KANA

READ DOCUMENT  Kana.doc 181 KB - Microsoft Word file 51 secs @ 28.8 Kbps Get Office file viewers Solution Overview Company KANA Customer Profile Founded in 1996, KANA provides external facing eCRM solutions to the largest businesses in the world. Through comprehensive multichannel customer relationship management that combines KANA iCARE Architecture with enterprise applications, KANA has become the fastest-growing provider of eCRM technology. The company's customer-focused service, marketing, and commerce software applications enable organizations to improve customer and partner relationships. KANA has 22 locations worldwide. Business Situation KANA needed to port its successful iCARE eCRM solution to the Microsoft® .NET platform quickly, and needed a way to leverage their existing Java-language source code when moving to .NET. Solution Description Using Microsoft Visual J#™ .NET, Kana ported the entire million lines of code of the KANA iCARE application to the .NET platform in 5 man-years. Benefits Leveraged existing Java-language source code for reuse within .NET application. The .NET application does not require a Java application server, significantly lowering the cost of ownership to KANA's customers. Software and Services Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Microsoft Visual J# .NET Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2002 Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Vertical Industries Information Technology Country/Region United States Audiences Developers

When KANA wanted to port its KANA iCARE eCRM application from J2EE to the Microsoft® .NET Framework, they turned to Visual J#™ .NET. They were able to port a complex Java Servlet/JSP application to ASP.NET relatively easily, and achieved their goal of preserving significant investments in Java-language source code when porting their application to the .NET Framework.

Running on the .NET Framework is significantly less expensive for KANA's customers, as it does not require a third-party Java application server. Such servers often cost $15,000/CPU initially, and $3,000/CPU/year for maintenance. With the Microsoft .NET architecture, the functionality of the Java application server is provided as part of the operating system.

Situation

KANA wanted to port its KANA iCARE enterprise customer relationship management application from J2EE to the Microsoft® .NET Framework. There were two major business goals to this porting effort: to expand its sales base to customers running the Microsoft .NET Framework rather than Java 2 Enterprise Edition, and to reuse much of their Java-language source code when building the .NET application.

KANA iCARE is a suite of integrated eCRM applications that enable enterprises to deliver targeted, effective marketing and the highest quality service. The suite provides the essential focus on customers missing in traditional CRM applications through cost-effective, Web-architected solutions that help the enterprise to market to and service more customers at lower cost.

KANA's customer-focused service, marketing and commerce software applications enable organizations to improve customer and partner relationships by enabling them to productively interact when, where and how they want—across all touch points, including web contact, web collaboration, e-mail, and telephone.

KANA investigated the technologies available for porting their product, and decided on Microsoft Visual J#™ .NET.

Visual J# maintained our Java-language syntax, helped us with code migration, and gave us a faster time to market than any alternative. Chris Maeda Chief Technical Officer, KANA

Solution

Chris Maeda, CTO: “We needed to port a Java / J2EE code base to the .NET Framework quickly, and we needed a way to leverage our existing code on the .NET Framework. Visual J# .NET is the only technology that allowed us to rebuild our solution for .NET using our existing Java-language source code.

"Visual J# .NET maintained our Java-language syntax, helped us with code migration, and gave us a faster time to market than any alternative.

"Our user interface tier now runs in ASP.NET.  We were able to port a complex Java Servlet/JSP application to ASP.NET relatively easily using Visual J# .NET. We ported a set of JSP tag libraries and a model-view-controller framework to ASP.NET server controls.  Then we were able to use a custom markup language to define our web user interface in one set of XML source files, and to transform the XML into [Microsoft] ASP.NET web pages at build time.

"We used ASP.NET and .NET Enterprise Services to build a horizontally scalable app that meets our performance requirements. On J2EE, our business logic tier is deployed as Stateless Session Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). Using .NET Enterprise Services, it was trivial to port our EJBs to .NET Serviced Components and deploy them in loosely coupled clusters accessed using SOAP remoting.

