Working Together for an Integrated Store Solution

Store owners face enough challenges today without having to worry about the potential problems inherent in a single-vendor solution. As a recognition of this concern, Sun, Triversity, and Wincor Nixdorf have marshaled their expertise to help owners avoid vendor lock-in, reduce IT costs, extend the value of legacy systems, scale up or down as needed, and rapidly deploy new-generation applications.

Relying on a single vendor for a complete retail enterprise solution often requires compromise at every level. No one vendor can claim to be the best in all categories, meaning that users must be able to rely on multiple vendors to take advantage of each one's special strengths.

That's why Triversity, Sun Microsystems, and Wincor Nixdorf have joined forces to offer retailers their respective expertise to help them create store solutions that meet their particular needs.

Triversity's expertise is in point-of-sale/point-of-interaction software, such as its Transactionware series. Sun developed Java technology and deploys it on high-quality, cost-effective servers. Wincor Nixdorf is a leader in retail point-of-sale (POS) hardware, such as the Beetle family of POS terminals. Together, the three providers offer open POS solutions for retailers.

All three companies sit on the JavaPOS standard committee, as well as on additional committees of the Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS), a part of the National Retail Federation. The three are actively involved in developing and standardizing retail-specific products and technologies, with a goal of creating open, component-based retail technology solutions that lower costs and are efficient and easy to maintain, support, and upgrade.

Triversity, Sun, and Wincor Nixdorf have a long-standing commitment to open systems—in this case, Java technology. Triversity offers an application approach based on the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE platform). Wincor Nixdorf has an extensive suite of field-tested JavaPOS technology device drivers and related expertise. Sun offers headquarters servers as well as "network appliance" servers, for hosting Java software applications within stores.

All of this translates into practical and readily available solutions with which retailers deploy next-generation POS solutions offering choices, low total cost of ownership, improved operating efficiencies, and enhanced customer service.

Inexpensive, Scalable, Platform-Independent, and Easy to Implement

In the fast-moving, demanding world of retail, enterprise applications have to be designed, built, and produced faster, for less money, and with fewer resources. To reduce costs and accelerate enterprise application design and development, J2EE technology provides a component-based approach to the design, development, assembly, and deployment of enterprise applications. Application developers benefit from the synergy of the Java platform with Extensible Markup Language (XML), the universal format for structured documents and data on the Web; integration of legacy systems; and code reuse/modification.

Many retailers already understand the advantages of open Java technology, having realized its benefits in Web services and headquarters applications. The Java platform is increasingly being seen as a leveraged technology for store-level applications, such as the one in Canada's largest retail drug store group that takes advantage of the next-generation version of Java technology, the J2EE platform.

The J2EE platform provides a multitier distributed application model, the ability to reuse components, a unified security model, and flexible transaction control. The platform independence of the Java platform means that retail applications written in the Java programming language can run anywhere, from POS terminal to in-store server to large headquarters data warehouse.

For retail POS applications, Java technology reduces the minimum system requirements for a point-of-sale terminal to what is necessary to support a single Java Virtual Machine (JVM)*. Thus, the use of Java technology at the POS enables applications to scale down without any code modifications, to run on low-cost thin clients, such as POS units. If, however, a thicker client is called for, Java technology is equally applicable. Store owners scale the application based on their bandwidth, transaction, volume, and availability requirements.

Recognizing the advantages of Java technology to those working on POS applications, developers created an API standard called JavaPOS (see www.javapos.com). The resulting JavaPOS specification has been adopted by ARTS as one of the two platform mappings for its UnifiedPOS device model architecture. This specification allows stores to employ peripherals such as scanners and printers from any vendor that supports JavaPOS technology, without affecting applications.

Store owners face enough challenges today without having to worry about the potential problems inherent in a single-vendor solution. As a recognition of this concern, Sun, Triversity, and Wincor Nixdorf have marshaled their expertise to help owners avoid vendor lock-in, reduce IT costs, extend the value of legacy systems, scale up or down as needed, and rapidly deploy new-generation applications.

*The terms "Java virtual machine" and "JVM" mean a virtual machine for the Java platform.