Help for Integration Woes

For Whit Gregg, server suites may not be perfect, but they are strong medicine for integration headaches. "Having gone through a decade of open systems, where we were integrating everything, preintegration of products represents a real benefit," he explains.

Gregg is director of MIS at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. (New York, NY), an investment research and management firm. Part of the network he oversees hosts a sophisticated document system that generates unique customer reports via 60 Windows NT-based servers running throughout the firm. Microsoft's BackOffice is a key component in that system.

As reports are requested, they're assembled with customer-specific info rmation, opinions, and market data. Gregg deploys pieces of BackOffice as required, and he's integrating more into the system. The data that feeds into the reports currently comes from a Sybase database, but it's being moved to SQL Server.

His company chose BackOffice partly because of Microsoft's size. Although his firm has occasionally dropped products and changed directions, Gregg isn't worried about it possibly happening again. "If I end up on the wrong side of a technology, I want to be with the majority in making that same mistake," he reasons. "The same logic that had us buying IBM in the 1970s has us buying Microsoft in the 1990s," he adds.