Dot-com opens up software science toolbox with e3000

While others drop dot-bombs, Software for Science thrives online

It can hardly be called an experiment to use the HP 3000 to start a business. But in an era with a high mortality rate for dot-com companies, putting the system at the heart of an e-commerce site for scientific software been a successful formula for Alex Cardona.

He operated an HP 3000 and the Smith-Gardner/Ecometry application for six years at another catalog provider, so Cardona had good data to pursue his dot-com experiment. That’s why at the start of this year he opened up Software for Science (www.softwareforscience.com) with a Series 928 HP e3000 and the Ecometry application.

Cardona admits his e-commerce operation is modest, but he’s got contracts with national distributor Ingram Micro to fulfill drop-shipped orders of hundreds of titles for hard science. More commonly ordered items like Fortran compilers are stocked in his warehouse, waiting for pick orders generated by the Ecometry 5.2 software on a Series 928RX.

And Software for Science is using one of the more advanced features of Ecometry: COM objects, which carry more information from registered customers into the sales process in the Web browser.

Software for Science is targeted at engineers and hard scientists. The COM objects give sites flexibility beyond what’s standard when Ecometry gets loaded on the e3000.

“There’s probably only two or three [Ecometry] Web sites out there enabled with Web objects,” Cardona said. In using them, “you’re not tied to the CGI scripts and profiles that Smith-Gardner gives you. You can do almost anything with them.

“You can track the customer without using the user ID that you have to keep bringing in page by page,” Cardona said. “The objects can take the customer’s information only once, and bring it all the way to the end of the shopping cart process.” For example, objects let a site fill out the order form at Software for Science automatically, after a buyer registers once. It also permits Web search engines to crawl through product descriptions, to register more hits for sites which use the objects.

Cardona runs the site as part of a Web hosting business he launched called Alive Studios.com. That firm is a member of the Ecometry Alliance Network, a collection of product and service suppliers who expand their market reach with help from the application supplier.

“I decided to get myself into this messy business,” Cardona said with a laugh. “The main idea was to offer a small company the option to Web-enable their business. A small catalog company with a $1-to-$2 million in sales doesn’t have the assets or capital to purchase the Ecometry system with the HP 3000. Ecometry has options to add up to 99 different companies, so we bought the package to do back end fulfillment.”

An HP SureStore disk array is attached to the Series 928 at the site, along with an HP Netserver LP for Web front-ending, and a UPS. The Netserver is backed up with a second server for reliability, but the e3000 stands on its own.

It was that reliability that led Cardona to choose the software to establish the dot-com sales site and the Ecometry Alliance partnership. In six years of managing an Ecometry site for another catalog provider, “not one time did my system go down,” he said.