Attachmate Verastream Unlocks Revenue Opportunities for Wholesaler

Business Wire, Sept 25, 2006

For Top U.S. Retail Distributor, Cooper Booth Wholesale, Verastream-Generated Online Order System Web-Enables Critical Legacy Assets, Increasing Daily Business in More Than 80 Stores

PHOENIX -- Attachmate Corporation today announced from the Gartner Application Development Summit that Cooper Booth Wholesale Company, one of the nation's top 25 leading convenience-store wholesale distributors, has upgraded its online customer systems Web site using Verastream Host Integrator. To stay competitive, Cooper Booth Wholesale (CBW) turned to Verastream Host Integrator, a screen-based integration product for service-enabling legacy data and logic, to redesign its customer order entry, online catalog and retail price updates into the ultimate Web self-service system for its retail store customers. CBW's IT team leveraged Verastream(R) software to build an easy-to-use, self-service, online system, enabling customers to place multiple orders simultaneously, update their retail store pricing and easily search CBW's online catalog.

A long-time satisfied user of Reflection(R) host access software, CBW turned to Attachmate for its expertise in UNIX mainframe integration software. CBW knew it needed to make a change when its first generation system could not be easily upgraded to the latest technologies, preventing CBW from adding and improving the system's functionality. CBW's retail customers demanded an easy-to-use, real-time system. Within a week of seeing an online demo, CBW selected Verastream for its ability to extend their UNIX assets to create an easy-to-use, Web-based system.

"We knew Attachmate could handle UNIX applications because of our positive experience with Reflection," said Becky Rhoads, IT manager for Cooper Booth Wholesale. "Our customers had a number of suggestions for us to improve our old Web site system, but we found making changes to be very time consuming, if not impossible. In looking for a mainframe integration tool, none of the other products we looked at were as slick as Verastream. Now, our site practically manages itself and customers are telling us how pleased they are with the changes."

Leveraging Verastream, CBW extended its manual, mainframe-based ordering platform to the Web, creating an online, menu-driven resource that its customers could self-manage easily and efficiently. Without any prior experience using Verastream, the Web development team was able to roll out a pilot version of the new application in less than two weeks. In only two months, they had the entire system operational for CBW.

"Instead of having to rewrite an interface and go out to the Web with it, Verastream simply lets us select and Web-enable the functionality we need from our order system," continued Rhoads. "I also like Verastream's versatility in terms of putting services on the Web using .NET or JavaBeans, because we typically outsource our Web development."

By using Verastream to generate a Web self-service application, CBW has expanded its customer base using this new system to more than 80 stores. Today, customers are able to easily and efficiently self-manage their own order placement, product distribution and account information.

"Web self-service is now a necessary business standard. Customers want to self-manage the entire order lifecycle from placing an order to checking on distribution status," said Eric Varness, vice president of marketing at Attachmate. "With Verastream Host Integrator, Cooper Booth Wholesale went one step further and tailored services to meet each store's needs without ever disturbing the valuable legacy data and logic or associated business processes."

With Verastream, CBW customers can do more than just order online. Customers can search product inventory to compile, place and change orders, check order status, look up accounts receivable balances, or review credit memos. Convenience stores have also been able to make their ordering process more efficient with the use of standing order guides. Instead of starting from scratch with each order, an established list of items can be automatically generated for each store. Customers can modify their standing lists whenever they need to adjust their purchasing patterns.

About Verastream Host Integrator

Verastream Host Integrator enables developers to encapsulate data and logic via the screen interface to create services and components (e.g., XML, COM, .NET, JavaBeans or Web services) that can be mixed, matched and reused to extend legacy functionality to new applications or users. Verastream Host Integrator is part of the Verastream legacy integration suite, a complete range of mainframe, Web and desktop modernization tools built to speed the reuse of legacy application investments. Verastream delivers the full spectrum of basic rejuvenation to customized presentation and sophisticated high-performance integration. No code changes to legacy applications are required.

Attachmate(R) Verastream software works collaboratively or as a stand-alone tool along with the Company's integration, legacy access, security and management products, enabling companies to extend the use of existing IT investments while adopting valuable new technologies to improve their businesses.