By Brett Mendel
Network World, 12/24/01

Like many corporations, Canada's Scotiabank has global aspirations. And not surprisingly, it has turned to the Web for the power to meet those goals.

Scotiabank has consumer and business-to-business Web sites in 50 countries, several services tied directly to e-commerce, and a 1-year-old subsidiary, e-Scotia, to drive into the e-commerce market even further.

"Our vision is to be the conduit for many e-commerce needs, not just banking, on a global scale," says Albert Wahbe, who orchestrated Scotiabank's e-business initiatives and conceptualized the e-Scotia plan while he was CIO. The bank has largely achieved that goal under Wahbe, who is now executive vice president of electronic banking at Scotiabank and CEO of e-Scotia. Its online businesses (such as a public-key infrastructure outsourcing service) and international reach have helped Scotiabank double revenue from its traditional cash-management business in the last three years.

But as any network executive can attest, knowing your CEO's grand vision is one thing, developing and managing it is quite another. Throw in the challenge of localizing sites to the languages and cultures of different countries, and establishing an international Web presence can take an Olympian effort.

Global goals, local ties

As they must with any satellite Web site residing outside the corporate network, network executives have to exert some control over the site and those responsible for administering it locally. The twist with globalization is the level of customization required in each locale. "The biggest hassle is making your content reflect the different communities you want to reach," says Steve Shah, a Web-architecture expert and manager of technical marketing at ClickArray Networks.

Language is the most obvious hurdle. Makers of content management system (CMS) software - a staple for many Web operations in managing the accuracy and flow of site content - have only begun to add translation features. Corporations that have long since built out Web sites in other countries already had to make their support choices. They let each locale maintain its own Web site with oversight from central IT, or they maintain a centralized, English-only site that they update and disseminate. Scotiabank keeps a front end of marketing and other nontransactional material that is replicated through its private network to all international sites. Each site prepares content updates, which a team in Toronto inspects for consistent branding and messaging. Pre-Web back-end customer-transaction systems remain housed in and specific to each country, Wahbe says.

Other corporations have circumvented the content quagmire by collapsing far-flung systems into one. That's what Honeywell Industrial Automation and Control (IAC) group did when it decided it could best serve its international customer and employee bases by consolidating roughly 17 sites into one site hosted domestically. The IAC group, which produces automation equipment for processing plants such as oil refineries, has to provide customers with information on service contracts, pricing agreements and repair requests. "There were a lot of inefficiencies before we consolidated," says Paul Orzeske, vice president of e-business at Honeywell IAC in Chicago.

Previously, international sites and databases were independent, not synchronized with the Honeywell IAC network. Sales representatives fetched answers for customers primarily by e-mailing employees who had access to the appropriate databases, be they for product catalogs, inventory, pricing, customer contracts, order management or other functions. Those databases relied on a variety of incompatible software and platforms.

Now the infrastructure for IAC's international Web operation resides in Honeywell's Phoenix facility, with one portal giving customers and employees secure access to the data they need, from wherever they are in the world. The portal requires users to register and log on before they can retrieve their desired data.

The myriad databases providing that information are located in the Phoenix data center, along with 10 development and test servers and four production servers, all behind a firewall. On the other side of the protected network sits one production server that receives batch updates of customer and product information from the data center's back-end databases and a CMS server, which acts as a communications interface between the databases and the public Web server.

Whereas in the past customers could have waited days for answers to their questions, they can now retrieve answers themselves almost instantaneously. And by switching to a system where customers and employees access one production server that receives batch updates from back-end databases, as opposed to simultaneously accessing back-end systems with separate requests, performance has been significantly improved despite an increase in the number of requests being served, Orzeske says.

Documents without borders

Global e-commerce managers have learned that most effective sites are presented in the local language. "In order to sell products in some countries, you have to be perceived as a local company," says Tami Bernier, manager of Web technology at Redback Networks.

The company recently launched sites in China, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that just provide information for marketing and sales support rather than e-commerce capabilities. Although each site appears in a local language, Redback relies on a centralized Web operation whose infrastructure remains largely untouched except for some tweaking of the site's directory structure supporting the sites.

That minor amount of development work was made possible by a critical addition: globalization software.  This relatively new type of application provides many of the functions of a CMS while smoothing the process of Web-page translation. Templates dictate page design, regardless of language, and let people translate pages without touching the format.

The only additional hardware required to handle Redback's new sites was one server - instead of storing the Web server and content database on one machine, Redback split them onto two to accommodate the rise in traffic.

The key to globalization software is XML, which lets documents be presented in a standard format, regardless of origin, and easily integrated into a Web site.

In fact, the same need exists for sites that are presented only in English. At Honeywell IAC, data comes from sources such as enterprise resource planning, financial and manufacturing applications that are scattered around legacy, Unix and Microsoft Windows NT systems. With a CMS that can pull data from those systems and encapsulate them in XML, the incompatibility of the underlying file format becomes a nonissue when the data is passed into an XML-enabled Web system.

Location, location, location

Without globalization software, corporations can still create international Web sites with little disturbance to the existing infrastructure. Companies that want to add international content yet keep servers and data stored in a central location can give users access to those servers through a directory tacked on to the existing site address. Unfortunately, e-commerce might require faster access to data than can be achieved by traversing many network hops across the globe.

A company might need servers and content-routing equipment in each region. Web users could choose a specific language from the initial home page and be routed to the appropriate group of international servers housing the content in that language. Such a setup typically requires load-balancing routers at the central location to redirect traffic.

A more cost-effective method for speeding access while maintaining a Web infrastructure in one location is to use a Web-caching service such as is available from Akamai Technologies. In this scenario, the Web request would go to the nearest cache server rather than to the central domestic location. This would minimize the infrastructure changes required for the new sites, keeping them in one location and reducing administration costs.

"The decision to cache vs. maintain locations around the world is largely a function of your ability to manage multiple locations without it costing too much," ClickArray's Shah says. Included in that cost is the task of keeping content synchronized, he adds.

As many network executives have learned, maintaining international Web sites from a single data center will help keep globalization costs down. Of course, with that control comes the need for more programming sleight of hand to ensure data consistency in a number of languages and, in general, a more rigorous process of site maintenance. No matter, the result can mean powerful new business opportunities.

Mendel is a freelance writer in San Francisco. He can be reached at brett@mendel.net