It provides us with scalable and portable applications, a robust, resilient database, and a highly productive application development environment. Tight integration between the stores and group headquarters is a key objective. Specsavers also selected the Sun Solaris implementation of UNIX for maximum cost-effectiveness. The servers in the stores are Intel. At the central office, we have large multi-processor Sun servers, so we have achieved consistency of operating system regardless of the platform.
Progress fits well because it provides complete flexibility across the application base.
The optical business is highly specialized, and Specsavers' experience is that standard applications packages are not available to fit all of the operational needs of the business. Progress's Roundtable software configuration tool has also proved useful for managing team development and version control, which is especially important with such a highly distributed network. A team of eight developers was trained in Progress. The stores feed the central database at headquarters, which at the last count contained some 8.1 million customers. New sales reporting and replenishment systems have also been written, so item level transaction data can be collected from the stores and added to the data warehouse.