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Winter 1998
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Next time you're feeling snug and cosy, while the rain lashes the windows and the thermometer sinks to the kind of level you normally associate with polar bears, think of Vencel Resil. Because without its products, you would be feeling distinctly less comfortable. In fact, you'd be frozen to the marrow.
Vencel Resil is the UK's leading manufacturer of expanded polystyrene insulation for the construction industry, and a major supplier of polystyrene and plaster mouldings for the DIY market. And, like Douglas Adams' universe, it is big. Really big. Originally owned by the Dutch oil giant Shell, it has five factories, each linked to the Dartford HQ, which controls operations using a powerful Windows NT-based IT system running on an HP Netserver.
But this hasn't always been the case. In fact, until January 1998, the company had been running its main application suite under Reality on a MDIS 19150. But it was a system which, though having served the company well, was beginning to show its age.
"Although there were aspects of the system's performance which were becoming decidedly less than ideal," said Ken Winfield, Vencel Resil's IT manager, "it was the future which was our greatest concern. In order to maintain and develop our extremely high service levels to our customers, we felt we needed the ability to expand the system in whatever way the continual improvement of our business. We felt there was an inherent lack of such flexibility in a system based around proprietary software running on proprietary hardware."
In fact, with a growing network of PC users increasingly needing seamless access to legacy data, one of Ken Winfield's main requirements was desktop integration. To his mind, there was only one way forward: Windows NT.
But how? Not only did Winfield want to migrate to NT, he wanted to keep downtime and user re-training to an absolute minimum. Unfortunately, the apparent solution - new hardware and software - was likely to be very expensive both in terms of money and time. Conceding that there was little choice, he costed out the move.
But it was a budget destined never to be spent in anything like its entirety. At the eleventh hour, Ken Winfield noticed an advertisement for jBASE, making extravagant claims for the product's ability to migrate MultiValue-based applications to Win95, NT and UNIX extremely quickly and cost-effectively. Furthermore, it offered the enticing prospect of a significant performance increase.
After a visit from the UK team of jBASE Software, he was convinced - jBASE Software's track-record with, and knowledge of, Windows NT made him confident that jBASE was a viable way forward. And have the results vindicated his decision?
"The first thing which amazed us about jBASE was the speed of the migration process, which was completed in a single weekend. When we powered up on Monday morning, the system worked almost perfectly, and the one or two minor problems we had were resolved immediately by the jBASE technical team - the support was simply outstanding. The system works like a dream now, and we are seeing many major improvements," said Winfield.
Such as? "Well, for example, our day-end process, which would previously take anything up to about an hour and a quarter, now completes in less than 15 minutes. But speed improvements are really only a small part of the benefits of using jBASE. The real issue is flexibility. jBASE features middleware called OBjEX, which is not only an extremely powerful way of giving users of programs such as Word and Excel full and transparent access to central data, it is also extremely easy to implement. It is a major benefit to know that we can manage our business growth, while maintaining service levels, by developing the system as required - and with minimum fuss and expense."
So how would Winfield sum up his jBASE experience (so far)?
"Breathtaking, really," he said. "Using jBASE, I have managed to buy a new box, migrate quickly and easily to NT, preserve the skillset of my staff, implement legacy data, make my company future-proof, and buy user licences and consultancy - all for less than the maintenance cost alone of the old system. It's difficult to imagine how things could have been improved."
Last Updated: 22 December 1998