More than ever, midsized businesses face the challenge of operating in a global economy, where nothing stands still. Product life cycles that once might have been measured in terms of years, are now measured in months or even weeks. From development to service, successful companies are leveraging process improvement and technology to continually reduce time to market and improve operating efficiencies. In order to be competitive, midmarket enterprises must be prepared to adapt their systems and business processes quickly to reflect changing market trends and demands. To support these requirements, the company must have business technologies that are intuitive, compliant, and adaptive - and particularly for midmarket companies, the technology has to be accessible, at an affordable price.

Today, Web services deliver an affordable, adaptable technology framework that over time can produce a significantly lower total cost of ownership for the midmarket enterprise. Web services allow for dynamic integration between applications without costly and time-consuming programming. This reduces implementation times and simplifies installations, ultimately accelerating the overall return on software investment.

With Web services, integration is no longer limited to within the four walls of the enterprise. Now businesses can more easily and affordably integrate processes beyond the firewall, with customers, partners, and suppliers, up and down their entire value chain and improve interenterprise collaborative capabilities. Through Web services, this integration can be achieved much more easily, without requiring a detailed understanding of how the suppliers, partners, and customers have built their IT systems. For example, a distributor could streamline its supply chain management by outsourcing inventory fulfillment simply by authorizing a partner's system to use the distributor's Web services over the Internet.

In developing their overall technology strategy, enterprise software vendors have to determine which Web services technology best meets the requirements of their customers and markets. In the midmarket, businesses typically have the same feature and functionality requirements of larger, global organizations, while at the same time facing significantly more constrained budgets and resources than large enterprises.

Why Microsoft .NET Fits the Midmarket
Web services technology can be the catalyst for deploying a host of rich solutions available using any device, at any time, in any place - turning the dream of the real-time global enterprise into a reality. And, for the midmarket, the most cost-effective way to get there is via Microsoft .NET, which can provide an underlying technology fabric and development framework that is uniquely suited to building and integrating Web services.

When Epicor Software Corporation set out to meet the challenge of creating its next generation of enterprise applications, Microsoft .NET was the clear choice to achieve an agile, pure Web services architecture for the global midmarket. With it we could build the foundation for our next generation of enterprise applications faster and more affordably, delivering the following key benefits to our customers:

• Rich user experience
• Agile, reliable technology
• New levels of interoperability and extensibility
• Portable, flexible, scalable, and secure
• Lower total cost of ownership

A significant benefit of implementing a Web services architecture is the ability to have multiple user interfaces interact with a single Web service. Microsoft .NET further extends this by allowing you to build both rich client and browser-based interfaces in the same development environment via Visual Studio .NET. The new tools and framework that Microsoft .NET provides makes building Web services much easier. With Web services development, the application logic or functionality itself doesn't change, but rather its behavior - how the applications expose functionality as a set of Web services to end users and/or developers. Essentially, you're able to break applications down into very small, granular software components and make them available everywhere using the Internet.

What this means to customers is powerful, fast, and low-cost personalization. They will have the ability to bring together aspects of applications from anywhere - front or back office, supplier or customer's systems - to suit their individual requirements. For instance, if you like Epicor's integrated financials solution but you want a third party's tax service module, you'll simply drag and drop it into your workspace: no middleware, no compatibility issues, no integration cost.

If you want your courier company's real-time scheduler to be available to your customers through your Web site, it won't be a problem. The technical barriers to e-business have gradually fallen away, enabling companies to make strategic, rather than technologically driven, decisions about supply chains and partnerships. Web services not only deliver faster return on investment, they also substantially reduce the cost of ownership and maintenance to end users.

First Pure Web Services CRM Solution Delivered
Epicor delivered the first customer relationship management (CRM) application built from the ground up utilizing Microsoft .NET technology in mid-2002, the Clientele CRM.NET Suite - a complete, CRM solution for small and medium enterprises and small to medium-sized divisions of larger organizations. Employing native Web services and XML throughout, the Clientele CRM.NET Suite makes integration to external applications easier and faster, allowing midmarket companies better interaction with partners, customers, and suppliers.

Epicor chose to build a rich client, or smart client, using Visual Studio .NET in the development of Clientele CRM.NET. For customers looking for advanced functionality with intuitive workflow and navigation, this approach was the ideal fit. Using a smart client enabled Epicor to leverage client-side processing and thereby reduce the number of server "round trips" - more efficiently using bandwidth, which improves performance and the user experience.

Web Services in Action at TruServ
TruServ Corporation, an organization formed in 1997 by the merger of Cotter & Company and ServiStar Coast to Coast, recently moved to the Clientele CRM.NET suite. The $2.2 billion Chicago-based cooperative supports over 6,400 independent retailers worldwide working under identities like True Value, Taylor Rental Center, and Home & Garden Showplace.

To ensure that those 6,400 entities get the expedient, high-quality customer service they require, TruServ has relied on Epicor's Clientele Customer Support for nearly seven years. In 2003 they migrated to Clientele Customer Support 8.1, part of the Clientele CRM.NET Suite. TruServ saw the value of Clientele's strong customer-focused functionality leveraged through the Microsoft .NET Framework for enhanced stability, portability, and flexibility.

