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Bandwidth and Taxes: Eide Bailly's New Gig
January 11, 1999

By Kelly Jackson Higgins Take a glimpse at the next wave of income-tax preparation: You log onto your accounting firm's extranet and run a program there to fill in your information; then, your accountant imports your information into his or her tax application. Accounting and consulting firm Eide Bailly is considering offering its clients this service within the next year or two. Eide Bailly has in place a new gigabit-speed campus backbone at its main location in Fargo, N.D.; eventually, it will host this secured extranet Web server.

"This is going to be one way you can do tax returns," says David Stone, IS manager for Eide Bailly, who says some clients still will choose a face-to-face tax consultation. "Web-enabling the tax organizer form is a way we can streamline the tax-preparation process."

Today, Eide Bailly runs its tax-processing and auditing applications over the new switched Ethernet network in Fargo, and its other eight sites run the applications locally on NetWare 4.11 servers. These sites access the Fargo gigabit network via an MCI frame relay voice and data WAN service for e-mail, intranet access and other corporate applications.

With tax season now under way, Eide Bailly may get the chance to truly flex its gigabit network muscle. The firm will add 20 new employees to bulk up for its busiest season--January through May. That could really test the gigabit pipe. "We really won't know until March or so, when we have our heaviest usage," Stone says.

One of the main benefits of the faster network has been more headroom for upgrades. Stone and his staff just finished a round of software updates prior to the 1998 winter holidays, before the tax-season rush; the next wave of applications Eide Bailly plans to run over its gigabit backbone is on-demand video for training in areas such as tax law and professional development.

But the faster network also uncovered problems with one of the firm's older applications, Hard Disk Copy, its shareware "cloning" software that lets users transmit a copy of an entire workstation's software configuration to another workstation. When network technicians began creating image files of the workstations and distributing them around the network, user calls began coming in.

"The application started flooding the network card on the server," says Stone, who is now looking at other cloning packages. "Then it causes a resend of the information, which compounds the problem."

Meanwhile, Eide Bailly is planning for future growth of its backbone. Its 10/100 3Com SuperStack 3900 switches push all traffic through the gigabit-speed 3Com SuperStack 9300. Today's stackables likely will be pushed to Eide Bailly's smaller offices as it continues its expansion.

"Hardware never dies in our organization," Stone says. "If it works, it gets used somewhere. Our 100-Mbps SuperStack 3900 switches could go down to our smaller offices as their core solution."