J.D. Associates, IBM Partner To Make Clients Retail Pros

John Deery, co-owner of J.D. Associates, based here, said his company initially found a niche in the small to midsize retail market in New England by selling, installing and supporting Retail Technologies International's Retail Pro POS sales and inventory management software.

By the mid-1990s, however, J.D. Associates began integrating Retail Pro with IBM's SureOne retail terminal, an all-in-one POS solution designed for small to midsize retailers, Deery said. J.D. Associates' customer account list includes stores involved in selling luggage, bicycles and crystal, as well as museum shops.

SureOne fits in the same space as an electronic cash register so retailers do not need to rework counter space, Deery said. Its features,a built-in credit card swiper, receipt printer and customer display,appeal to small, single-store specialty retailers conscious of image as well as larger merchants deploying systems across the country, he said.

"Larger customers are concerned with reliability and serviceability," said Deery. "The nice thing about the SureOne products is if any of those built-in features breaks, they are easily replaced without having to replace the entire unit."

Over time, the IBM product line was revised and enhanced, and IBM responded to J.D. Associates' success by officially certifying Retail Pro for integration with the SureOne product family, aimed at retailers adopting thin-client computing architecture.

"IBM works very hard at trying to provide what smaller companies like us need," said Deery. "They have a number of good programs, and working with such a large company helps give smaller companies like us instant credibility."

Deery also credits similar support from J.D. Associates' distributor, Greenville, S.C.-based ScanSource. About half of J.D. Associates' annual revenue, or about 75 new POS systems installed, is attributable to solutions that incorporate the IBM and Retail Pro products, said Deery. The rest of its revenue is derived from solutions via mix-and-match components.

Ed Solomon, partner solution manager for IBM's Retail Store Systems unit, said J.D. Associates is one of IBM's top RSS solution providers. Sales of IBM's RSS products have grown consistently since the RSS unit engaged the channel in 1994, Solomon said.

IBM's RSS division now works with more than 300 VARs that resell IBM POS hardware, including the SureOne products. IBM introduced new products such as the SurePOS 300 and 600 this year, as well as a refresh of the SureOne terminal that features a faster processor and color flat-panel LCD display.

"IBM's market direction is to grow our sales by working closely with our retail business partners," said Solomon. "These business partners are local to the retailer and are key to the growth of the IBM RSS organization."

The latest SureOne models include the IBM 4614 A05, which has an integrated 10-inch color active-matrix LCD display, and the A04, with an integrated 9-inch monochrome CRT display. All models offer 64 Mbytes of base memory (expandable to 512 Mbytes) and 866MHz of processing power. IBM would not provide pricing.

As for the latest version of Retail Pro, it is a native 32-bit Windows application featuring touch-screen POS; user-defined layouts, navigation and documents; multistore management features; integrated e-commerce; CRM capabilities; and retail business analytics. It comes in different editions, depending on store size, ranging from single stores up to large multinational chains.

Soon-to-be-released improvements to the software include Retail Pro's migration to an Oracle database, said Deery.

"That's a pretty big deal," said Deery. "Oracle is a widely used, scalable database that runs on a variety of platforms, and that will give us better entrance into larger markets."