Case studies
What our customers actually run, in their own words. Recorded from customers rather than constructed.
Some of our customers have been with us for more than twenty years, running the same software on their third or fourth generation of hardware.
Everything below is recorded from customers rather than constructed.
Never comes up in conversation, don't think about it, it just works, like electricity, always there.
Southern Mills / TenCate, a customer of twenty years
Xi-Batch
Local authority
Overnight batch across a Unix estate
Kirklees Metropolitan Council migrated applications from an ICL VME mainframe to distributed Unix systems, moving to unattended overnight operation at the same time. Xi-Batch was selected by tender and manages batch scheduling across the networked Unix systems, including the mutual dependencies between application systems and the interface between the mainframe and the Unix estate.
It runs across multiple relational databases - Oracle, Ingres, Informix - as well as mainframe IDMS and COBOL flat files.
The ability to customise Xi-Batch's text and commands to resemble the scheduler operations already knew is what made the transition work, and the internal hooks let it be interfaced to the council's alert management system.
We schedule overnight batches, and it just works seamlessly. We are long-term customers and can't find anything else as good.
Adrian Foster, Kirklees Metropolitan Council
Healthcare
Database and system scheduling
A medical centre runs Xi-Batch on IBM AIX, scheduling database and operating system jobs at over 200 jobs per server.
It operates so efficiently on its own, scheduling jobs and managing databases seamlessly.
Anthony D'Angelo, Montefiore Medical Centre / Emerging Health
Warehousing and logistics
Across regions, for more than ten years
A global logistics operation runs Xi-Batch on AIX servers in the United States and Singapore, serving North America and Asia-Pacific. It runs the batch programmes behind the warehousing system, and has done for more than ten years.
Financial services
Clearing and settlement
A clearing house uses Xi-Batch to control stock movement transactions, and has since 2000. It is among the most demanding installations we have, using essentially every aspect of the product.
Xi-Text
Document services
High-volume statement and invoice production
A document service bureau prints around a quarter of a million pages a day, averaging five to ten million pages a month, driving four Xerox DocuPrint laser printers from Sun Solaris systems.
Xi-Text segments large jobs across multiple printers. An eight-hour print run becomes a series of segments of about an hour each, which means operators can start jobs right up to the end of the production shift, an urgent job waits one segment rather than the remainder of an eight-hour run, output is handled in manageable batches, and a printer failure moves the segment elsewhere and resumes cleanly at the segment boundary.
Reducing errors is what this business is all about. An error rate of one in 10,000 sounds good - but if you print 5 million pages a month, that's 500 phone calls. Xi-Text is an important part of our QA programme.
Marty Scholes, Output Services Inc.
Higher education
Cross-campus report distribution
A university uses Xi-Text to manage printers across campuses for report distribution from its student records system.
If it wasn't for Xi, we would have to write reports differently for each printer. This enables operators to queue up or down the printer, queue and hold jobs. Very straightforward.
University of Richmond
Manufacturing
Extending the life of a legacy ERP
A textiles manufacturer runs an ERP system now thirty years old on Red Hat Linux, having moved from a Basic-4 system to Unix decades ago. Xi-Text handles its printing, and is one of the things making it viable to keep running.
Also recorded
Shorter accounts of Xi-Text at work
- Printing cheques to secure printers most of the organisation cannot reach
- Formatting from a single form definition and converting per printer, so applications need not know about device differences
- Serving applications that have no interface to the native spooler at all
- Replacing an inadequate AIX spooling system
- Feeding a document management system, with Xi-Text holding and routing the spool
- One site running 11,500 print jobs a week
On support
The support provided by Xi has been tremendous, even with the 5 hour time difference.
David Laneville, Manager of I/S, City of Timmins, Canada
I only wish that the other vendors we deal with could be half as good as you guys.
Greg Walker, Tap Publishing Company
Would you like to speak to a customer?
For a serious evaluation we can usually arrange a conversation with an existing customer in a comparable environment.