Project Title: Developing a custom-built Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system

The Challenge

This project entailed development, testing, deployment, and support of a Web-based system that was supposed to provide enterprise and partner users with tools and functions for managing business opportunities, deals, and various types of requests associated with those opportunities. The user base included company employees (internal users) and individuals within partner companies (external users). The partner management system was expected to complement company’s existing content management system that provided various technical support information, a Siebel based CRM system, and a B2B system that allowed partners to build computer storage product configurations.

Among technical challenges, the proposed PRM had to support two tiers of customer accounts, including a commercial tier consisting of channel sales accounts dealt with primarily by partners, and an enterprise tier of direct accounts maintained by company’s own sales managers. Additional challenge was a robust multi-language support needed to make the system easy to use for partners in Asia whose knowledge of English is not always adequate. In addition to English, five other languages were to be available so that the user could choose from Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Thai. Information entered in a language should have been displayed as entered, regardless of the language option chosen by the user. An elaborate notification and escalation mechanisms were among must-have features. Email notices needed to be sent from PRM according to customizable business rules. The ultimate goal was to improve communication among enterprise and partner employees.

The Solution

Open source implementation of the J2EE platform by Apache Software Foundation laid the foundation of the enterprise PRM portal. Apache technologies utilized in this project included Apache HTTP Server 2.0, Apache Tomcat 5.0, Apache Struts and Apache ObjectRelationalBridge (OJB). The choice of the server side operating system fell on the open-source Fedora Project, while Oracle 9i Database Enterprise Edition served as a DBMS platform. On the client side, the requirements stipulated that Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was the only Web browser to access the system in the production environment.

For users, the system includes the following main sections: opportunity management, deal registration, pricing assistance, service registration, custom presales quotes, presales questions and answers, general requests, an interface for site administration and preferences, and a usage statistics monitor. The system is equipped with a powerful and flexible search engine. Opportunity management allows internal and external users be able to add and maintain high-level information about business opportunities for a given customer. Deal registration allows partners to bring incremental business to the company. Before the PRM system was introduced, partners had communicated sales opportunities through various channels, and there was no system allowing partner companies to enter and track those deals.

A production Web server was deployed on two hosts for load balancing purposes, while an Oracle 9i database storing all the information was replicated across two nodes using Oracle 9i Data Guard. Replication improves the availability of the PRM system because it provides it with alternative data access options. Artezio accomplished the entire deployment remotely, thus demonstrating its capability not only to develop and test software in an offshore delivery mode, but also remotely deploy and maintain a production system.

Finalizing the software lifecycle the customer requested that Artezio also supported the newly created system, occasionally extended the existing functionality and added new features. As a part of the support stage more new reports in the five languages were added and a visual request history tracking module was introduced. Full scale exploitation of the PRM system on the 24/7 basis required extra development efforts to ensure re

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