Risetime is pleased to announce a strategic partnership agreement with AquiTec, Inc., a leading provider of collaborative Supply Chain Management (SCM) software utilized by wholesalers, distributors, retailers and manufacturers in the food distribution business. In this partnership, Risetime will take responsibility for application development and support of the AquiTec SCM modules for Associated Wholesale Grocers, Inc. (AWG), one of the largest grocery wholesalers in the United States (1,500 member-stores in 21 states) and the nation's oldest grocery cooperative.

Risetime will provide application updates, new system features, and performance related enhancements to AquiTec's eProcurement and eBilling product suites for AWG. Work has already begun on adding performance instrumentation and enhancements in preparation for AWG's near-term and long-term system needs. Once the performance goals are achieved, Risetime will focus on developing additional functionality for AWG and work with AquiTec to incorporate the new capabilities into its eProcurement and eBilling product suites.

The architecture of the AquiTec Supply Chain Management (SCM) solution is quite unique. When AquiTec developed the new generation of its software, a vital decision was made to preserve most of the existing database schema and 20+ years of business logic and to refresh the front end with the creation of all new web components. This unique solution allows AquiTec to take advantages of its many years of experience with its SCM software solution, while also minimizing client risk and effort associated with a typical migration project.

The first unique element in AWG's SCM environment is the use of mainframe technology - vital components of the system run here including the application server, database instance, and Business Objects. This environment hosts four partitions which run the aforementioned subsystems. The application server choice is WebSphere, the database is DB2, and the COBOL is compiled using PERCobol. PERCobol extends classic COBOL capabilities by permitting use of XML, TCP/IP socket, 64 bit architecture, event-driven programming and J2EE capabilities.

To preserve the valuable business logic, applets and servlets were created to establish socket-level connections to the COBOL programs which act as 'heavy lifters' in the solution. Instead of using applets to connect directly to the database, COBOL is also used in the data access layer. COBOL is not typically viewed as a web-friendly application development language, but this solution has resulted in screens and functions that can execute at lightning fast speeds. AWG is also on the cutting edge of virtualization and use of 'true' thin client end-user hardware. All AWG end-user thin client machines attach to a Citrix farm to provide standard Windows desktops. Additional Citrix machines have also been employed to serve up other business applications, including a server farm dedicated to serving up the AquiTec SCM eProcurement and eBilling applications.

The AquiTec applications are 'hosted' from a set of two 8-way servers. These 'hosted' applications run within Citrix-provided Internet Explorer sessions, which are also running the end-user Windows virtual machines. Here comes the twist - AWG does not actually run Citrix directly on the 8-way boxes. Instead, AWG runs four VMware virtual machines per 8-way server, with each of the four VMware instances running Citrix. Now that is one virtualized environment! Needless to say, Risetime's ability to performance-tune in this complicated environment is quite difficult, as the 'loosely coupled' nature of this environment can make cause and effect very difficult to pinpoint.