adidas connects its System i back-end to Microsoft’s Office front-end

Melbourne, Australia – February 28, 2008. - adidas Korea’s problem was one shared by many 5250 based applications around the world – the acceptance of the customized RPG back-end was hampered by its green-screen front-end. There was also no chance of easy integration with the Office desktop applications preferred by most business users.

“Our system needed agile responses and data integrity throughout all the processes relating to new product announcements, promotions and the processing of orders and sales. To achieve these requirements, we investigated a number of options, and newlook gave the best results. It made it possible for us to develop a graphical, web-enabled user interface in no time at all.” said B.H. Lee, Team Leader of adidas Korea’s IT team.

“Our end users are very happy with the improved user experience and additional functionality we have provided. They love the seamless integration with Microsoft Office and now think the System i is wonderful!”, said Mr. Lee. Now they have a front-end that integrates with Excel, Word and other desktop applications. It also looks and feels like the applications the business users are already accustomed to and no changes were required to the core RPG back-end application.

“The more we use it to enhance, modernize and integrate our applications, the more we appreciate the power of the looksoftware suite of programs”, said Mr. Lee. Our users are now actively suggesting other ways in which the applications can benefit from newlook’s capabilities – it seems to them that there is very little you can’t do with it!”

“adidas is leading an important new trend started by Microsoft and SAP with their Duet product when they connected SAP back-end functionality to the Office front-end”, said Marcus Dee, Managing Director, looksoftware. “The analysts including Gartner and Forrester agree that it makes sense to connect existing back-end applications to the front-ends that most users already use and prefer, like Microsoft’s Outlook and IBM’s Notes. IBM back-end applications can be accessed from Outlook, Notes, even Google, relatively easily, using SOA, without changing a line of code.” Dee continued.

About adidas

The adidas corporation has revenues approaching €10 billion and representation in every major market in the world. Today, the company is the world’s largest manufacturer of sports footwear, clothing and accessories and in 2006 acquired one of its major competitors, Reebok.

adidas Korea is just one of the many successful national subsidiaries of the group, with 500 stores around the country. Being a long-established user of IBM System i hardware, it had developed its own core ERP application which has successfully coped with the company’s requirements for some years.

Read more on adidas loves System i again!