£16M dealer moves to Progress Online

A Progress user for 10 years, Bluefish joins the other 2000 users of Progress Online where more than £30m is transacted each month. Currently, over three-quarters of Progress Dealers in the UK use the Progress Online service, enjoying performance, resilience and security that they could have never afforded.

Paola White, VP Sales for ECi commented:

“In today’s economic climate, companies are even more nervous about changing systems and we want to reassure them that ECi is strong, healthy and investing in the future of our dealers. Because we eliminate the need for any capital outlay, there really has not been a better time for a dealer to review their system requirements. Our software eliminates any need to upgrade hardware, pay for maintenance or retain IT expertise in-house. With our fully hosted business systems (Progress Online and Vision Online) a dealer can reduce their overall costs and get access to a comprehensive, modern business system that will enable them to grow and manage their business more effectively.”

Since 2003, ECi has invested over £1M into hosting - this includes an array of servers, storage area networks, multi-point Internet connections and power-redundancy at a state-of-the-art hosting facility, all to ensure business continuity.

In the last few months, ECi has further invested in new Itanium servers—following HP’s long-term commitment to OpenVMS, so Progress dealers can be assured of the continuation of Progress Online and now enjoy performance far superior to the previous 64-bit Alpha servers.

Mark Heath, MD, of Bluefish commented:

“We have migrated to Progress Online as we had outgrown our current server. Having reviewed all available options, we decided to stick with ECi and Progress as they are a reliable business partner. The beauty of a fully hosted version is that we can concentrate on our core business and keep our IT resource lean - we trust ECi to do it better than we could. With Progress Online not only do we enjoy system performance far superior to what we had previously, but we get access to New Progress without having to invest in a SQL server and all of the additional costs that are associated with managing it. Of particular interest to me is the Progress Dashboard as it allows me to get a snapshot of the business without having to run reports. Another useful feature is the Progress Information Centre, which is a powerful reporting tool that will be deployed across the whole of the organisation - it will be particularly useful to our sales team and hope to see increased revenues as a result of its use.'