CommercialWare Update

Title Nine has chosen the CommercialWare suite of cross-channel retail software products - CW Direct, CWData and CWAnalytics, CWStore, CWValueCard, and CWLocate – for its eight retail stores, storefront retail operations in its call center and supporting the website operations. Also, Sur La Table has completed the implementation of CommercialWare's CWDirect and CWCollaborate for improved and accelerated inventory visibility and managing its processes for drop-ship orders. In addition to improved coordination between the stores, website, and catalog call center, Sur La Table can now obtain reports and more easily access information including comprehensive order activity, trending views, and operational metrics.

CommercialWare also announced that Restoration Hardware, Payless, Vermont Country Store, and the Metropolitan Museum Of Art will all be going live later this year or early next year.

In other news, CommercialWare is now fully PCI-Compliant, having become PABP (Payment Application Best Practices)-certified. The PABP is currently a voluntary VISA program, which will be mandatory in the near future.

Finally, six months after its acquisition by Datavantage, a wholly owned subsidiary of Micro Systems Inc., the two companies are on course to integrating their solution suites, according to Mark Lightbody, Senior Business Consultant at CommercialWare. Datavantage provides specialty retailers such as Coldwater Creek and JJill with POS and analytical applications, with some users having more than 10,000 registers in place. CWI’s users tend to have a total of fewer than 50 cash registers to manage.

When the two companies’ application suites are merged, the final result will rely on components from each. For instance, “Relate” is the Datavantage CRM application, which can house the Retail Master File and populate it to the POS. For the Inventory Locator and Gift Card management, it will be CWI applications they will use.

The two sales teams are beginning to coordinate and work together, and to market together as well. Europe, Asia, and South America are already covered by Micros, and eventually both Datavantage and CWI will be serving specialty retailers on a truly global basis, too.