Press Releases

Conforama® Selects Xcalia® to Integrate Mission-Critical Systems Across European Locations

Leading Furniture and Appliance Retailer Says Xcalia Intermediation Core™ Increases System Interoperability and Decreases Development Times

PARIS, FRANCE AND PALO ALTO, CA – January 15, 2007 –Xcalia, a leading provider of dynamic integration software, today announced that France-based Conforama, the world’s second largest retailer of home furnishings and appliances, has deployed Xcalia Intermediation Core™ to solve complex application integration issues for its multinational operations.

With 2005 annual sales of €3.14 billion through a network of 246 stores in Europe, Conforama continually faces IT system integration challenges as it expands, due to a heterogeneous application environment involving mission-critical systems that span multiple geographies, most with different IT requirements and governmental regulations.

One of Conforama’s most recent IT initiatives was to improve customer satisfaction and optimize the efficiency of customer service by providing 180 European locations with real-time access to country sales information and customer files. Conforama’s IT group realized that its current front-office applications could not scale to meet these requirements and would have to be totally redesigned. The group also decided to implement a J2EE application environment so that the corporate applications could be ported to multiple databases, and also give its development organization a more flexible integration framework that would speed the deployment of future projects as well as drive down the overall costs of the endeavors.

With the J2EE approach, Conforama wanted to reduce complexity in its mission-critical applications, which included both custom and packaged solutions. “At one point, we thought the only way to decrease complexity and achieve our cost management goals was to reduce the number of custom applications. But we realized that packaged software would not meet our specific requirements for the more business-critical, high performance, applications. We soon discovered that building our own solutions using Xcalia helped to reduce our development time,” said Jean-Paul Rinaldi, IT Director of Conforama. “Xcalia’s innovative intermediation approach provides us with a framework to mix and match custom and packaged applications and gives our company more flexibility in the solutions we provide to meet the needs of individual stores.”

Conforama is also moving towards a service-oriented architecture by increasing its use of web services, particularly in Internet applications with suppliers. Mr. Rinaldi and his team want to be able to access and map both data and service resources and easily reuse them in a new application.

Xcalia Intermediation Core is a service-oriented software platform which utilizes a new approach to creating and managing composite applications and their modern and legacy data resources. Intermediation is a patented infrastructure layer that sits between the business model and the data/service resources that enables composite applications to be assembled faster and easier to meet changing business demands. This capability enables interoperability, faster development and deployment of applications and services, and reduced cost of SOA, legacy integration and migration projects.

“Today’s multi-billion euro organizations such as Conforama require a great deal of flexibility to support their unique business processes,” said Pierre Violo, CEO of Xcalia. “Xcalia Intermediation Core makes it easy for large organizations to adapt their heterogeneous IT environments to meet ever-changing customer demands and manage external business relationships using best practices for data management in service oriented architectures.”

About Xcalia
Xcalia’s dynamic integration software makes it easier for enterprises to build composite applications in SOAs while reusing valuable information resources, optimizing IT investments and reducing operating costs. Through Intermediation, a layer between the business model and the data/services resources, applications can be created or updated quickly to meet changing business demands. Xcalia is ideal for high-performance transactional applications that also need to reuse legacy and mainframe resources with maximum interoperability in any environment. The company has 20 large enterprise customers and has partnerships with IBM, Microsoft and Sierra Atlantic. Headquartered in Paris, France, Xcalia has offices in the U.S. and Germany, and the company is privately held. For more information, visit www.xcalia.com.

About Conforama
Conforama (a subsidiary of the PPR group) is the French leader and the world’s second largest retailer of home furnishings and appliances, with a network of 246 stores, including 177 units in France and 11 in French overseas departments and territories. With approximately 14,000 employees, Conforama operates 58 stores – 39 under the Conforama name and 19 Emmezeta-branded units – in seven countries: Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Poland, Luxembourg, Italy and Croatia.

Xcalia Media Inquiries:
Kurt Foeller
kurt@foellercom.com
Phone: +1 (415) 578-3251

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