CIOIN

Roland Whitehead

IT director, Bonhams

Executive summary

Open  source infrastructure  supported  and fuelled  Bonham's   ambitious growth, helping sales grow  from a  $64 million in 2000 to more than $400 million, and a  customer base to triple to 1.3 million  The secret is a home-grown auction management system, which runs on Linux and powers almost every aspect of the auction house's business, including  property management and CRM.

The secret sauce behind Bonhams' bid to grow and flourish is a home-grown auction management system, which runs on Linux and powers almost every aspect of the auction house's business, including functions as wide-ranging as property management and CRM. Bonhams' IT director Roland Whitehead says he built this core system internally rather than install ERP and CRM applications in order to keep Bonhams' costs down.

Bonhams' management team wanted a user-friendly trading system that would provide accurate sales, stock and customer information and would make the production of catalogues easier. Whitehead decided to build the system in-house because, having worked with packaged applications like SAP he didn't think they were flexible enough. Bonhams' IT director also wanted to build a single system that encompassed as many activities and business processes in which the auction house engages as possible so that he wouldn't have to patch together a bunch of disparate systems. Whitehead and two developers began building the system, dubbed A3, in May 2001, well before Brooks' acquisition spree was complete. The IT director opted for software and development tools from vendor Progress for two reasons: they were less expensive than Oracle, and more scalable and reliable than Microsoft. He also liked the software because it provided a single programming language for three separate activities - coding the database, programming the business logic and writing the programs that deliver content to the Web.

Whitehead discovered that the cost of licensing technology from Sun for that kind of distributed computing architecture was prohibitive. So instead he chose to go with Linux. And IBM, eager to enter the Linux market, made Whitehead an offer he couldn't refuse on its x series servers. Whitehead also uses Apache Web servers, Tomcat, the open source version of the Java servlet, FOP, an open source typesetting system, and many other open source applications.

With the architecture in place, Whitehead and his programmers began developing a framework for storing and displaying information in A3. The framework establishes the user interface for A3 and manages all the business rules that dictate how A3 works. The application has programming logic for all manner of activities, from authenticating users to tracking properties, mining customer information and producing reports on sales activity.

The application interface is stored in a database so that developers can reuse it quickly and easily when working on enhancements to A3. Whitehead originally planned to launch A3 in the summer of 2002, but the pace of acquisitions and the need to build the acquired companies' processes into A3 slowed down the project. A3 went live six months after originally planned, in January 2003. Whitehead has said that A3 cost approximately $800,000 to develop.

Bonhams' top executives seem impressed by all this newfound IT agility. "When we ask things of IT that will help us drive the business forward, they come up with answers pretty quickly," says CEO Barber. And when he wants to know what goods have been consigned, which are ready for sale and how each department within the company is doing, Barber turns to A3. When you've got offices all over the world, it gives me a comforting feeling that I can get an overview [of the entire business] very quickly," he adds.