Case Study
Askews Library Services
Industry: Library Services (Book Wholesale)
Annual Revenue: £22 million
Employees: 170
Product: Ingres 2006 / ABF
"...its a serious and unique benefit to be able to deal direct with the people actually developing the database, rather than going through a third-party...We also really like the way the open source model adopted by Ingres has substantially cut our costs."
Tim Cotterall
Commercial Director
Askews Library Services
It has no name or even a fashionably obscure acronym, and yet the bespoke central system operated by Askews Library Services is, quite literally, the core around which this specialist supplier to the world's book lending libraries has built a highly successful and resilient business.
At the heart of the system-with-no-name is the Ingres database. For more than 10 years and through successive upgrades, it has provided Askews with an ultra reliable, high performance and easily maintained platform for growth. "And no sleepless nights," adds Tim Cotterall, Askews Commercial Director.
An IT veteran with extensive experience of complex environments, Cotterall was hired as IT manager by Askews in 1997. The firm had been struggling with the development and deployment of the bespoke central system after four years of work, the migration from HP platforms to Sun technology running Ingres was in production but was still less than fit for purpose. Cotterall, recruited partly because he was already familiar with Ingres having run systems built around the database at his previous employer, swiftly built a team that pulled the project back on track. He recalls: "The problems were actually nothing to do with the database and we were able to resolve them very effectively." So effectively, that today's system can trace its lineage directly back to the original of 1997. It's grown in capacity and ability, but it is faithful to the original concept and the database, recently upgraded to Ingres 2006, remains at the core.
Founded 130 years ago and one of the longest-established companies of its type, Askews is nevertheless a business of the times. Although it is physically located in Preston in the UK, it uses the Web to market globally and the Internet to serve customers world-wide via Electronic Data Interchange. Askews is a full-service library supplier. It provides libraries with a complete package - selection support, buying, cataloguing, physical preparation for lending, promotional support and management reporting. "You can think of us as a factory," says Cotterall.
"We understand the pressures libraries face and so we employ a multi-stage process that results in an end-product that makes their lives easier and more cost-effective. That end-product is a fully catalogued book, with the right protective cover on it, and with the right combination of bar code, lending ticket and security mark applied, ready to go on a library shelf somewhere to be lent to a reader."
Achieving that end product requires the employment of some 150 staff and Ingres. The libraries market has become increasingly sensitive as economic pressures cap and in some cases depress spending, but there are still rewards to be played for. Four other companies compete with Askews in the £90m-a-year UK market where contracts are awarded by competitive tender. The combination of the need to tightly control costs at home while supporting a programme to develop geographical reach, has pushed Ingres even more to the fore at Askews. "The pressures have meant we've had to become smarter and more efficient at what we do," explains Cotterall. "Doing things electronically that before were largely manual processes has benefits for us and for our customers. It allows us to keep our costs under control and pass on the savings which in turn makes us a more compelling partner than our competitors. Of course, it becomes even more important when you're servicing some customers half way around the world. We like to think we are at the leading edge of e-procurement and we offer a complete solution for EDI orders, quotes, acknowledgements, order fulfilment and invoices - in short the complete supply chain. 80-90% of orders are now placed electronically and our customers are able to access information stored in the database in order to make their selection. It's very transparent, but of course it places more demands on our systems."
So how large is the database? "It currently holds details of four million titles, 900,000 of which are currently in print. It's vital that we keep such a large repository of information about out of print titles because publishers can often decide to print another run of a title. We also need to retain knowledge of each customer and the relationship between each customer and each individual title. Different libraries have different requirements that we need to remember and apply to each of the books we prepare for delivery. There is no standard approach. One customer might expect a certain type of protective cover and want a book on geography denoted with a yellow spot. Another might want a certain type of date label and bar code. We deliver some three million books a year and deal with more than 5,000 libraries in the UK alone, many of them with a different profile of interests and requirements." Systems managers will immediately recognise that the Askews database team faces a task of significant complexity. But Cotterall insists it is very manageable, thanks in no small part to the ease with which Ingres can be maintained. Four in-house developers actually spend most of their time building enhancements to the service and working towards major system upgrades which, so far, have taken place approximately every three years.
The latest upgrade came just before Christmas in 2006 when the hardware was upgraded to Sun x86 platforms, the operating system to Solaris 10 and the database moved to Ingres 2006 all without drama. Cotterall accepts that such smooth transitions owe much to the practised ease with which his people manage change, but he also pays tribute to the way the new version of Ingres simply builds on the strong foundations of earlier ones and delivers enhanced functionality without tears. "We did a couple of tests and went live."
"On the rare occasions we have had a problem, we've found the Ingres support service to be very good even out of hours. We were concerned about the future when Ingres was taken out of CA, particularly over the possibility that the database might simply die through lack of development, but Ingres 2006 has shown us that our fears were groundless. Ingres as a company is doing the right things."
Cotterall approves of the commitment to product development; he also likes the way licensing is now structured. "First of all, it's a serious and unique benefit to be able to deal direct with the people actually developing the database, rather than going through a third-party which we would be forced to do if we used an alternative database. We also really like the way the open source model adopted by Ingres has substantially cut our costs. Ingres is clearly well aware that it will only retain the confidence of customers like us if it keeps a tight grip on development and I am confident that it will do so".
"For now, the system does all we need, and does it with great integrity. Ingres makes a profound contribution to that robustness and utility because it is very high performance, flexible, ultra stable and easy to maintain."
Some might be surprised that Askews has stuck with the essentially green-screen Solaris environment for so long, but Cotterall counters that the business is driven by the pragmatists' mantra: 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' "We do have some Java screens on the desktop running via terminal emulation and we are looking at possibly moving to a windows environment, but that's in the future."