Wolseley UK (“Wolseley”) is the UK operating company of Wolseley plc, the world's number one distributor of heating and plumbing products and a leading supplier of builders' products to the professional market. As part of a longer term strategy to extend functionality from a core legacy application Wolseley UK looked to Jubilant for a modern terminal emulator that could be used natively. Wolseley currently uses a client based terminal screen based application at the core of its critical business systems. Wolseley decided to roll out Jubilant’s browser based terminal emulation solution across its 600 UK stores and to 5, 000 devices.
So why did Wolseley choose Jubilant Security?
Wolseley faced a challenge to both utilise a pure HTML based emulator to access their legacy multivalue application and at the same time extend new functionality using the Oracle development platform as part of a longer term strategy to develop services that can be consumed across multiple interfaces and devices. A modern browser user interface would allow Wolseley to improve business processes, however, any solution would need to be fast, reliable and secure.
Multi-device
Wolseley wanted to operate their store workforce, capitalizing on IGEL thin client technology to improve the customer experience in their stores and also via PCs used in the back office. Jubilant’s pure HTML emulations automatically works on any device and allows employees to access the application through a variety of browsers. Jubilant doesn’t require any apps or software to be downloaded on the devices, giving Wolseley complete flexibility on desktop deployment whilst reducing training and maintenance overheads.
Security
Security is something that no organisation can afford to compromise. A solution relying on Java applets and Active X plugins was not viable.
Jubilant Terminal Emulator™ is a pure HTML emulator so does not require any plugins and thus avoids potential security risks. It had also recently undergone penetration tested by KPMG at another customer site. This meant Wolseley could be confident that Jubilant Viewer could enable them to meet their security objectives.
Efficiency
Jubilant Terminal Emulator’s server based configuration means that the application can be updated and maintained on the server side drastically reducing disruption and overheads, while increasing stability. Wolseley have opted to deploy Jubilant using load balanced servers and are actively testing scalability in preparation for the full rollout.
Jubilant have been supporting the development process with Wolseley and have generated a number of run time efficiency gains; one such development area has been to implement web sockets to improve the speed of the emulation; specifically avoiding the overhead of initializing request/response communication tunnels for each client/server action. This reduced the amount of data that needed to be sent over the network between the browser and Jubilant Terminal Emulator. This especially benefits Wolseley’s character based ADDS Viewpoint emulation, but would equally benefit other multivalue, character based protocols such as VT and ANSI along with IBM 3270 and 5250 block mode protocols.
Programmability
Jubilant Terminal Emulator has a fully programmable API, this has already enabled Wolseley to make their application available within the Oracle Fusion Framework.
The Jubilant API could be used in the future to modernize the look and feel of the application, or to take advantage of new technologies and working practices such as single sign on. This programmable API is an option that could enable further integration as needed by Wolseley in the longer term.