Iona’s key applications

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• Function: Back office administration (general administration, finance and human resources)
• Product: SAP R/3
• Location: Data centre at corporate headquarters Dublin

SAP drives all of Iona’s financial corporate reporting requirements and was installed when the company first launched on the stock market in 1997. Over the years, the company has added extra functions to the product suite including human-resources (HR) modules.

‘We are looking at doing all the definitions of our product codes in SAP,’ said Rogan, ‘and we do the shipping of our products through it. We are trying to centralise all the separate applications into one system, where once we had separate systems in different locations. That exercise is pretty much finished now’.

Iona maintains a single instance of SAP, running on Compaq hardware under the Windows 2000 operating system at its Dublin headquarters. The company has strenuously resisted any attempts to distribute the servers throughout the regions it serves. ‘I’ve been to a number of SAP forums,’ said Rogan, ‘and have learned that as companies expand and grow they often end up with multiple SAP instances in various locations and one of the biggest challenges they face is to go back to having just one. We have resisted any attempt to do that, and so the SAP installation we have here is used widely by our finance people in the US and Asia Pacific.’

A number of different types of user have access to the SAP system. Between 50 and 60 people in the general administration functions use it, as do all the company’s cost-centre managers so that they can look at their budgetary information. And as Rogan points out: ‘as HR becomes more prevalent on SAP and more information about employees gets added, employees will be able to access their own information. So you could end up with a system to which all 600 people have access’.

• Function: Engineering and development
• Product: Rational Software (IBM) ClearCase
• Location: Various

For the process of software code development, which forms the basis of everything Iona does, the key application is ClearCase from Rational Software, now an IBM company. ClearCase is a source-code control system which maintains all of the raw code that makes up Iona’s products as they are being developed.

ClearCase enables Iona to carry out so-called ‘follow the sun engineering’, where engineers in different time zones work on the same project around the clock, one developer picking up in the morning what another has just left down in the evening on the other side of the world.

Iona has development sites in several locations in Europe and America. There are also individual engineers located in remote regions like Australia and Canada.

ClearCase allows a developer to check out a piece of code, at which point the system registers that developer as being the person working on the code. The developer can then edit and perform modifications on the code before checking it back in again so that someone else somewhere else can begin work.

While the code is registered as being in the possession of one developer, others are effectively locked out so that multiple versions of the same code are not being developed at the same time.

ClearCase carries out all the version control that helps people to manage versions of their code. It also replicates the source code databases that are held on servers at all the company’s main development centres. 

‘It’s the most critical application for our engineering organisation,’ said Rogan. ‘It’s like our warehouse, it’s where we store everything. It’s very common within software development to use a source control system of some sort and ClearCase is one of the prevalent ones.’ 

• Function: Sales force automation and CRM
• Product: eWare
• Location: Various

Iona’s main front-office application, and the most recent of the major application rollouts the company has performed is eWare’s sales and customer-relationship management (CRM) tool.

Originally an Irish company, eWare was recently acquired by Accpac of the US. Its software is server based and instances run in each of Iona’s major data centres. The eWare instance for the EMEA region is hosted in Dublin.

‘eWare had to Web Service enable their products before we implemented it. That was something they didn’t have when we first went to them, but they delivered it as part of the our implementation.’

The main advantage that eWare has brought to Iona is transparency in the sales and marketing process. ‘We have huge visibility now in our sales process,’ said Rogan, ‘and that visibility is global. We can see the pipeline of business that we have. eWare has helped us remove a lot of the manual collating and trawling through the sales organisation for potential business opportunities that we used to do and allows us to automate our whole forecasting process’.

It also has a Web Services Interface so that the data in eWare can be linked back into the company’s main SAP system via one of Iona’s own middleware products called Enterprise Integrator.

‘eWare delivers XML documents to our Enterprise Integrator Engine which we pass into SAP,’ says Rogan. ‘Likewise SAP can output XML documents which we can feed into eWare.’

July 2003

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