable its dealers to go online and buy bait, rods and reels.

To expand his business horizons even further, Watson is hoping to connect with other IBM business partners.

"Our go-to-market strategy is to find partners in local geographies that can come in and help us generate leads," he says. "They can do all the hardware and wiring and get a commission from IBM. We get licensing revenue and a customer. We're all happy."