The solution was to separate the customer interactions from internal systems, so customers could choose their preferred way of connecting using an extranet portal without affecting the operations of Avnet's internal systems. "We could now create a custom layer to adapt to our customer needs: b-to-b your way, not b-to-b our way," Chapman says. Those choices ranged from direct links to customer ERP systems to Web pages that enabled customers to enter orders manually.

As it had done with its internal systems, Avnet deployed wrappers around key legacy applications and created new services for missing functions, all accessed through generic APIs at the portal. In some cases, that meant providing adapters for the client to use; in others, it meant transforming data to whatever format the customer preferred, from IDoc to EDI to RosettaNet.

The M&A challenge

Not long after the RosettaNet effort, Avnet faced a new integration challenge: The company purchased IBM distributor the Savoir Technology Group in summer 2000. Along with the business came new applications that Avnet wanted to make available to both HP and its storage product clients.

Avnet, however, first simply had to make the Savoir front end work with the Avnet back end. "We took all their front-end apps and had them running on our system in three months," Chapman notes. The company performed this trick by creating new services to translate Savoir's data and basic functions into Avnet's common model.