Kowabunga, Kawasaki - Company Business and Marketing

Communications News, March, 2001 by Sean Kelly

Kawasaki Motors Corp. U.S.A.--famous for its motorcycles, watercraft and ATV--has a website where customers can buy accessories, clothing and gear, and obtain vehicle information. To provide dependable and current information, database servers must run nearly 24x7, serving Web page content, and capturing, replicating and processing customer data.

The website required a solution that would monitor and notify staff of critical service status changes and problems, and trigger tasks to transfer mainframe-sourced data to other back-end servers. Most data, such as updated catalog, dealer and pricing information, is sourced from Kawasaki's mainframe systems in Irvine, CA. Two additional servers supporting Web activity are in San Jose.

OpalisRobot software now manages the website's information exchange between the servers. Each night, the software triggers the data transformation services to move data from the mainframe system in Irvine to San Jose. There, the staging server collects updated catalog, dealer and pricing information for replication to the production database server, which uses it to generate Web page content and capture customer information. Software will be added to two other servers soon.

The software also provides 24x7 notification of critical process failures and services status changes on the entire infrastructure. "We are always discovering new needs for monitoring, notification and file management within our system, because of the software's capabilities," says Victor Martinez, manager of data administration and information access services for Kawasaki.

www.opalis.com

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