Last updated October 2011

Customers

Elizabeth Arden Red Door Spas

Elizabeth Arden Salons was a customer that acquired the Liberty ODBC technology in late 1996, along with consulting services. For a modest amount of money, we helped them get their online gift certificate system up and running. We connected their web site into their POS system for their salons so that it instantly integrated with it. This involved credit card validation, order processing, shipping and other features. The first month that the web site was active, with no advertising on their part, they made sales that exceeded their costs of setting up the web site. I wrote the original forms that they used for ordering the certificates.

After I left Liberty, Elizabeth Arden retained my services to assist them with changes to the gift certificate system that allowed them to automatically schedule a FedEx pickup for delivery of the order, and other enhancements.

Furthermore, I assisted them with setting up a new system for booking appointments online.

For the Christmas 2002 sales season, I assisted with the print-a-gift enhancement to the gift certificate system. This allowed the user placing the order to have a gift certificate, bar-code and all, generated into a PDF and emailed to them. They could then print this certificate and have it immediately. This was done as a perceived convenience to their customers, but there was an unexpected benefit to it. Every year, orders come in fast and furious right up until a few days before Christmas, when it is no longer possible to schedule a fedex delivery in time to make Christmas Eve day. Then sales normally drop off. What happened instead is that the orders continued to build, but all shifted to the print-a-gift system. They took an unprecedented number of orders in a one-hour timeframe on Christmas morning! The enhancement paid for itself in those few days alone.

I continue to provide middleware services to integrate this customer's POS and booking systems into their web, integrating their web with Facebook, mobile users, and other social media initiatives, allowing. Their guests can buy gift certificates, posting them to a friend's wall, so all their friends can see the gift they gave (with links that let them do the same!) We are also now implementing a system to make guest referrals through Facebook.

A Phone, Cable and Internet Provider in the Mid-West

This customer ame to us several years ago with a difficult problem. They had long ago moved off of their AS/400 system to new applications on newer platforms, but for reasons of compliance, they were using the AS/400 to view historical data, including a massive library of proprietary IBM Optical drives with data stored in proprietary formats using EBCDIC encoding. IBM was going to end support on their hardware and they had a hard time justifying a hardware upgrade for an otherwise redundant system.

They had sought for someone who would do this for them for quite some time, and had even done some groundwork that told them it should be possible, but no one was prepared to take up the challenge until they came to us.

We successfully reverse-engineered the data formats, converted the data, and transfered it into a relational data store. Then wrote web-based viewers that would allow them to access the data whenever they were required to for compliance purposes.

Reynolds and Reynolds

Reynolds and Reynolds (R&R) was another customer of Liberty. They provide automobile dealer management systems to over 60% of the North American auto dealer market. All of their present systems include several of the technologies that I helped develop at Liberty, mostly as part of their ERALink system. While there, I assisted them in evaluating and integrating our technology into their systems, resulting in their signing a $5.7 million deal with Liberty.