When businesses need to calculate the sales tax for a customer's purchase, there's a good chance that they're using CorpSystem Sales Tax Online from CCH, one of the nation’s leading providers of tax and business law information and software solutions.

CCH turned to CA Plex 6.0 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 to transform its original application-service-provided solution on the System i into a different kind of workhouse that utilized the .NET framework.

CCH saw the opportunity to offer an enhanced version of Sales Tax Online, one that companies could host on their own while still getting database updates over the Internet from CCH in the business model "Software + Services."

By hosting the new application themselves, large enterprises with extensive rates of transactions could become more organized and gain control over the tax calculation process. For example, they could increase the rates of responsiveness and availability, something that wasn't possible when an application had to continually send information across the Internet.

The company wanted the solution to be flexible so that customers could easily integrate it with their existing business software. CCH also wanted the development to be as fast and as cost effective as possible in order to bring the product to market quickly, thus maintaining and increasing competitive advantage. It also wanted to ensure the broadest possible market acceptance.

To meet its objectives, CCH used the CA Plex 6.0 tool and the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development system to integrate its initial System i product into a solution with .NET-connected code for Sales Tax Office. The Plex tool enabled the developers to write their application quickly using the high-level Plex language.

Srinivas Koppisetty, CCH senior software engineer, noted the ability of Plex to automate the generation of C# code for .NET as well as the tool's creation of high-level patterns –- or building blocks –- of functionality that can be reused for future development without having to write additional code.