Balloons Everywhere Expands with Pervasive
"We are very pleased with the efficiencies and overall performance of Pervasive.SQL V8. With Pervasive.SQL we never wait on our system and have seen a noticeable improvement in our call center. Simply put, we get more work done in less time."
Harry Palmer, CEO, Balloons Everywhere
About Balloons Everywhere
Since 1981, Balloons Everywhere has supplied balloons and floral supplies to wholesale customers worldwide. To meet the ever-changing needs of its customers, Balloons Everywhere constantly forecasts new product trends and designs so that it can offer the right products at the right time. Providing these at the lowest possible cost requires Balloons Everywhere to frequently adjust its inventory of 6,000 items.
To oversee this complex process, Balloons Everywhere has relied on a powerful, in-house Visual DataFlex application for tracking purchasing, production, shipping, receiving and accounting. This system also powers the company's online product catalog at www.balloons.com.
Business Challenge
Based in Fairhope, Ala., Balloons Everywhere is a growing company that found it necessary to add users and workstations to its intricately connected computer network running the customized application. With its expansion, the company wanted to upgrade its database to a client/server architecture to increase reliability and performance and to further protect against possible downtime or corrupted and lost data files. It turned to solution provider StarZen Technologies to design a low-cost solution that could be implemented quickly to minimize any disruption to current business operations.
Working closely with Balloons Everywhere, StarZen examined several options for upgrading the wholesaler's database backend, including IBM DB2 and Microsoft's SQL Server. As a mid-sized company, Balloons Everywhere needed a powerful system that required little maintenance and administration costs, yet provided the flexibility and performance needed to achieve their objectives.
Pervasive.SQL Solution
The decision to augment the Visual DataFlex application with Pervasive.SQL V8 to achieve these objectives was a clear solution. "My past experience with Pervasive's reliability and performance gave me the confidence that Harry's operation would be well-served by deploying Pervasive.SQL V8," said Mike Salzlechner of StarZen Technologies who steered the project through completion.
Performance – Using Pervasive.SQL V8, Balloons Everywhere reduced traffic on its network, leading to greater productivity in the company's call center. Call center employees now can enter orders as fast as the customer can give them. No one waits for the database system to catch up with data entry. Also, thanks to both transactional and relational data access, Pervasive.SQL has reduced by nearly half the time it takes to perform searches in the company's online catalog.
"Before we had used a custom DLL that would read the DataFlex database files directly to do full-text searching," said Salzlechner. "Now we use the ODBC Connectivity Kit and the SQL interface to do the searches."
Reliability – Balloons Everywhere maintains a competitive edge through its automated systems. The deployment of Pervasive.SQL further enhances their position by virtually eliminating DBMS downtime. As a true database server, Pervasive.SQL isolates data from local or wide area network issues or workstation problems. Server engine transaction logging provides the ability to roll databases forward or back in the event of a hardware server failure.
Low TCO – Low total cost of ownership was a key factor in Palmer's Pervasive.SQL decision. V8's ability to run efficiently without a database administrator eliminates costs compared with competitors' offerings. Development costs were reduced as well due to Pervasive.SQL's seamless integration with the Visual DataFlex development environment and applications. Balloons Everywhere's VDF applications required virtually no programming changes to migrate to Pervasive.SQL V8.
Balloons Everywhere CEO Harry Palmer said, "It's the real long-term benefit that matters. The database is pretty much 'set and forget,' and the Pervasive reputation for stability and speed made it a clear choice."
Data Access Worldwide's president and CEO Charles Casanave agrees with Palmer. "Like many other customers running Visual DataFlex and WebApp Server applications, Balloons Everywhere has decided that Pervasive.SQL V8 with its high performance, exceptional stability and low cost of ownership is the ideal client/server DBMS for a mid-sized business," he said.
Bottom Line
Balloons Everywhere stays ahead of its competitors by accurately predicting customer demand and keeping product cost low. The company continues to meet these goals even as it grows through its use of highly efficient software and a highly productive embedded database from Pervasive Software.
Palmer is pleased with the immediate ROI he's received from upgrading to Pervasive.SQL V8. "It's definitely more stable and significantly faster than our previous environment was, plus it allows us to use SQL queries for Web users, which expands our ability to better serve our global customer base."
About Data Access Worldwide
Data Access Worldwide develops advanced, productivity enhancing software tools for professional application developers. The company's WebApp Server, Visual DataFlex and DataFlex products form an advanced, multi-platform, technology suite for building reliable, high-performance, component-based database applications for desktop, client-server, Web, e-commerce and wireless environments. Over 400,000 WebApp, Visual DataFlex and DataFlex licenses have been delivered to application customers worldwide in accounting, healthcare, finance, insurance, hospitality, manufacturing, transportation and government sectors. Established in 1976, Data Access Worldwide is headquartered in Miami, Fla., with regional offices in The Netherlands, Brazil and Australia. A network of distributors and channel partners deliver and support the company's products in over 20 countries. For more information visit www.DataAccess.com.
About Pervasive Software®
Pervasive Software is a leading global data-management company powering the success of application developers by providing solutions that deliver the industry's best combination of performance, reliability and low administration costs. Pervasive's strength is evidenced by the size and diversity of its customer base, serving tens of thousands of customers with hundreds of thousands of end-users in nearly every vertical market around the world. Founded in 1994, Pervasive sells its products into more than 150 countries and is based in Austin, Texas, with offices in Europe. More information may be found on the Web at http://www.pervasive.com.
For more information
To learn more about Pervasive Software and our solutions, please visit www.pervasive.com. To reach the North American sales office, call 1.800.287.4383, extension 2. For Latin, Central and South America, Australia and New Zealand, call +1.512.231.6000. In Europe, for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, call +800.12.12.34.34. For any other European, Middle Eastern, African or Asian countries (excluding Japan), call +32.70.23.37.61. For Japan, please call +81.3.3293.5300, or visit www.pervasive.co.jp.
