Northgate to Migrate Nebraska Furniture Mart's Retail System to Reality

Northgate Information Solutions, a major provider of relational database management software solutions and managed services, today announced it has entered into an agreement to migrate the Nebraska Furniture Mart (NFM) retail applications solutions to the Reality Multi-Relational Data Management System. NFM is the largest furniture retail outlet in the U.S. with stores in Omaha, Neb., and Kansas City, Kan.

NFM's selection team chose Northgate's Reality based on its open platform, ability to maximize the use of existing technologies and support of NFM's disaster recovery architecture. The five-year agreement with Northgate for their Reality products and services will provide excellent implementation engineering in the short run and offer superior support in the long run.

David Bash, NFM's Director of I.T. states "While it won't be seamless, our expansion and renovations have placed real demands on our IT capabilities and Reality will help us solve many of those issues."

As Northgate's MultiValue enhanced relational database management system, Reality delivers maximum mission-critical performance for a single user to many thousands. The Reality RDMS will enable NFM's systems to continue running AIX on Bull hardware. Currently, NFM has 2,000 active users and the Reality solution will provide a growth path that will allow many times this number.

According to Northgate spokesman John Seaman, "We are very pleased that following an intense and comprehensive evaluation of Multi-Value options, NFM has selected Northgate with Reality as their partner of choice. We look forward to working closely with NFM to enable them to achieve their expansion objectives. Reality will expand NFM's interoperability with other on-site databases, and establish robust resilience options with fail-safe back-up protection, while providing new remote access capabilities. It will also allow them to leverage Web Services for increased operational power and flexibility," Seaman concluded.

With continuous product innovations and enhancements stretching over three decades, Reality will provide NFM an impressive array of powerful features including fast backup and recovery, inbuilt XML parsing and creation, seamless CSV file integration, dataBasic Profiler, and an industrial strength SQL engine.