| Date: |
7/1/2005 |
| Industry: |
Floriculture/Retail |
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When 23,000 florists need flowers, they need them now. Geneca helped the VP of Product Development upgrade.... |
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| Critical Issue: |
FTD is the premier electronic network in the floriculture industry over 23,000 florists worldwide processing 15 million orders and messages annually. In addition to order expedition, FTD provides florists with PC-based business management software. The legacy software in use, however, was becoming increasingly dated and was difficult and expensive to maintain and support. The time had come to decide whether to update, migrate, or rebuild |
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| Reasons: |
At its core, FTD is a software company that supports the floral industry. Mercury Technology Group, FTD’s IT organization, supports and maintains the “Floral Information Superhighway" FTD is known for. Because this legacy offering was over 20 years old, written in Cobol, and costly to change and improve, our client needed to quickly decide whether to refactor or replace this legacy application before customers became dissatisfied. |
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| Result: |
Based on Geneca’s assessments, a decision was made to discontinue the legacy application and roll out the off-the-shelf Windows version with a more complete feature set. Geneca helped this client navigate through a thorny business decision and provided a deeper understanding of the immediate and future requirements necessary to become a more agile, competitive enterprise. Additionally, Geneca will provide its services to support migration to the new application. |
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| Capabilities: |
FTD required a secure, more intuitive full-featured Windows product they could sell and redistribute to the florists. The product also needed to be flexible enough to support future growth of FTD’s telemarketing services and PC-based business management applications. |
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| We Provided: |
Geneca conducted Risk Assessment and Portfolio Assessment processes that included a fact-based code analysis and metrics. These assessments addressed C-level concerns on all the options for the product’s future: Refactoring, semi-customization of an existing Windows-based product, or a complete rewrite in .NET. |