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Achieving a dominant market position has been a considerable
challenge for Mercury Communications, the United Kingdom's
second largest telecommunications company.
As in most organizations, Mercury uses its IT systems to
ensure the smooth and efficient operations of the company.
Information stored on servers and mainframes must be easily
accessed and updated. And like many large companies, Mercury's
IT system has evolved over a number of years in order to meet
the needs of various departments. The result is a disparate
IT network incorporating IBM, Digital, UNIX, and PC-based
systems. At the same time, departments within Mercury had
a clear need to access information across the enterprise,
necessitating an integrated IT system.
For Mercury's customer inquiry centers, employees needed
to access corporate information on bills and services from
a variety of IT systems spread throughout the organization.
To ensure interoperability across disparate platforms, Mercury
chose The Open Group Distributed Computing Environment (TOG
DCE), including PC-DCE from Entegrity Solutions
In its full configuration, DCE consists of a variety of services
that developers can use to create applications that are portable
and interoperable. It provides an environment in which all
systems and their resources are widely available regardless
of the location of the user. DCE is operating system- and
network-independent, providing compatibility with users' existing
environments. The primary services integrated in DCE are Remote
Procedure Calls (RPCs), Distributed Naming Service, Distributed
Time Service, Security Service, and POSIX Threads.
For Mercury, it was DCE's RPC capability that delivered the
most value. RPCs distribute the execution of an application
by enabling individual procedures in an application to be
run on a computer somewhere else in the network. RPCs support
direct calls to procedures on remote systems, effectively
extending the familiar local procedure call and allowing programmers
to develop distributed applications as easily as traditional
single-user systems. In addition, the difference between data
representations on different machines is masked so programs
can work across heterogeneous systems.
"DCE is not the only cross-platform RPC mechanism. There
are alternatives," said Brian O'Malley, project leader,
Mercury. "We chose DCE because it had the broadest base
of support across the industry, initially from vendors, and
increasingly from end users as well."
One of Mercury's corporate policies has been to adopt an
IT structure based on an open, standards-based, distributed
services model. Standard functions - for example, customer
account details, address details, employee status, etc. -
had to be created that could be used to support any application
that needed them. Typically, this functionality had been built
into individual applications and had not been accessible from
outside those applications.
To implement a distributed services approach, Mercury used
a three-layer client/server architecture based on DCE. The
three-layer client/server architecture consists of front-end
applications, a communications infrastructure, and back-end
services.
In addition to providing the physical network and communications
protocols, the DCE-based communications infrastructure provides
facilities such as security services (for authentication,
authorization, data privacy and integrity), directory services
(so that applications need not be aware of the location of
the services they call), and data conversion. With such a
system in place, it is possible for any application to access
any service as long as it has the authority to use it, regardless
of the service platform.
Entegrity was the first company to offer DCE for the desktop,
enabling PC and Macintosh users to interoperate with all other
DCE-compliant systems (such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun)
as trusted peers, and promoting wider deployment of the technology.
Initially, Mercury's DCE-based applications were developed
to deal with customers' inquiries regarding, for instance,
bills through the Billing Inquiry System. The Billing Inquiry
System is still rolling out and is currently in operation
at Mercury's Wythenshawe, Warrington, and Bracknell centers
in the UK.
The system is used for handling billing complaints and inquiries
on billing for Mercury's residential telephone customers.
PC-DCE has the benefit of making the inquiry process more
transparent to the end user. All the application functionality
has moved to the middle layer of the three-tier architecture
rather than the client front end, effectively hiding the back-end
system from the end user. The new system also enables users
to call up photographic quality images of individual bills.
The use of DCE has been so successful at Mercury that it
has recently been expanded to encompass a second project.
Entegrity's PC-DCE product was chosen to enable the Windows-based
PCs in the Service Management Centers to access these new
applications. The Service Request Management System has been
running since the beginning of 1995 and will expand to a total
of 700 users. It is currently rolled out in twelve locations.
"DCE is extremely appropriate for larger organizations
that have to some extent inherited their IT systems,"
added O'Malley. "It is a technology that has a long-term
future. It is not something that is standing still but is
continually developing in client/server systems. DCE provides
the infrastructure we are looking for to integrate our systems,
ease-of-use for the end user, security, and the ability to
adapt and change with the latest networking technologies."
Entegrity's PC-DCE Product Family
Entegrity Solutions is the leading supplier of The Open
Group Distributed Computing Environment (TOG DCE) technology
for the desktop.
Entegrity provides DCE runtime services for a wide
variety of platforms including Windows 2003, Windows
XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2000 Terminal Server, Windows
NT 4.0 Workstation & Server (SP6a and above), Windows
NT Terminal Server, Windows 98, and Windows XP.
Entegrity also offers the DCE Distributed File System
(DFS), a system software service that enables computers
to share files within and across enterprises, on selected
platforms including Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows
2000, Windows 2000 Terminal Server
Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (ask about versions
for other Linux distributions), and Tru64 UNIX v4.0
and later.
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