Founded in 1920 and headquartered in Germany, the adidas group is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of sports footwear, clothing, and accessories, with 500 stores throughout the world. Since 1928, when athletes began wearing adidas shoes at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam, the company has become involved in one way or another with every major sporting event in today’s global calendar. In 2006, it acquired competitor Reebok.

Company officials in Korea, one of adidas's national subsidiaries, rely on the System i and developed their own ERP application to handle their business requirements. The problem was that the system was hampered by its green-screen design and text interface. Also, there was no way to successfully and easily achieve the integration requirements being identified by users for the desktop functions of Microsoft Office.

Enter Looksoftware's Newlook

For a solution, the adidas group in Korea turned to looksoftware's newlook and its rules-based repository, which provides for the generation of a customized user interface to suit existing applications. Newlook is known as a fast and easy way to provide modern browser-based and Windows-based user interfaces for 5250-based applications. It eliminates repeated collections, conversions, and compilations and solves the double-maintenance problem.

Newlook offers an integrated, web-enabled system capable of graphical information. It promises seamless integration with other applications without the need to change the original applications.

"Our system needed agile responses and data integrity throughout all the processes relating to new product announcements, promotions, and the processing of orders and sales," says B.H. Lee, team leader of adidas Korea's IT shop. "To achieve these requirements, we investigated a number of options, and newlook gave the best results."

Lee adds, "It made it possible for us to develop a graphical, web-enabled user interface in no time at all from our text-based legacy system. The more we use it to enhance, modernize, and integrate our applications, the more we appreciate the power of the looksoftware suite of programs. Our end users are very happy with the convenience and added functions that we have provided them with. They love the seamless integration with Microsoft Office and now think the System i is wonderful!"

The Looksoftware Way

Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, looksoftware is an Advanced IBM Partner and Microsoft Certified Business Partner. The company specializes in tools to web-enable, reuse, extend, and integrate core applications. It is a member of the IBM Developer Roadmap and the Midrange Alliance.

"Adidas is leading an important new trend started by Microsoft and SAP with their Duet product when they connected SAP back-end functionality to the Office front-end," notes Marcus Dee, managing director of looksoftware. "The analysts including Gartner and Forrester agree that it makes sense to connect existing back-end applications to the front ends that most users already use and prefer. IBM back-end applications can be accessed from Outlook, Notes, even Google, relatively easily, using SOA, without changing a line of code."