Daniel IT Services featured on Line56.com for work on Carrot Ink ecommerce site.

Line56.com featured Daniel IT Services in a article relating to the Carrot Ink ecommerce site. Carrot Ink sells printer cartridges and contracted with the IBM Business Partner to provide development and implementation services for the J2EE-based WebSphere Commerce application.

Background
Founded in the spring of 1998, Carrot Ink (www.carrotink.com) has stamped itself as one of the Internet's premier retailers of inkjet printer cartridges and supplies. Carrying such leading brands as Epson, Canon and Hewlett-
Packard, the company supplies as many as 400 individual cartridge types, supporting thousands of different printer models. Carrot Ink was a true startup success story. Founder John Howard built the existing home-grown" Web site himself using Microsoft FrontPage® and Mercantecs SoftCart e-commerce storefront application on an Apache Web server running Linux. With more than 800 static HTML pages and expanding daily, the Web site was becoming cumbersome to manage and update.

With the growth of Carrot Ink's e-commerce business, the retailer needed a solution that was more user friendly, easier to maintain and dynamic, so that catalog and product changes could be easily and quickly implemented.
The site was outgrowing its current shopping cart application. It was very difficult to change and manage both the cosmetics of the site and the data, such as product descriptions, graphics or pricing.

We had an ambitious goal," said John Howard, Carrot Ink founder. We wanted customers to be able to find their product in three clicks. The first click would take them to the Web site, the second one to the right printer line, the
third to the right cartridge. Any more effort than that and shoppers become frustrated and go elsewhere," said Howard.

I talked with a number of professionals, all of whom said IBM has this great thing called WebSphere® Commerce Suite," said Howard. So I took a class at IBM to see for myself. I realized soon that WebSphere was a very professional package beyond my skillset. It made sense to outsource the design, development, implementation and managed hosting services. This would also free us up to focus more on marketing and business development, and less on technical details."
He didnt have to look far for a solution. His course instructor was Rhett Daniel, CEO of Daniel IT Services (http://www.danielit.com), an Advanced member of Partnerworld® for Software. Daniel recommended and implemented WebSphere Commerce Suite V5.1 and DB2® UDB running on a Microsoft Windows® 2000 server, as well as a Lotus® Domino® server running Linux for messaging. The company is also providing managed hosting services and a VPN (Virtual Private Network), allowing the client and Business Partner to share management and administrative control.

About the Business Partner

Daniel IT Services is a computer consulting provider, offering services in business Internet site development, application development, application integration, technical courseware development and course delivery.

The company specializes in the development of custom e-business and e-commerce solutions for business-to-business and business to consumer applications using IBM WebSphere, WebSphere Commerce Suite, Lotus Domino and J2EE
development and integration.