The ongoing Customer Q & A blog series highlights a wide range of Jitterbit customers to find out what business needs drove their integration requirements and what their reasons for selecting Jitterbit as their integration solution.
In this week’s hot seat is Rick Proctor, VP of Information Technology at Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Can you tell me a little about Thomas Nelson?
Thomas Nelson is a publisher of Christian books, bibles, videos, and toys. We are headquartered in Nashville, and the company has been around since 1798. We currently employ about 700 people. You’ll find our books across a variety of retailers, including Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com.
How did you find out about Jitterbit and what were some of the reasons you chose it as your integration solution?
We needed to not only migrate off the mainframe, but then create an ongoing integration between our modern business applications. It became clear pretty early on that building something ourselves wasn’t a viable option, so I searched Google for some tools and found Jitterbit.
I downloaded Jitterbit and played with a few simple data transformations. I immediately liked what I saw so I passed it on to the others in my group to take a look at. We really loved the client interface because it was much more visual and easy to use than any of the other vendors we looked at. In the end though, we chose to go with Jitterbit for the ongoing support and maintenance. For a project of this size and with our plans to standardize on Jitterbit as our integration platform, knowing we had a support team behind it was of the utmost importance.
How do you currently use Jitterbit?
3-4 of members of our IT group touch Jitterbit on a day to day basis. Currently, we are using Jitterbit to help us migrate off our mainframe system, so that we can move to a more modern objected oriented environment. We are currently in the process of overhauling nearly 30 years of data and Jitterbit is helping us migrate and normalize all of this data from our mainframe system to a number of other systems — specifically Microsoft Dynamics for our financials, Red Prairie’s Warehouse Management, Klopotek’s royalties/contracts system, and our in-house order processing system. Jitterbit is absolutely critical to this project.
Moving forward we are going to make Jitterbit the data transformation and messaging layer for our entire infrastructure. Eventually, we also plan to use Jitterbit to help us deliver catalog content to retailers like Amazon.com.
From a business perspective, how has Jitterbit helped Thomas Nelson?
The biggest benefit with using Jitterbit over our previous in-house methods has been a huge savings on time for configuration and maintenance. Jitterbit gives us a standardized platform to build on and it has great reporting tools that let us know exactly what is going on with our various integration operations.
Developers are smart people and we want them to do smart work. Maintenance is busy work and this isn’t what I want them spending time on. I would much rather have them working on strategic projects to move the company forward – Jitterbit lets them do this.
From a time-savings perspective, Jitterbit has been huge. Previously, integration took up to 40% of the time of any given IT project. With Jitterbit, this has been cut to 10%. With projects than can last as long as year, you can imagine how much time we save now.
Thanks Rick! If you want to learn more about Thomas Nelson’s integration, be sure to check out their Customer Success Story.
Do you have a Jitterbit success story you would like to share? Drop us a line at customersuccess [at] jitterbit.com or @jitterbit on twitter.
