Benefits

Cost reductions: one tool, many projects
Alpine no longer is limited to building and maintaining unwieldy scripts for integrations. With the broad connectivity and technical capabilities of Pervasive Data Integrator™, many integration projects can be accomplished with the investment in a single tool. Alpine saves money by no longer turning to outsourcers to create complex integrations.

Faster time-to-solution
In Pervasive Data Integrator, Alpine can quickly create and reuse integration processes. Todd comments on the additional time saved with Pervasive Data Integrator: “Management is far easier to have it all in one place in one tool. You can make modifications more easily. You can separate the data integration task from the particularities of SQL 2000 for instance.” This is coming in handy for their upgrade project to SQL 2008.

Process execution time reduced by 90%
Pervasive Data Integrator has greatly reduced execution times for feeding data into PartnerNet from various sources, as well as feeding weather data into the sizing estimator. Before Pervasive, the data crunching process for the sizing estimator took two days. Now that same process takes about 2 hours, a 90% reduction in execution time.

Visual integration feedback
Todd said, “One of the benefits with Pervasive is the ease of visualizing the data. When building a map for instance, you can easily see your source and target, make changes, and see them. The structured data designer is head and shoulders above SQL.”

Modular and reusable Todd remarked: “The concept of building a map that can be readily reused in Pervasive, rather than using Microsoft DTS or SSIS, it is so much easier and faster.” He added, “It’s head and shoulders better with Process Designer. If I have to change a source or target, I don’t have to build it all over again.”

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No More Hand-Coded Integration Scripts

Alpine Home Air Products, a wholesaler for heating and air conditioning products, offers direct sales to customers on the Internet and via phone. Alpine has an extensive catalog of products to maintain as well as customer data, quotes and orders, all of which must be constantly updated. Alpine selected Pervasive Software to eliminate brittle hand-coded integration scripts and inefficient production processes. Alpine now has centralized data integration management and has sped up daily data feeds from a variety of sources for updating its order management system.

With Pervasive Data Integrator, Alpine can now quickly update the order management system with scheduled jobs, pulling data for product, pricing, availability and so on from the NetSuite ERP, call data from the Asterisk telephony system, as well as updates from shippers and vendors. Alpine also uses Pervasive Data Integrator to feed regional weather data into an online sizing estimator for heating and cooling products. This improves the accuracy of customer decisions when determining products to buy, which in turn can lead to fewer returns and increased customer satisfaction. Alpine now has a data management solution that will support many new projects and innumerable data formats.

Finding a Centralized Management System for Integration Projects

Alpine Home Air Products wanted to eliminate data integration processes based on extensive hand-coding (ColdFusion, SQL statements) and also wanted to go beyond the limited functionality of Microsoft SQL Server DTS and SSIS. Pervasive Data Integrator has transformed how Alpine’s IT team creates, runs and maintains integration processes.

Like many companies, Alpine works with diverse data formats as sources that need to be transformed into data that can be stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Hand-coding methods were becoming unwieldy and hard to maintain. New scripts had to be created for every new data feed, and performance was not optimal.

Alpine also lacked centralized management of integration projects, as well as a means to easily create sophisticated workflows for overall job control. For instance, Alpine wanted to be able to handle exceptions, and send email alerts when certain conditions occurred.

Custom Coding vs Pervasive Data Integrator

Jason Todd, CEO/CTO, assessed the current approach which was comprised of several components: Microsoft SQL Server DTS / SSIS, ColdFusion scripting, and scripting based on other Microsoft products such as VBA for Excel and Access. Todd was particularly focused on daily updates from the NetSuite ERP system to the Alpine order management system at the time.

At first, Todd thought his choices were: “Do we build a custom NetSuite solution, or do we build a tool, or do we get a consultant to build an import utility for us?” But he found that Pervasive Data Integrator provided many advantages over hand-coding, which frequently is difficult to maintain and does not scale well.

Todd noted: “We got Pervasive Data Integrator for the same amount it would have cost us to have an outsourcer build us one NetSuite import tool. Instead, now we can integrate with anything.”

He also said, “Process Designer has great functionality to be able to visualize the processes and lay them out. I could not accomplish the same thing using DTS, and I wouldn’t even try. Even with SSIS, a job has a series of steps, one to next to next to next. But jobs don’t necessarily do that. They might need to kick off an email or not, or do multiple things at once.” Pervasive Data Integrator gave him the power to do conditional and parallel workflows in an easy visual interface. “I’d hate to have to code that with ColdFusion and then have to change it two months later.”

Synchronizing Data Flows Between NetSuite and Disparate Systems 

At the digital heart of Alpine Home Air Products is their proprietary order management system called PartnerNet. This order management system stores such data as product information, available inventory, customer information, quotes and order entry. Pervasive Data Integrator pulls from NetSuite every hour to acquire inventory and pricing data that is then pushed into PartnerNet to synch with quotes and orders. PartnerNet data is stored in Microsoft SQL Server 2000 (which is being migrated to SQL Server 2008). The same process pulls the shipping data into PartnerNet via flat files.

Asterisk, an open source telephony system, provides call data and detail records (CDR) that are integrated into PartnerNet to synch with quotes and orders. Asterisk data sits in PostgreSQL and is pulled out nightly using Pervasive Data Integrator. Todd remarked that, “Pulling data out of PostgreSQL was simple.”

Alpine provides a sizing estimator tool on its website to assist customers when selecting heating and cooling products. The sizing estimator uses regional weather data as part of the selection algorithms. Pervasive Data Integrator parses the inbound data files using online documentation to ascertain the meaning of the weather data, then pushes only the useful data into SQL Server. The integration process distills down hundreds of gigabytes of data to the hundreds of megabytes that the estimator requires.

Look What A Few Days of Training Can Do

Todd compared old methods to new, “We’ve got a guy in-house who is a VBA/Excel whiz. His Access scripts completed the task in a weekend. Now, it takes only a couple of hours to parse out the data. That helps a lot because we can make changes and test them on the full dataset, instead of testing on a small sample and getting final data a day or two later.”

Todd’s own team built all of these integration processes themselves after just a few days of training from Pervasive. Overall, Todd said, “Implementation was easy. There weren’t really any major hurdles.” It did take some time to work on understanding the NetSuite data structure but the Alpine team mastered that as well.

Centralized System of Management For All Data Integration

Initially Alpine Air Home Products purchased Pervasive Data Integrator just to handle the daily data updates from NetSuite to PartnerNet. Now, Jason Todd is looking at Pervasive Data Integrator to stand as the centralized system to manage data for any new integrations that Alpine needs for its business technology. Todd sees a particular benefit from using one central point of management for all data integration: “The next best thing to centralizing data, when you can’t, is to centralize the management. One of the big advantages is being able to centralize the movement from system to system.”

When asked if there was any situation where Data Integrator wouldn’t help, he joked, “I am an avid rock climber, and I have found no use for Pervasive Data Integrator there.”