Retailers Harness Big Data with Actian Vectorwise and Softwear BV

Amsterdam, Netherlands – 22nd May 2012: Actian Corporation today announced that Softwear BV, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) provider based in the Netherlands, has selected Vectorwise, Actian’s ground-breaking analytical database, to offer Dutch fashion and apparel retailers and wholesalers a high-speed, on-demand intuitive business analytics and reporting system.

Founded in 1988, Softwear BV serves as the IT department for its client base of 600 retailers and 120 wholesalers by providing SaaS-based solutions that help them to run their ERP and POS systems and provide deep-dive analytic reporting to drive their business.

In order to keep up with the latest fashion fads, which demand a nimble response from retailer and wholesalers, Softwear has to provide highly responsive business intelligence and analytic software to its customers. For small to medium sized apparel enterprises, the ability to stay one step ahead of the fashion brigade is key to survival in the ultra competitive and quicksilver world of retail.

Softwear’s internal custom-built FoxPro application was unable to keep up with the ballooning business analytic demands from its customers. Slow query, poor performance and functionality were critical issues requiring a solution.

“Following an extensive period of testing, we were very impressed with how well Vectorwise performed in terms of increased query and analytic speeds,” explained Jeroen de Vries, CEO of Softwear BV. “It enables our customer base to manipulate data and provide analytic reports in granular detail ensuring that they remain at the vanguard of market trends.

“By deploying Vectorwise, we are now able to see all our customers’ data in one database table and slice and dice the data in just milliseconds. This is in stark contrast to our legacy system which first took 20 seconds to write a query and then 80 seconds to execute it, and this was for data that related to just one company with one outlet.”

Vectorwise delivers analytic capability that allows Softwear BV to break down the confines of reporting. Rather than providing one standard report that does not give much insight, Softwear BV can now provide value by allowing the retailer and wholesaler to compare their business with a wide variety of other factors, thus responding to fast moving events.

Vectorwise has not only accelerated Softwear’s analytic and reporting service but also streamlined its applications and hardware by leveraging the power of modern chip architectures through which it powers its performance. Softwear no longer needs multiple racks of servers which were necessary for running its previous database software.

“Softwear’s customers are not data analytics experts; they are retailers working in a fast moving industry, where in the blink of an eye, an “it” trend can turn into yesterday’s news,” commented Steve Shine, CEO and President. “With Vectorwise, Softwear now offers its client base a solution that frees the retailers and wholesales up to do what they do best and focus on their business, while accessing dynamic analytics on-demand when they need to in order to run their operations.”
 
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