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Beyond the One-Man Band
There's strong demand for application-server software, the computing workhorses behind the mightiest of Web sites.
By Jason K. Krause
Jason Apfel's first stab at creating an online store for Fragrancenet.com, his Deer Park, N.Y., perfume retailer, resulted in a site that was simple but dull, more of a product list than an e-commerce vehicle.
"When we first launched the site in 1995, we were still an 800-number business," says Apfel, the company's president and CEO. "Our first site had a list of something like 300 to 400 fragrances ? a catalog, basically. We really didn't generate any business through the site."
That has changed. Fragrancenet.com has scrapped the telephone-based mail-order business and focused on selling its wares over the Web. Using an Oracle (ORCL) application server as the underlying engine, Fragrancenet.com now displays a wealth of data on 1,200 brand-name fragrances.
Not to be confused with the server that directly faces the Web, an application server can dramatically improve a Web site's interactive characteristics. Think of the app server as the computing middleman, freeing up the Web site to greet more visitors. The app server crunches away behind the scenes, volleying instructions between the Web server and the legacy mainframe, monitoring transactions, creating and managing content that gets published on the site, storing data and more. Application servers also thrive away from the Web, sitting in the middle tier between desktop computers and central servers or mainframes in a local- or wide-area network.
Fragrancenet.com's application server has helped make the company an electronic-commerce powerhouse: Its traffic quadrupled in the 1998 holiday shopping season compared with a year earlier. The application server helps manage the site's automatic discount programs and shopping guides, as well as features like free gift wrapping and other promotions that involve detailed data and number crunching.
Gauging application servers' exact return on investment is difficult, but, as Apfel puts it, "Without the application server, we'd basically have no business at all."
Fragrancenet.com certainly is not the only business that places a high priority on this technology. A recent Forrester Research (FORR) survey of 50 large corporations found that 46 percent believed application servers were already a strategic asset in 1998. Of those companies surveyed, another 18 percent said that this is the year the servers become strategically valuable. Only 2 percent didn't know when or how an application server would fit in their business.
From: The Industry Standard, May 24, 1999 |
