Trimble Navigation Ltd., Sunnyvale, CA, is the world leader in location-based products and services. No other company holds as many GPS patents.

Because Trimble sells its products worldwide, the company deals with many complex issues, including international licenses, pricing, trading agreements and documentation. Complicating the job further, many products are subject to U.S. strategic technologies export regulations. Trimble is a good corporate citizen and takes strong steps to comply with U.S. and foreign laws, regulations and agreements.

Problem: Data caught in a box – the HP 3000.

To facilitate the export process, Trimble implemented software from NextLinx, a company that specializes in streamlining global trade. NextLinx runs in Oracle on a UNIX platform and requires current data from Trimble’s manufacturing systems frequently each day. Unfortunately, Trimble’s legacy systems are not well suited to the need -- being based on the MANMAN ERP system with IMAGE databases and running on H-P 3000 computers.

Anne Fujimoto, Business Systems Manager at Trimble, found that getting data from the IMAGE database to the Oracle database wasn’t easy. Worse, the logical records needed were stored in multiple IMAGE datasets and databases. Despite Anne’s long experience with the H-P 3000, heavy hands-on skills in extracting data from IMAGE and the range of tools at her finger tips, she couldn't get the IMAGE data to NextLinx in any effective or timely fashion.

"I tried many different ways to solve the problem," said Ms. Fujimoto. "I could use IMAGE reporting tools, such as Quizz, to build extracts in order to show differentials, but there is no fast and easy and way to identify new and changed customer orders. I began to despair. Then I discovered BridgeWare."

Solution: Bring data into the open enterprise.

BridgeWare was the missing link in Anne’s system. In simple terms, BridgeWare catches transactions as IMAGE writes them to disk. Anne found she could specify what MANMAN transactions were needed and how they should be transformed for NextLinx. The transformed transactions were buffered until NextLinx requested them. The transfers can be set to occur transaction-by-transaction almost instantaneously or in batches at any interval.

Ms. Fujimoto was thrilled, "Only BridgeWare gave us the business benefits promised by NextLinx. Important, because we want to stay with the H-P 3000 for our manufacturing applications while adopting modern open-systems applications to increase productivity and competitiveness. Accessing our IMAGE data quickly and easily is the key."

A common problem. An uncommon solution.

This story illustrates one  example of a common problem experienced with data stored in H-P 3000 IMAGE databases -- how to get data from IMAGE to another system for other purposes? These uses include:

• A bolt on application such as NextLinx that needs IMAGE data in close to real-time.
• A web server that needs to communicate order and status data bi-directionally with IMAGE.
• A relational staging area used to replicate a copy of IMAGE data to other applications, such as query and reporting, operational data stores, data warehouses and data marts.