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Squeezing Profits from E-Grapes

World-renowned Portuguese wine master Anthony Romao has recently expanded his company, Romao Vineyards, through the acquisition of several smaller wine producers in Northern California. To consolidate the growing concern's operations, and to leverage the Internet's e-commerce potential, Romao is seeking an e-business solution that will streamline the company's distributed sales, marketing and warehousing operations, and connect the company to prospective customers via the Web. Preferring to outsource some applications to a capable Web hosting provider, Romao Vineyards issued an RFI to identify a qualified managed Web hosting service vendor that could support the company's e-business initiative.

In the Romao scenario, corporate accounting and financial reporting will continue to be hosted on a legacy IBM AS/400 system at the company's headquarters, in Santa Barbara, Calif. However, the company's bottling, distribution, sales and marketing operations will continue to be divided between bicoastal operations centers (called hubs), in Los Olivos, Calif., and Long Island, New York.

Romao Vineyards wants to customize and deploy Hewlett-Packard's Total-e-Server software solution at two fully mirrored hosting centers. The application will be tailored to meet Romao's needs for coordinated logistics management, inventory control, order fulfillment, sales-force automation, Web-based order taking and credit-card processing. The customized application modules will leverage an Oracle 9i database deployed at each hosting center and synchronized between the two sites.

Romao Vineyards has a mixture of content-oriented and transaction-oriented replication requirements. The company wishes to retain a hosting provider with data centers near each hub site. Content, such as product information, should be replicated between the sites to ensure the fastest possible access by customers and internal personnel, based on their locations. Transaction records pertaining to orders must also be replicated at both sites. The databases at each site must be current to within 30 minutes of each other. Both sites should provide connections to the financial back-end system at company headquarters.

Anthony Romao is concerned about data integrity, security and service quality. Ideally, he wants to have remote-console access to security monitoring tools used by the Web hosting vendor or to deploy his own system to monitor for potential intrusions. He also wants remote-console access to the hosting vendor's application, platform- and network-management and monitoring tools, and to enlist a third-party monitoring service, such as NetMechanic, InternetSeer or Big Brother, to ensure that the performance of the service vendor conforms to SLA (service-level agreement) specifications. To address concerns about the potential for hosting service "overbooking," Romao seeks a concise description of resources -- both technology and personnel -- dedicated to his company's needs.