IBM's SPCs Help Partners Go

San Francisco-based Evant was working on a deal to deploy an Internet-based, end-to-end management system for retail transactions using IBM technology on the back end, said CEO Rob Feuerman and Vice President Jack Harbaugh.

Evant's solution, the EM3 Multichannel Merchandise Management System, however, was built on Sun Microsystems and Oracle technology. The retailer requested a proof of concept on IBM software and hardware to make sure Evant's solution would work on another vendor's platform.

Although the customer did not make the proof of concept a mandatory requirement for the engagement, Feuerman said he wanted to port Evant's solution to IBM technology to go the extra mile and secure Evant's reputation for customer service.

"We recognized it was important to accommodate the request as a young company," he said.

The only problem was that Evant, a small ISV, didn't have the facilities or the technology readily available to handle such a complicated endeavor, Harbaugh said. "Given that the customer was a large retailer, we didn't have those types of resources," he said.

Enter IBM's San Mateo SPC, which is led by IBM Manager Rob Guara. The center, one of 17 worldwide and IBM's first such facility, gives ISV partners such as Evant access to large servers and other IBM technology on which they can build, test and deploy applications before running the solutions on their customers' systems.

Feuerman said Evant contacted the SPC and within 10 days received IBM equipment on which to begin the porting process. That took 90 days to complete, six weeks of which were spent working at the SPC, he said.

Evant engineers also took advantage of the VPN used to link other IBM facilities to the San Mateo SPC. For example, Evant engineers in San Mateo worked remotely with research and development engineers in an IBM office in Texas to learn more about how Java uses memory to help the Evant technicians make necessary adjustments to the solution, Feuerman said.

Guara, who has been at the San Mateo SPC for two of its seven years, said the SPCs have always been part of IBM's strategy to enable ISV partners and developers to use IBM technology to better deploy solutions on IBM products.

While the centers were originally opened to help ISVs use IBM's Unix-based AIX platform, the SPCs now give developers access to a wide range of IBM technology, including WebSphere software products, a variety of servers and DB2.

"To bring a solution to market requires all of these elements," Guara said.

Another ISV partner using the San Mateo SPC, jNETx, is leveraging IBM's telecom configuration of its WebSphere Application Server to provide a services platform to bridge the gap between IT and telecom networks, said Steve Lasko, director of operations at jNETx, Dallas.

jNETx is learning to scale a variety of packaged applications that it plans to roll out as part of a co-branding effort with IBM, Lasko said.

"We need to know what kind of processing power we need," he said.

Apparently, the investment IBM has made in the SPCs is paying off for both the vendor and its partners. In Evant's case, the retail customer, upon seeing Evant's proof of concept, decided to add even more IBM products to its current IBM-based network.

Harbaugh said Evant also expects to reap benefits from using the SPC for the project.

"The credibility we were able to gain from this is going to pay dividends not just for this opportunity," Harbaugh said. "We'll also be able to leverage this deal for future opportunities for both Evant and IBM."