Life Time Fitness

Success at a Glance

With a growing membership base and plans to diversify its offerings to include other services, Life Time Fitness needed a technology platform that could grow with its business needs. A critical aspect to the success of the company's growing business is its member management/point-of-sale system, which stores membership and payment data for thousands of members. The system handles millions of transactions and provides intranet and Internet functionality to employees and customers through the Web and kiosks. The system also provides reporting and analytics for customer relationship management functions and call center integration. However, the system didn't offer the kind of integration that would provide all Life Time Fitness employees with a standardized view of its customers across multiple touch points within the organization.

"We turned to Sun because we believed in the openness and stability of Sun and the proven success of Sun's Java technology," says Wesley Bertch, Director of Software Systems for Life Time Fitness. "These were important factors to enable us to grow and diversify our business at an accelerated rate." Sun provided the complete solution: open standards to avoid complex and expensive lock-in technologies; integration with existing systems; scalability for changing needs; availability; and, market-leading technology such as Java, Sun servers, and the Solaris Operating System.

With Sun hardware, Solaris, and Java, Life Time Fitness built a dynamic member management/point-of-sale system that expanded its customer base and company offerings through online services. Front desk employees can now promote online scheduling of personal training or even massages to its members. And by moving to Solaris, the company's overall operations have more speed, stability and uptime—all of which have drastically reduced server administration costs. "We felt it had the best flexibility and support for the server side Java Virtual Machine," explains Jud McKee, Director of Network Operations for Life Time Fitness. "Another feature we like is the Solaris JumpStart technology. With the automated installation process in place, we are able to recover any of our systems in under an hour. This allows us to add more servers if they're required in a clustered environment."

Together with the J2EE component architecture and Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB), Sun also helped Life Time Fitness seamlessly incorporate products from different vendors. "By incorporating Sun's open and available standards into our architecture, we end up with more flexibility and more creative options," says Brent Zempel, Life Time Fitness CIO. "That's Sun's real competitive advantage. You don’t feel any proprietary headlock."