Visible Brands Case Study

VisibleBrands™ reduces distributed database deployment time and complexity and adds application monitoring capability with JNetDirect’s Combine with SQL Azure support.

VisibleBrands is the first impression-based, in-store, digital media and data network serving customized offers to shoppers at the Moment of Decision®.

VisibleBrands wanted to reduce the time and complexity involved in resolving and deploying code in a distributed environment of databases and servers and conduct application monitoring.

VisibleBrands selected JNetDirect’s Combine with SQL Azure support to simplify its existing environment and reduce overall complexity, time and effort needed to manage a distributed database environment.

Since deploying JNetDirect’s Combine with SQL Azure support, VisibleBrands has experienced deployment times that have gone from hours to minutes with much lower levels of complexity.

Retail Point of Sale Technology

Capturing a customer’s attention at the point-of-sale in a retail store has gotten harder than ever. Interesting displays may draw the eye, but unless there’s a payoff in the form of real savings or products the customer actually needs, they are more likely to just walk by.

VisibleBrands is changing this all-too-common scenario by engaging the customer at what the company calls the “Moment of Decision,” that is while the customer is in the store shopping.

Using data, cloud computing and mobile technologies, VisibleBrands can manage displays within a store, including the delivery of location-based coupons; generate digital content to touch screens on store shelves; allow shoppers to easily accept digital coupons or other deals wirelessly to their shopping carts; and supply analytics and reporting information on in-store campaigns and behavioral data in real time.

But all of this requires serious horsepower on the back end of the company’s systems in order to deliver coupons and offers in real time and allow customers to redeem them immediately, which involves the ability to conduct real-time settlement right at the point of sale.

VisibleBrands was on the lookout for a solution that could support its technology in the retail environment without taxing its resources or requiring complex set up and deployment. According to Omri Bahat, Database Architect at VisibleBrands, the company was looking to solve two key challenges. “We needed the ability to easily resolve code and deploy it against all databases and servers where it needed to go, and we wanted to be able to conduct application monitoring on a large database environment and take big chunks of data and feed it into monitoring tools such as System Center Operations Manager (SCOM),” Bahat says.

To solves these challenges, Bahat evaluated Combine – a set of powerful development, change management and code development tools that automates the development, quality assurance and production lifecycle and release process of database code.

“Combine was developed to manage distributed database environments or federations of databases,” Bahat says. He adds that while the company did not conduct a formal evaluation of products to perform the code deployment side of things, it did look at several solutions for application monitoring. “The ones we looked at were too complex and very heavy and just didn’t meet our needs,” Bahat says. “We really wanted one product to address both of our challenges.

VisibleBrands deployed Combine with SQL Azure support to reach its goals.

According to Bahat, VisibleBrands has been able to reduce its deployment complexity for database code significantly. In addition, deployment times have gone from several hours to minutes with the Combine solution. He adds that the SQL Azure feature has been a critical addition to the original Combine product. “This allows us to more uniformly work with Azure environments,” he says.

While VisibleBrands’ deployment is still in the early stages, the results so far have shown Bahat that Combine with SQL Azure support was the right tool for the job.