The site tightly integrates with See's internally developed mail order system. It has proven to be a high-performance, highly available, scalable solution. The application logic was internally developed by See's. To improve performance, ODBC connections are opened once and reused. The Web application server has access to these sub-programs via COM object calls.
Performance is excellent, with sub-second response times being typical.
Adding more NT-based servers can scale the Web application server tier. Increasing the database server capacity can scale the database server. During load simulations, the site was clocked at over 3,500 orders per hour. Greg Gibbons, MIS director for California-based See's Candies, Inc., has been working with the HP e3000 since 1986. All of See's mission-critical business applications are internally developed on the HP e3000.