Railroad operators have a lot of operations to consider on a regular basis, which could translate to data that needs to be managed successfully around the clock. Industries like this have an understandable reliance on their mainframes, because they have been using them for a long time and converting seems to cost too much time and money.
However, the Inventu Viewer is a simple solution for terminal access that will allow for rail companies to address problems as quickly through common mobile systems as with PC’s.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a derailment that the Canadian National Railway Co. experienced last month, in which trains carrying crude oil in Ontario left their tracks. A chief concern related to the accident is the state of the train tracks in that area of the railway system. The company has responded in part by committing more than $1 billion to safety-related and infrastructural improvement this year.
Jim Vena, COO of the company, was quoted describing the ongoing investigations.
“We had a rail break,” he said. “We are also looking at were the people doing the right thing? Were the inspections done properly? All the things that are important to see if we were missing something. And the [probe] is ongoing.”
Derailments are problems that threaten operations and require fast response as well as monitoring that is easy to manage in all centers. With Inventu, a department has a simple connection to the legacy applications previously run off of the mainframe, but in an internet-friendly environment that doesn’t require extra downloads, installations or apps. An external tool could take time to install and run just to perform simple actions. Instead, railroad workers should use an online solution that is closer to a website in terms of ease of access.
At Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), a risky installation of an unlicensed web emulation product (Flynet Viewer) has many scratching their heads. The product that BNSF is paying Flynet LTD for is almost six years old, and has been installed and running under an Evaluation-only license. The same product, named Inventu Viewer has almost six years of enhancements and bug fixes over the Flynet version and is available from Inventu Corporation, a U.S. corporation.
Why BNSF, a U.S. company, would purchase an unlicensed, older version of the same product from a British company and ignore a U.S. company selling a superior and supported version is certainly a mystery.