News

Retail-software vendor claims uptime during blackout

August 18, 2003

NEW YORK CITY -- Many retail chains were up to the challenge of the nation's worst power grid failure August 15. The key for them was Tomax Retail.net software.

According to a report in Yahoo News, as much of the Northeastern United States and parts of Canada were crippled by power outages, Network Information Technology (NIT), a Tomax business partner based in Long Island, maintained continuous hosting services and support for customers throughout New York and as far away as Bermuda.

The Tomax Retail.net solution enables retailers to create a "retail-in-real time" infrastructure across the enterprise, supporting associates in stores and customers at the point of sale, at kiosks and online. See related stories, "Kiosk software vendor touts uptime versus Internet bug," "Microsoft virus disables kiosks, PCs worldwide."

"The lights went out, but the Retail.net suite kept running," said Marc Grossman, CEO of NIT, in the report. "As we lost electricity, our hosting center was supported with backup power, and remarkably, our wide area network circuits to our clients continued to serve our client's local workstations."

NIT customers in Bermuda had no indication of problems, demonstrating the high availability of the network delivered Retail.net solution even in the event of catastrophic power failure at hosting center.

As business went back to normal this week throughout the Northeast, Retail.net retailers opened their businesses without any system or data problems, according to the report.