"We had to rewrite about 20% of the total code base.  This was primarily code to access databases, message queue services, etc. We were fortunate in already having a framework that abstracted core system services like database and message queue access.  We had to write new provider modules that mapped our framework to the managed providers for SQL Server and Oracle, and that interfaced our framework with MSMQ.

"Because we use Enterprise Services and SOAP Remoting for our business logic tier, we were able to provide an XML Web services architecture to our customers simply by documenting our internal APIs.

"We interface to other databases and enterprise apps, using SOAP, database access, and EAI technology as appropriate. Our architecture allows customers to extend the product using new serviced components or web services.  That allows us to talk to pretty much whatever is out there."

Benefits

The three main business benefits that KANA saw from the Visual J# .NET port were lower cost of ownership for their customers, the ability to leverage their existing Java-language source code, and a quick time to market.

Lower Cost of Ownership

Maeda: "Visual J# .NET reduced our R&D costs and allowed us to deliver our application on the Microsoft  .NET Framework and the Windows Platform faster.  Without it, we would not have been able to ship our application on .NET.

"The Visual J# .NET application will help our customers because they can get the functionality of the Kana iCare Suite at a much lower cost of ownership, due to the economics of the .NET Framework.

"The difference is that the J2EE platform requires you to license an application server from someone like BEA or IBM.  BEA's price is about $15k/CPU plus about $3k/CPU/year in maintenance.  A production deployment on 2 quad-CPU servers would be $120,000 in initial license cost and $24,000 in annual maintenance cost.  With the Microsoft  .NET Framework, you get this functionality for free with the Windows operating system.

"These kinds of economics are why we believe the .NET Framework will catch on with a significant percentage of the market.

Leveraged Existing Java-language Source Code

"We could not afford to completely rewrite our Java-language source code to recompile on .NET.  We would either have had to double the size of our engineering team or evolve our product half as fast. Either outcome would have been death for the company. With Visual J# .NET, we have recompiled 80% of our existing Java-language source code with no changes, and rewritten the remaining 20% to adapt to and take advantage of the capabilities of .NET.

Quick Time to Market

"With Visual J# .NET, our Java programmers could get up to speed on .NET quickly, and we could migrate code from J2EE to .NET quickly.

"We have always been a Java shop. While we think C# is a great language, we have better things to do than learn a new language. Visual J# .NET allowed us to leverage our knowledge of the Java language, while quickly getting up to speed on the .NET Framework.

Easy Debugging of Distributed Applications

"We have also been impressed with the productivity we get out of [Microsoft] Visual Studio® .NET. One of the hardest parts of developing enterprise software is debugging an application that is spread across multiple tiers.  But Visual Studio .NET makes it easy”.

A Great Success

"Before Microsoft announced Visual J# .NET, we thought we would have to rewrite our applications in C# in order to support the .NET Framework. Now we are leading the market in delivering high-end enterprise software on J2EE and the .NET Framework. Visual J# .NET has been a great success for us."

The Microsoft .NET Framework is a platform for building, deploying, and running Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web services and applications. It provides a highly productive, standards-based, multilanguage environment for integrating existing investments with next-generation applications and services, as well as the agility to solve the challenges of deployment and operation of Internet-scale applications. The .NET Framework consists of two main parts: the Common Language Runtime and a hierarchical set of unified class libraries that includes a componentized version of Active Server Pages (ASP.NET), a loosely coupled data access subsystem (ADO.NET), and an environment for building rich Windows®-based applications (Windows Forms).

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and XML Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice. Visual Studio .NET includes a single integrated development environment with RAD features for building Web applications and middle-tier business logic, and RAD XML designers for working with data.

For more information about Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, go to:
http://www.visualstudio.net/

For more information about Visual J# .NET, go to:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vjsharp

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about KANA's products and services, call 1.800.737.8738 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.kana.com/

© 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

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