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To: Gus who wrote (12894)	7/17/2001 4:08:07 AM
From: Gus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17183

More on Home Depot....... Tuesday, July 10, 2001, 9:57 AM ET. Home Depot's Net Improvement By Ted Kemp Home Depot will undertake a broad enterprise application integration project to better process a torrent of transactional data that's likely to swell even more as the company opens 200 more stores this year. The EAI project, to unfold over the next 12 to 18 months, will string together mainframes, databases, point-of-sale terminals and other packaged and homegrown applications that span generations. The initial goal is the real-time transfer of data from Home Depot's more than 1 billion annual customer transactions in brick-and-mortar stores to its central data repository in Atlanta. Down the line, Home Depot's plans will facilitate faster data exchange with suppliers and vendors as well. Today, the $46 billion home-improvement retailer uses batch processing to move transactional information, product specifications and inventory updates to a central data repository running on four IBM mainframes. But transmitting big chunks of data clogs up the company's frame relay network. "It creates huge choke points," said Charlie Weston, Home Depot's director of information services. "For Home Depot, as for most large companies and retailers in particular, you have a pretty big data-integration problem." As the number of Home Depot stores swells 17 percent this year, to about 1,400 outlets, it's a problem that will only get worse. The centerpieces of Home Depot's EAI push are IBM's MQSeries message-queuing software and CommerceQuest's EnableNet Data Integrator data integration software, which will reside on all of the company's transactional databases, Unix servers, Web servers and mainframes. EnableNet, which is specifically designed to operate with MQSeries' messaging capabilities, interacts with most file systems, file types and databases. The software is written predominantly in C programming language, using code that is 80 percent consistent, regardless of the platform it operates on, and 20 percent customized for individual platforms, said Paul Roth, CommerceQuest's chief technology officer. In the case of Home Depot and its 11,000 suppliers, the software will interact with 3,500 different platforms, ranging from Windows NT systems and Unix to more specialized platforms. The EAI project is still in its early stages, Home Depot's Weston said, and the company can't detail how it will exchange data with its suppliers. EnableNet and MQSeries will let suppliers easily integrate with Home Depot, the company said. The company will support both HTTP and XML links with suppliers, Weston said. Long Time Coming Home Depot has long wrestled with ways to handle massive volumes of data. In 1999, the company postponed the launch of its online store in an effort to more deeply integrate its brick-and-mortar stores with its e-storefront. In 1998, the company gained notoriety for an early commitment to Java, including the rollout of in-store handheld computers and a wide array of thin-client apps. Separately, Home Depot confirmed this month that it is pressing ahead with a customer relationship management (CRM) effort that will take customer phone calls made to local stores and divert them to its central call center in Tampa, Fla. Beginning in September, a call center application from Avaya Inc. will let the company's 1,000 phone agents there access information about product pricing, delivery and installation internetwk.com