Abivia Web Development and Hosting

The Challenge

Ashton Green is a well known supplier of cooking tools and kitchenware. Originally in the mail order business, the company operated from a remote location where high speed wired Internet connections were not available. Their high speed wireless link took so long to make a connection it was impossible to host the web site in the same facility while delivering an acceptable user experience.

The company's order processing systems ran on an IBM AS/400 Midrange computer. Moving the AS/400 to a central hosting facility would improve Web site performance but this would transfer the connection problems to daily operations, causing much more serious issues.

In order to meet the company's customer service expectations, the Web site and the AS/400 needed to be able to interact with each other while still providing customers with fast response.

The Solution

Implement an Abivia NDEA three tier architecture:

• Host the web site on a low-cost shared hosting plan in a well connected data centre to guarantee responsiveness.
• Place an application server at the Ashton Green office that provides application services to the web site.
• Use a publication model to allow the back office to update the product catalogue and pricing on demand.

The storefront web site minimized the number of interactions over the wireless network by sending complex transactions to the application server instead of accessing the AS/400 databases directly.

The Technology

The company's budget precluded the implementation of typical commercial enterprise server technologies. Abivia implemented a lightweight, XML based server using open source technologies (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

The Results

• Order processing times cut from an unacceptable 2 to 3 minutes to an average of less than 20 seconds.
• More than 40% of the company's business came through the web site.
• Cost savings were realized through the elimination of the company's printed annual catalogue.
• Costs of deployment were a fraction of typical application server configurations.

The Abivia solution served Ashton Green for five years. In 2008, the company was sold to a larger retailing group. Operations were consolodated, eliminating the AS/400 and allowing the web site to be transferred to a simplified shopping cart system.

For more information on Abivia's enterprise e-commerce solutions, please contact us.