In past columns we looked at several ways that sales teams can work together and the considerations involved in a successful sales process. This month let's get a little further inside of a big customer's thought process, a customer who out of the gate requires high scalability. These are customers with multi-tier architectures, terabytes of data storage, sophisticated business logic, distributed applications, and a very real need for maximum uptime. These are the customers who bring the greatest challenges - and the greatest rewards.

With the bitter smell of tax season still lingering in the air, a great example comes to mind. If you live in California I hope you filed your taxes; the State of California Franchise Tax Board (FTB) has taken a giant step in tracking tax filings by building an e-business infrastructure that handles the 14 or so million tax returns filed in California each year. More importantly, they also needed the ability to track and identify the roughly 7% of the people who are nonfilers. This is almost the definition of scalability and availability.

As electronic tax filing increases each year the FTB recognized that they had to move their environment into the Internet age or they would be left with multiple datastores that had little to nothing in common, thus creating labor-intensive processes that would still leave holes in the tracking process. "Historically, we've had about 7 to 9 million pieces of information we could not use, mainly because the information was incomplete and our legacy system was unable to process it," says Cathy Cleek, FTB program director. "Now, even if we're missing an identification number or an address, the information is still useful. We use data-cleansing technology to derive as much value as possible from our data in order to locate non-filers." The FTB incorporated data-cleansing technologies from Vality Technology, Inc., and Evolutionary Technologies International (ETI), both of which are IBM Business Partners. "By making better use of our data, we'll be able to identify an additional 100,000 non-filers and bring in an additional $50 million each year."

Setting out on the project, the architects knew that the infrastructure would have to have the highest availability and be scalable enough to handle both a public Web site and the 2,000 users internal to the FTB. The ROI had to pay off near-term. The last thing the State of California wanted was a high-profile, high-cost project that failed to deliver on its promise. The architects and planners looked at what other states had done with their tax initiatives and tried to learn from their successes and failures. Two things became obvious early on: 1) the solution had to be industrial strength, and 2) the solution vendor had to be highly qualified.

The team looked at and evaluated the best-of-breed technologies for the applications and the environment in which they would run. Because of the size and prestige of the project there was no shortage of attention from the top vendors in this space. The FTB evaluated solutions from IBM, Oracle, and AMS. "IBM offered the best value - a combination of the strongest technical solution with an attractive price and strong potential for generating fast returns," says Cathy Cleek. "There was a very powerful ROI model that was very hard to ignore, even for a state the size of California. IBM pushed us in the e-government direction sooner than we had planned - and I'll always be grateful for that," says Cleek. The project provided a foundation for later moving other state processes to the Internet. making the original project an incubator for future initiatives.

The ROI model wasn't based solely on the cost of the infrastructure; it also had to incorporate the cost of deployment, maintenance, and the future costs of adding applications and functionality. To keep a state-of-the-art system state of the art one of two things must occur: either you continually engage a technology partner or you have the ability in-house to grow and maintain the system. IBM Global Services assisted in the implementation of the system but also acted as a mentor to the FTB IT staff to prepare them for the future.

Whether the vendor selection is IBM Global Services or another service provider it's important to select a vendor with more than a working knowledge of the required skills; they need to be experienced experts. The technology provider and the customer need to work in lock step with one another and share a common vision of what the project objective is and where the technology will take the business later on. If either of these components is missing, the entire initiative could be placed in jeopardy. A high-volume, mission-critical system of this nature required much more than just service delivery. It required a mentoring partnership between the customer and the technology provider "It would have been difficult for us to manage a project of this scope without assistance from IBM Global Services," notes Cleek. "Besides, working with large IT vendors exposes us to new ideas that enhance our skills base."

The system was developed using Java technology. The development team used IBM VisualAge for Java to create the Java servlets and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) that provide the business logic within the system. VisualAge provides two resources that were very important to the development team; server side debugging tools and it is a proven, very reliable development environment. The tool's version control ability to track and recover previous programming efforts made it easy for members of the development team to retrace their steps when programming changes were required. More importantly, the servlets provide a centralized element of control while also providing platform and browser independence for users. Truly a best of both words model.

"We wanted to use the latest open technologies, so we could easily make enhancements and incorporate new functionality into our system. We also wanted to work with a vendor that would be around for a long time. IBM has more than satisfied us on both counts." Again this was used as a factor in determining ROI. Future functionality would be completely within the control of FTB because the system was designed using open standards. They would be in control of their own destiny and would not be beholden to proprietary technology or handcuffed to a vendor who held the keys to the kingdom. "Considering the additional revenue generated as well as efficiency enhancements, we earned a full payback on our IBM business intelligence solution within just one year." Said Cleek. When future enhancements are factored in the long term ROI model will present even better economies.

So what are the most important factors in the customers decision to buy WebSphere? The environment addressed the most important concerns without compromise.

1. The application environment is a proven industrial strength approach that will scale as more functionality is needed.
2. The customer and technology provider shared the same vision of what the intent of the business process improvement was all about.
3. Open standards allowed the customer to take control of the future direction and uses of the system.
4. The technology provider fulfilled the customer needs at each critical point. There were no patchwork solutions for melding disparate technologies.
5. The technology vendor was expert at what they were attempting.

Conclusion
The more a technology project becomes a solid partnership the more effective the outcome will be. In this case there was a customer who had a very clear vision of where they needed technology to take them. They were open to listening to experts from many different technology providers and made their decision based upon proven abilities, systems that run in the real world, not just in Powerpoint. Maybe, this isn't a good case study because here we have a combination of superior technology and an open-minded customer who had a definite vision of where they needed technology to take them. The result is a scalable solution that has improved the efficiencies of the FTB in California. If you live or work in California, I hope you filed your taxes because now the tax man cometh and he has WebSphere with him.