In 1999, Volkswagen's top executives directed chief
technology officer Claus Hohmann and his IT team to design and
build an IT infrastructure that would flawlessly support a unique
and highly customer-centric automotive theme park.
The idea was to create a spectacular and ever-changing marketing
venue where visitors could experience state-of-the-art automotive
technology. Buyers would pick up their new cars from one of the
park's two gleaming 20-storey, fully automated glass-and-steel
towers.
The Autostadt, or "car city", which is near Wolfsburg
in Germany, celebrates its third birthday this month and has
attracted more than six million visitors. Some 6,000 per day have
toured its car museum and six brand-new pavilions, which offer a
variety of interactive and computerised exhibits and web-based
point-of-information terminals. They've dined in the park's
restaurants and bars and shopped in its stores, paying for goods
and services with computerised stored-value cards issued upon
arrival. Perhaps most important, 349,000 of Autostadt's visitors
have taken delivery of new cars. This is the theme park's key
success indicator, since its ultimate goal is to wow every person
who comes through Autostadt to the point of buying a new car.
"We are not a normal corporation where we have a headquarters
and a shop floor. We are producing adventures and values, " says
Hohmann, who came to the Autostadt from Volkswagen's Skoda unit in
the Czech Republic. To do that, he says, "we have had to combine
different worlds". These include Volkswagen's mainframe-based
factory systems, proprietary Unix-based systems that run the car
towers, plus various packaged and proprietary web-based
applications written in Java for reservations, customer service and
multimedia entertainment systems.
All of this information comes together at Autostadt over a
three-tier information architecture called the Integrated Autostadt
System (IAS). At its centre is Vignette's V6 Content Suite
software, which functions as the web-based window through which
information about car deliveries, event bookings and daily
ticketing, plus reservations for the Autostadt-owned Ritz-Carlton
Hotel, is drawn together. The system presents information to
Autostadt and Volkswagen employees based on their predefined
roles.
"This provides optimised process support and covers all data
protection," explains chief information officer Michal Bruna. The
architecture also provides internet and intranet services which
allow customers and employees to access more general
information.
Online interfaces link the Vignette server to a centralised
Oracle8i database into which these various back-end systems funnel
data. The interfaces use IBM's MQSeries middleware and BEA Systems'
Tuxedo transaction monitor.
Until last month, the Oracle database ran on two Sun Enterprise
4500 database servers with Sun Cluster 2x software. But Autostadt
swapped these out one night for Sun Fire 4800 servers running
Solaris 9.0.
"The migration went so successfully and we were done so quickly
that we even had to wait for the first test users [to come in the
next morning]," says CIO Michal Bruna.
Burning the midnight oil on changes and fixes is one of the key
IT challenges as well as a point of pride at Autostadt. All
software and hardware upgrades and other changes must take place
after visiting hours. That means after 10pm, since the park is open
seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, and all systems must operate at
99.95% reliability for at least 12 hours a day.
Preparing for the server swap involved synchronising all
transactions and having the new machines in place and tested so
they could communicate with the network, explains Bruna. During the
cutover, "there's no internet, no IAS, the Sun environment is
dead," Bruna says.
Swapping servers
The good news is that thanks to extensive training of in-house
IT staff and plenty of hands-on practice, Autostadt has been able
to cut loose all external vendor consultants and contractors who
helped build the initial Autostadt IT architecture.
Initially, 20 contractors from Gedas, a German systems
integration firm partially owned by Volkswagen, helped develop and
implement the systems.
What's more, Bruna says, because of the internal IT group's
expertise, Autostadt has been able to downgrade service and support
contracts with Sun and its other hardware providers.
On the software side, the Vignette system functions as the
digital heart and soul of the IAS and Autostadt as a whole.
"Vignette is not a solution itself, but it is our development
environment, our tool kit for making applications and an area in
which we now have huge know-how," Bruna says.
He estimates that Autostadt has between 500 and 600 templates on
its Vignette servers. The Vignette system has two components: the
content management system, which runs on two Sun Netra T1 servers,
and the content delivery system, which runs on four Sun 420
servers. The IT staff include three full-time Vignette developers,
who receive two to three weeks of advanced Vignette training each
year.
Autostadt began using Vignette StoryServer Version 4.2 in June
2000. A key selling point was its use of templates to separate
content and format as well as its overall ease of use. Vignette
developers handle the design and associated back-end data calls and
connections for all templates, which non-technical users can then
populate with changing web page content.
One of the biggest integration challenges is negotiating the
IAS's sophisticated security mechanisms "to pull all of the
information I need to publish to the right people", says Vignette
developer Uwe Hollatz.
To get production manufacturing information from Volkswagen's
mainframe system, for example, the Autostadt uses RVS, a system to
share files to authenticated users over a remote directory.
"The data structure of these files is known, so I can write a
filter in Tool Command Language to parse the files and store the
results in our Oracle database. From this database, I have all the
possibilities to publish the data to the channels that are needed
because the Vignette system uses this database as the content
database for its delivery applications," Hollatz says.
The Autostadt's various channels include two completely new
websites, the POI terminals scattered throughout the park and an
intranet.
The ability to separate content and format means that new web
pages can be produced quickly and easily, with a minimum of
specialist skills. This, in turn, allows for more content
contributors which, Hohmann notes, is critical to Autostadt's
mission of providing an ever-changing venue to Autostadt's physical
and digital visitors.
Since its opening, Autostadt has migrated to Vignette V6 Content
Suite, which uses a newer TCL interpreter and has several new and
improved functions, including services to build reports and the
ability to dock onto a servlet engine such as Apache Software,
Foundation's Tomcat or BEA's WebLogic to deliver Java applications.
These small servlet applications, usually written in Java, enhance
the display and delivery of web pages.
The new websites include
www.autostadt.de, where
consumers can buy tickets, reserve a hotel room or learn more about
the theme park and educational and entertainment events, and
www.autosphere.autostadt.de,
which features flash animations, films and music for visitors with
a high-speed Integrated Services Digital Network or Asymmetric
Digital Subscriber Line connection.
Both sites are populated with content from the Vignette server
and were completed by the three in-house Vignette developers, who
worked on them full time for six months.
Guy Crease, an analyst at Boston-based Aberdeen Group, says
Autostadt has put a unique twist on content management by doing it
in such a "strategic marketing fashion". He also describes
Autostadt's "unified approach" to content management as "quite
rare".
Typically, Crease says, large organisations have multiple
content management systems, with different business units, regional
offices and country groups developing idiosyncratic sites
internally and externally.
Such a reaction is in line with Autostadt's business goal, which
is to stand out from the crowd by offering visitors a one-of-a-kind
experience. "The danger here," says Hohmann, "would be becoming a
normal corporate office."
The Autostadt IT Project
The challenge: Design and build an IT
infrastructure to support a unique automotive theme park and a
new-car delivery centre operating with 99.95% uptime at least 12
hours a day. Create internet-based applications; integrate with
existing mainframe systems.
Key technologies: Vignette V6 Content Suite;
Oracle8i database; IBM MQSeries middleware and BEA Systems Tuxedo
transaction monitor; Sun Microsystems servers running Solaris;
Cisco networking gear.
The cost: $500m (£309m). "Cheaper than Matrix:
Reloaded," says CIO Michal Bruna.
The payoff: About 349,000 of Autostadt's
visitors have left with new VWs. Customer satisfaction ratings
consistently exceed 98%. In three years, Autostadt has never lost
any data nor experienced any significant network or systems
problems.
Julia King writes for
Computerworld