WebSphere Revolution

The Finnish Defence Forces and WebSphere Portal It is the job of the Finnish Defence Forces to survey Finnish territory and defend its boarders. Together, their army, air force, and navy comprise up to 520,000 troops. They train about 27,000 new recruits per year and provide refresher courses to about 35,000 reservists each year. Training was key to the Finnish Defence Forces mission, but there were some efficiency problems with the way the training was managed and delivered. They were storing their education and training materials in several different places, and there was no easy way to search these materials. As a result, documents and other teaching tools were often created several times for the same purpose because there was no way to share knowledge. The organization was regularly reinventing the wheel, wasting valuable resources. Frustrated, the organization came to IBM wanting to develop a centralized, Web-based learning management portal that would help employees, recruits, and reservists stay trained to perform defined tasks. The Finnish Defence Forces implemented an education management portal based on WebSphere Portal, IBM DB2 Content Manager®, IBM Tivoli Access Manager®, and a Generation LMS (learning management solution) from IBM Business Partner R5Vision. Today, when teachers produce educational material, they can store it in a central repository and share it via WebSphere Portal with virtual classrooms throughout the country. WebSphere Portal’s metadata management and version control provides the Finnish Defence Forces with a way to create and implement new portlets quickly on an as-needed basis. By centralizing the management of educational materials, including documents, presentations, videos, and more, the IBM solution has helped free up about 30 percent of The Finnish Defence Forces’ teachers’ time, allowing them to focus on additional valuable endeavors. The portal solution also helps with reservist training. Reservists can study pre-educational material on the portal before they attend actual practices. Traditional reservist practices typically take about a week, but by allowing reservists to study and prepare beforehand, the portal reduces practice length by about half—saving the organization approximately 10,000 person-days per year. Another result of the IBM solution is that the organization can train more people without additional funding. 26 building more WebSphere offerings on top of the bullet-proof WebSphere Application Server base. Customers would not only be able to purchase the WebSphere Application Server for their own middleware applications but they could also choose from a growing set of WebSphere middleware building blocks to help build out their infrastructure. This strategy is one of the core drivers behind the far-reaching success of the WebSphere brand. Two early examples of this expansion strategy are WebSphere Commerce and WebSphere Portal. To see this strategy in action, let’s take a look at how these two early WebSphere products evolved. The roots of WebSphere Commerce can be traced back to the Internet Division—IBM’s sandbox for early Internet experimentation. It is important to understand that if the Internet Division was a “little brother” to the IBM Software Division, then Steve Mills was its favorite uncle. Of course Steve would make sure that the Internet Division had the necessary funding. But beyond that, Steve would often put his personal equity behind the Internet Division as diplomat when the Internet Division would encroach on territory controlled by other segments of the IBM Software Division. This nurturing enabled the Internet Division to experiment in ways that would otherwise have been impossible. And now Steve’s nurturing was about to result in a new era of expansion for WebSphere. Starting in the mid 1990s, customers were becoming increasingly interested in selling products through their Websites.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of WebSphere Revolution

WebSphere Revolution Table of Contents The Rise of Internet Business WebSphere Takes the Stage WebSphere Application Server Evolves Beyond the Application Server WebSphere and On Demand Business New Flexibility through SOA An Eye Toward the Future

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