Value City Furniture Puts NCs On The Table

Value City Furniture is reupholstering its IS operation with a new fabric of 1,000 Network Computers from IBM.

The Columbus, Ohio-based chain of retail furniture stores is deploying 1,000 IBM NetStation 1000s to serve as front ends to AS/400e units in each of the company's 70 or so stores in 13 states.

Value City plans to use the NCs to access invoicing, inventory and merchandising applications that run on the AS/400s. At the same time, Value City is also rolling out Lotu s Notes and plans to have store personnel access those applications through the Internet browser built into the NetStations. End users also will access E-mail on mainframes through 3270 terminal emulation. Many terminal applications will be fitted with a graphical front end using the J Walk Java-based GUI builder from Seagull Software Systems, said Jerry Kerr, CIO of Value City.

Ease of maintenance led Kerr to choose thin-client computing over full-fledged PCs.

"If I've got a thousand PCs out there, I've got to worry about maintaining a thousand PCs. If I've got to update the software, or if there's breakage, or if a disk goes out, I've got to handle that,'' Kerr said. NetStations present a prettier maintenance picture: With fewer spare parts and with software stored in a central location, updates and repairs are simplified.

Value City selected IBM's thin clients over other vendors' NCs because IBM offers a tight integration package among Notes, NCs and AS/400s, Kerr said.

The company plans to run several multimedia applications over Notes. One will be video training. Another app will be downloading floor plans for displaying furniture, including mock room layouts and overall design for store layout.

To handle the additional bandwidth needs, Kerr is investigating moving from a dial-up WAN to a "fatter pipe," most likely frame-relay. In stores, the company runs an Ethernet LAN, and the entire company is standardized on TCP/ IP, Kerr said.

Value City is planning to deploy Lotus' eSuite Java-based client software this summer to give end users access to word processing and spreadsheets. The company also is considering using eSuite as a Notes client.

The NetStation is IBM's high-end NC; it includes a Java Virtual Machine and other Java runtime components, Windows terminal software, terminal-emulation packages and an X-Window desktop interface. The eSuite software is licensed only to run on NetStation 1000s, but it can run on any Java-enabled system. "The only thing stopping it from running on other machines is that little piece of paper--the license,'' said Paul Boulay, project manager of marketing for IBM Network Computer Division.

Analyst Martin Marshall of Zona Research said that Value City's NC deployment is fairly typical of the way companies are rolling out thin clients: looking first at terminal emulation, with more sophisticated functions penciled in for later.

"Value City demonstrates there is a pent-up demand for terminal replacements. That will enable Network Computer numbers to be decent-to-good for the next 18 months. In the longer term, that cherry picking may give way to continued demand for Windows-based terminals rather than NCs,'' Marshall said.