AUTOMOTIVE

In the test, Retail.net was subjected to a combination of loads, from initial data acquisition, item processing, and outbound delivery. In the peak load test, Retail.net was successful in processing the equivalent of over 50,000 unique price changes in each of over 2,000 stores. In all over 100 million unique retail price change calculations, in two hours, fifty-four minutes. As retailers adopt thin-client architecture, the computing power moves from the store to a centralized model. This puts exceptional pressure on the central system to scale and deliver response times and throughput required in extremely high transaction retail environments. While such benchmarking efforts are time consuming and costly, it is the only way to prove the capability of what is a new paradigm in retail computing. Combined with the empirical, real-world results of numerous customers already running Retail.net in high-performance configurations, a new proof point of the capabilities of Retail.net has been convincingly established. "Retailers will take comfort knowing that Retail.net can be configured to support data volumes and processing loads that are in all likelihood well beyond anything that would be encountered in the real world. With very low cost hardware and infrastructure, it is scalability that can be realized affordably for any sized retailer", says Virgil Fernandez, Chief Technology Officer for Tomax. "Less is more. Retail.net 5.0 has the data model, mechanical advantage, and superior software engineering that reduces the data model mass and streamlines the work that gets done in retail. Everything required to support processes is brought together in a single, scalable structure. It is not just brute force scalability, it is efficiency." says Eric Olafson, CEO for Tomax. For the first time, it is entirely feasible to take all aspects of item maintenance -- from pricing to perpetual inventory -- to the item/store level for Tier One retailers. Now, retailers can leverage the benefits of realtime promotions, competitive price adjustments, in-store wireless price lookup and adjustments, and fine tune assortment pricing and strategies to new level of granularity. In addition, the use of centralized, network-deployed applications eliminates the requirement for servers in every store. This combination of extremely high processing throughput, with elimination of massive numbers of servers, dramatically reduces IT cost for the retail industry.