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Computerworld - In 1999, Volkswagen AG's top executives directed Chief Technology Officer Claus Hohmann and his IT team to design and build an IT infrastructure that would flawlessly support a unique and highly customer-centric automotive theme park. The idea was to create a spectacular and ever-changing marketing venue where visitors could experience state-of-the-art automotive technology. Buyers would pick up their new cars from one of the park's two gleaming 20-story, fully automated glass-and-steel towers.

The Autostadt, or "car city," which is near Wolfsburg, Germany, celebrates its third birthday this month and has attracted more than 6 million visitors. Some 6,000 per day have toured its car museum and six brand pavilions, which offer a variety of interactive and computerized exhibits and Web-based point-of-information (POI) terminals. They've dined in the park's restaurants and bars and shopped in its stores, paying for goods and services with computerized stored-value cards issued upon arrival. Perhaps most important, 349,000 of Autostadt's visitors have taken delivery of new cars. This is the theme park's key success indicator, since its ultimate goal is to wow every person who comes through Autostadt to the point of buying a new car.

Point-of-information terminals throughout the park are just one of the IT innovations geared toward providing visitors with ever-changing content.

"We are not a normal corporation where we have a headquarters and a shop floor. We are producing adventures and values," says Hohmann, who came to the Autostadt from Volkswagen's Skoda Auto AS unit in the Czech Republic. To do that, he says, "we have had to combine different worlds." These include Volkswagen's mainframe-based factory systems, proprietary Unix-based systems that run the car towers, plus various packaged and proprietary Web-based applications written in Java for reservations, customer service and multimedia entertainment systems.

All of this information comes together at Autostadt over a three-tier information architecture called the Integrated Autostadt System (IAS). At its center is Vignette Corp.'s V6 Content Suite software, which functions as the Web-based window through which information about car deliveries, event bookings and daily ticketing, plus reservations for the Autostadt-owned Ritz-Carlton Hotel, is drawn together. The system presents information to Autostadt and Volkswagen employees based on their predefined roles.

"This provides optimized process support and covers all data protection," explains Bruna. The architecture also provides Internet and intranet services that let customers and employees access more general information.

Online interfaces link the Vignette server to a centralized Oracle8i database into which these various back-end systems funnel data. The interfaces use IBM's MQSeries middleware and BEA Systems Inc.'s Tuxedo transaction monitor. Until last month, the Oracle database ran on two Sun Enterprise 4500 database servers with Sun Cluster 2x software. But Autostadt swapped these out one recent night for Sun Fire 4800 servers running Solaris 9.0.