Omaha Steaks Puts Meat On The Online Bone

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August 15, 2000 (10:51 AM EDT)

Jeff Carter will never go through another outdoor grilling season as grueling as this summer's. Not because he's hanging up his apron and tongs for good, but because Omaha Steaks International Inc. is relaunching its online store.

Carter, the IS director of Omaha Steaks, has spent most of the year overseeing the redesign of the e-tailer's website, which launches this week. The revamped Net destination will still market filet mignons, sirloins, and boneless strips, but Omaha Steaks is betting that a more direct connection between the site and the company's order fulfillment system will make that job easier.

"The site's almost ready for prime time," Carter said.

Until now, Omaha Steaks has outsourced the hosting of its e-commerce site, which was built with static HTML. The result was heavy IT maintenance price updates, product launches, and discontinuations all had to be changed manually. The site didn't let customers track their orders in real time, either.

The new storefront will make updates and recall delivery data using a direct tie to the company's existing AS/400 back-end servers, which route products and generate estimated delivery dates based on room in the company's trucks, the products available, and which shipment modes are possible to individual locations.

On the site-serving end, Omaha Steaks will use a cluster of Linux servers that will be connected to the AS/400 back end via Web development software from eOneGroup. The Java servlet software, called jCommerce, resides on the Linux servers and makes stored procedure calls to the AS/400 data.

The visual presentation of the site is based on XML, and the company's development team controls the site through a graphic user interface.

"My people don't know anything about Java and don't care to,"Carter said. "What they're responsible for is the XML interfaces and the look and feel and the graphics -- the business issues."

In addition to the live connection to back-end systems, the site got a full aesthetic redesign with a more visible search box and a new front page with direct links to the company's product categories. Omaha Steaks plans to have the older sites' external links to affiliate programs and outside shopping sites moved to the new site by September.

EOneGroup charges $40,000 for a perpetual jCommerce license, plus an additional $40,000 for each processor running the application. Users also pay an annual 20 percent maintenance fee.