Upcoming Events

Interop is the only event to give you a comprehensive and unbiased understanding of all the latest innovations—including cloud computing, virtualization, security, mobility and data center advances—that help position your company for growth.

Register Now!

Intranet-a-Brewing at John Harvard's Restaurant
March 8, 1999

Adobe Acrobat

For the full
Centerfold graphic.

Other Centerfolds

A Complete Guide to Network Computing's Centerfold articles.

Company Directory

Browse our directory to get data, starting with a particular company.

Reader Service

Allows you to request additional product information from our advertisers.

Print The Full Article

Click

Here

E-mail this URL

Click

Here

Buy the Book

By Kelly Jackson Higgins When the master brewer at a John Harvard's Brew House restaurant taps out his inventory, he orders and pays for more hops and barley. The sales and expense data from the restaurant's beer-making operation is processed and stored locally in a Windows NT server until the wee hours of the morning, when the chain's third-party data center pulls that data into its database in Danvers, Mass.

But John Harvard's may replace that dial-up method of polling its 14 restaurants with an Internet-based transport that links the restaurants, its Boston corporate offices and its data center at Restaurant Consulting Services (RCS), the outsourcing company that runs John Harvard's data center as well as those for larger restaurant chains, such as Planet Hollywood and Champs. Then John Harvard's would enjoy a faster, more uniform network for polling its restaurants, too.

"Ideally, we would like the stores to call into an intranet for daily sales and payroll applications and for corporate to transfer data to the restaurants," says Mike Wilson, director of IS for John Harvard's.

The sticking point with an Internet approach is security. "We're going to be transferring payroll and personnel data, which is our biggest concern," says Wilson. He adds that sales data isn't as sensitive because it's harder to keep such information under wraps in the close-knit restaurant industry. John Harvard's would install firewalls and extra encryption if it goes intranet.

Today, RCS dials up and polls the restaurants after-hours to pluck ordering and payment data for beer ingredients, foodstuffs and other items, and John Harvard's IS department uses Sterling Commerce RemoteWare polling software to grab sales and payroll data and e-mail. "The restaurants handle their daily sales, process all invoices and accounts payable, and we pull it here to the corporate systems where the checks are cut," Wilson says. The polling software allows John Harvard's to schedule and automate the "Hoovering" of the data and includes e-mail and electronic applications for the restaurants.

Once the restaurants' sales and other data resides safely at the RCS data center, John Harvard's can access that data via a T1 connection. Third-party data centers like RCS will likely become the norm for restaurant chains that prefer to handle mainly network and systems support, and outsource the management of the databases and other applications. "It's a no-brainer for us to play off RCS' expertise," Wilson says. "It wouldn't be feasible to bring in-house the expertise they have."

Going with the Internet as a transport would mean porting the RemoteWare polling application to an NT server, says Wilson, who adds that the chain won't drop its T1 connection to RCS. RCS today also provides Internet mail service and home-office Internet access for John Harvard's, and would be a candidate for John Harvard's intranet service, too, Wilson says.

Research and Reports