Re: E-commerce Architecture

Bill,

In a message dated 1/26/00 9:51:28 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
breger@levitz.com writes:

> Our plans for e-commerce are to outsource the development and hosting of our
>  web site to a third-party firm.  This will allow our inhouse staff to
>  concentrate on handling the interface data going to and from the web site,
>  and to develop and run the  backend transaction processing on our AS/400's.
<<snip>>
>  Any feedback (positive and negative!) about this approach would be
>  appreciated, since I feel that we must architect our e-commerce application
>  correctly.  Any other approaches that might be better would be appreciated
>  also.

If you have ensured that your "third party" has a track record, sounds like a 
good plan.  If your "third party" does not have a track record, it can still 
be a good plan as long as they are either willing to prototype with your 
anticipated traffic or put certain monetary guarantees in place.

Your <<snipped>> ideas of using either data queues or MQSeries are also good, 
but be aware of the data space limitations of MQSeries and how slow it runs 
using persistence should a long-term outage occur.  To me, data queues sound 
better than 16Mb user spaces.

IMO, the _ONE_ thing that your e-commerce approach is missing is the same 
thing that most of them are -- real time ATP (available to promise).  Yes, 
you want to maximize speed to prevent surfing to competitor sites.  But do 
you want to end up like "Toys R Us" (or my winery >8(, for that matter) and 
have to call the client before a critical date about non-delivery when you 
could have done so on line?  Actually, my winery called on the due date and 
_STILL_ said the package I have yet to see would arrive on time, despite a 30 
day advance order.  Will _ANY_ of those "Toys R Us" clients do business over 
the web with critical delivery dates _EVER_ again?  I doubt it -- I know I 
won't be doing so with my winery any time soon...

JMHO,

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"A friend is a lot of things, but a critic he isn't." -- Bern Williams
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