Client Brief: Sierra Club
America's oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization, the Sierra Club, has a chapter in each of the US states as well as a presence in Canada. The Sierra Club's mission is to explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth; practice and promote the responsible use of the Earth's ecosystems and resources; educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and use all lawful means to carry out these objectives. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 by John Muir. For more information, visit www.sierraclub.org or www.sierraclub.org/inside.
Why Exadel
"Exadel played a critical role in helping us navigate through the open source market," said Mark Maslow, lead programmer analyst, Sierra Club. "Their expertise and deep technology knowledge, in addition to their feature-rich development tools, helped us meet our business goals of simplifying our complex processes and creating more flexibility within our systems."
"The driving consideration was being able to have the most appropriate solution tailored specifically to what we needed and to do that on every level of the application," Maslow said.
Business Challenge
- Sierra Club needed to overhaul the Web-based reservation system for "Sierra Club Outings," a 100-year-old hallmark program. Tied to its membership database of over 3 million members, the reservation application had grown increasingly complex as additional business processes and requirements were added to the application
- With Sierra Club's database growing to more than 3 million members and interest in its outings on the rise, the reservation process was becoming increasingly complex. The Sierra Club estimated that about 70% of the 4,000 members who go on Sierra Club outings each year sign up online. The program brings in some $5 million annually, so an efficient, easy-to-use online reservation process was key
- To improve the system, the development team wanted to use a Java-based Web development toolset that could offer a component-based architecture and strong data conversion capabilities
- Sierra Club knew that it could find the right technologies in the open source community. They chose a Java-based application development project rooted in open source products: the Jakarta Struts Web application framework, Hibernate object/relational mapping software for database information storage and retrieval, the Eclipse development environment, and the Tomcat Web server. However, Sierra Club also needed the support and services of a commercially-backed product to ensure the project finished on time and with minimal technical headaches
Business Solution
- Sierra Club chose to bring in Exadel, which became an extension of the organization's development team
- Sierra Club used Exadel's consulting services (Development Boost) and Exadel Studio Pro, a Web application development environment built on Eclipse
Business Results
- Exadel helped Sierra Club take the online reservation system overhaul project from start to finish in less than three months
- Sierra Club was pleased with the results of the reservation system and decided to use Exadel to help develop another open source application for the Sierra Club's nearly three-dozen field offices to use in organizing political activities
- "The application is fully meeting all of our expectations, but I wasn't at all sure how I was going to do that before bringing in Exadel," said Maslow. "Certainly I could have gotten to the same place, but it would have taken me a lot longer to get there, that's for sure."
