ELECTRONIC MESSAGING FOR OPEN SYSTEMS BASF and HP X.400 BASF Background BASF Group is a major international chemical company with headquarters in Ludwigshafen, Germany. BASF Corporation is its North American organization and is among the leading producers and marketers of chemical and chemical-related materials in the world. In 1990, BASF Group employed 140,000 people worldwide with sales of $28 billion. BASF Corporation had sales of $5 billion in North America with 19,000 employees. The Electronic Mail Challenge In 1990, BASF had over 2,000 electronic mail users in the U.S. and over 10,000 in Germany. In the U.S. alone, users accessed five electronic mail systems which included CC:Mail, Network Courier, SprintMail, All-IN-1 and VMSMail. Because most of these email systems were incompatible, many BASF employees were limited in their ability to exchange electronic mail messages with each other. Also, since the mail systems were connected to public email carriers, email users were limited in their ability to communicate electronically with BASF's many worldwide business and trading partners. BASF believed that improving both internal and external electronic communication was of great strategic importance. Integration of their electronic mail environment was one tactic used in achieving this strategy. The Options In looking at the problem, two potential solutions immediately came to mind: * One idea was to replace the five disparate email systems with a single application. However, not only was this idea expensive, but the users of the existing systems had grown accustomed to them and did not wish to change. * A second option was to keep the existing email systems and find a way to allow them to communicate with each other. The Solution Rather than completely replace their current environment, BASF chose to integrate their existing email networks together into a single, heterogeneous, multivendor email network. The challenge that BASF faced in creating such a network was three-fold: First, they had to interconnect all five of their email systems in the U.S. and provide connectivity to both their corporate headquarters and their business partners. Second, BASF's new network would have to be designed so it could grow as new e-mail users and systems were added and network traffic increased. Lastly, BASF needed to ensure the impact to their end users would be kept to a minimum. To reach their first goal, connectivity, BASF chose to standardize on X.400 as the single common medium in which they could exchange messages. All of their electronic mail suppliers already supported X.400 gateways, so interconnection was no problem. An X.400 connection to a public X.400 carrier would enable BASF to communicate via e-mail to their business partners. However, in order to keep the number of interconnections in the network to a minimum, BASF decided to create an X.400 Messaging Backbone. BASF chose Hewlett-Packard as the supplier of this backbone for several reasons: * First, HP's X.400 product was considered to be the only viable UNIX-based X.400 solution available at the time. Other solutions were considered to be too "vanilla" and had yet to add capabilities such as troubleshooting tools, interoperability tools and menu driven interfaces, all which make HP's X.400 product easy to use, implement and maintain. * Second, BASF wanted to be able to increase the throughput of the network without necessarily adding additional backbone servers. Because HP's messaging solution is scalable from low end servers to high end mini/mainframe class systems, this was no problem. * Finally, HP supports value added capabilities as part of the HP Messaging Backbone such as: * Billing facilities which allow BASF to charge for use of the backbone * X.400 APIs for adding new applications specific to BASF's needs The Results for BASF Today, BASF's X.400 Backbone consists of a single HP 9000 Series 822 running HP X.400. This single X.400 node connects all of the BASF X.400 gateways to one another. It even reduces the amount of work required to maintain each gateway node because each gateway is only connected to the HP X.400 Server. The X.400 Backbone design simplifies the growth of the network since new severs and gateways can be added with little effect to existing gateway nodes. Eventually, BASF expects to have up to four Backbone Severs in the U.S. with over 10,000 electronic mail users. As their network grows and new servers are added, BASF will be able to manage all of their X.400 Servers from a single site. They also plan to use their X.400 Backbone to track billing information and maintain user access into and out of the network. The BASF X.400 network shows how OSI multivendor networking can help create a cooperative computing environment today. By using an X.400 Messaging Backbone from Hewlett-Packard, BASF is able to integrate any electronic mail network from any vendor which supports the X.400 standard. Their employees can now communicate more effectively with one another and with BASF business partners, while improving the competitiveness of BASF today, and in the years to come.