According to Sherry Fascia, TruServ's financial manager, Customer Support 8.1 assists TruServ's field organization to gain efficiencies while on the road by allowing easier connectivity to the home company's system. In the past, they would rarely connect to the Clientele system because of the time it took to get them logged into the TruServ network. Under the new system's .NET environment, they're using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to connect, with complete security and gain access to Clientele instantly.

Customer Support 8.1 also accelerated the rate at which TruServ's Chicago and Butler, PA call centers share information and reports. In the past, Fascia says it often took up to 30 minutes to print a report shared between the two because the company's multiple geographic locations required all of the information to be brought over from one call center, filtered into the software, and then printed out.

"It was an inefficient way to work," says Fascia. "Now with the real-time Web connectivity enabled by Clientele's .NET architecture, Butler, Chicago, and anyone else who dials in from the field can print reports and information quickly."

Web Services ESA Solution for the Midmarket
Epicor was at the forefront of .NET development again in June 2003, delivering the first XML Web service enterprise service automation (ESA) solution for mid-sized, project-based businesses - Epicor for Service Enterprises. The solution is part of a series of industry-specific Epicor solutions built using Microsoft .NET technology and enabled by Epicor's new Internet Component Environment (ICE) platform for rapid development of Web service applications - built from the ground up in just 24 months.

Epicor ICE is an application framework for the next generation of enterprise solutions leveraging pure, granular XML Web services. These next-generation "solution assemblies," like Epicor for Service Enterprises, deliver greater control, choice, and flexibility to customers. The ICE platform, built using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET and running on top of the Microsoft .NET Framework, extends the unique value proposition of Web services technology to midmarket businesses. ICE brings extensive flexibility and ease of use through integrated yet granular components that allow straightforward, low-cost interaction with existing IT infrastructure and also with suppliers, partners, and customers. While offering high connectivity and portability, ICE leverages Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology and Microsoft Windows security protocols, including Active Directory LDAP, to ensure that only authorized users and components with requisite permissions can access the system.

What makes Epicor for Service Enterprises unique is that it is not built on the complex, monolithic, highly duplicative code sets found in other enterprise applications. Instead, it uses Web applications to call Web services that invoke functionality such as opportunity management, project planning, resource management, and financial analysis. Epicor for Service Enterprises uses more than 60 Web services to manage essential business processes more effectively - from resource and project planning to travel, expenses, and invoicing. Because of how the solution is architected, a full range of functionality can be delivered on a thin-client basis.

StreamServe Streamlines Professional Services Organization with Web Services
StreamServe Inc, a leading business communication solution provider, was the first company to implement Epicor for Service Enterprises. StreamServe wanted to improve operational efficiency across its consulting operations by implementing a central mechanism for resource and project planning, logging of consultants' time, and generating customer invoices.

As a growing organization, StreamServe understood the need to establish efficient business processes throughout the company. Rod Kilgour, vice president of Services for StreamServe, says, "Previously, we had 11 service managers double keying in the same information for resource planning and invoicing expenses manually. Not only was this approach very inefficient in terms of people's time, it was also prone to human error."

StreamServe selected the Web services-based Epicor for Service Enterprises to address these issues across its Nordic consulting division. The open nature of Web services enabled StreamServe to integrate the Epicor for Service Enterprises solution with its existing systems. The company connected its existing CRM platform, accounting system, and Epicor for Service Enterprises using their own StreamServe Business Communication Platform (BCP).

The first information on StreamServe consultants' time and expenses was entered into the Epicor application and customer invoices were generated successfully just one week after going live. Concurrently running the legacy business systems that previously supported these functions in tandem with the new solution has verified the accuracy of all information generated from the new application.

Access to timely management information was critical to StreamServe. Previously, reports had to be produced by professional services managers and were often not available until 10 to 15 days after information was collected. As a result of the Epicor for Service Enterprises .NET-powered solution, StreamServe can access timely management information from across its services enterprise.

Affordable Web Services for the Midmarket
According to Gartner Group, one of the best strategies for accessing Web services is to turn to vendors with whom you have solid working relationships. These vendors will have Web services capabilities in their products (for example, servers and application development tools). You can use these capabilities to bolster your own Web services strategies without having to buy new products.

For the midmarket it's especially important that Web services strategies are focused on business benefits, and not just a move to new technology for technology's sake. One of the key benefits of Web services technology is the ability to evolve and extend traditional systems, preserving existing investments in IT while providing a platform for growth and agile business connectivity. When looking at implementing Web services, midmarket companies should first conduct an analysis of their business's requirements, and then evaluate how to best leverage existing enterprise systems. Midmarket companies can reap many benefits from implementing Web services technology, enabling them to rapidly respond to change, adjust for growth, and maintain competitive advantage, while achieving a low total cost of ownership.

About the Author
John Hiraoka is senior vice president of corporate development for Epicor Software Corporation, and has over 20 years of enterprise applications design, development, sales, marketing, and operations experience. Epicor builds world-class enterprise applications, architected to utilize leading Microsoft platforms and technologies. Prior to joining Epicor, John held a variety of senior management positions with DataWorks, including vice president of advanced product development. jhiraoka@epicor.com