jBASE Delivers Long-Term Options for Exeter City Council

Population served: 109,000
Location of headquarters: Exeter, Devon
Number of jBASE users: 400
Platform: Sun Solaris


When it came to choosing a new IT system, Exeter City Councils Andy Billington took a notably practical view. "We see technology as a means to an end, not an end in itself," he said, "and we were looking for a solution which offered long-term advantages over our existing system. We didn't want a quick fix."

Not that there weren't shorter-term issues as well. In fact, at the time of researching the options - 1998 - there was one particular issue which Exeter specifically wanted to address. This was Y2K compliance. But, over the longer term, the council was concerned about several key questions. Support, for example. "This was proving a real problem", said Billington, "as it was both poor and expensive. We needed to look at this as a matter of priority."

"But there were other issues, too. Such as Integration. Reality wasn't the appropriate platform for our future requirements. We wanted a system which would give us true flexibility, in terms of our integration options and we had a need to integrate with data held on our Ingres database."

The result - after a thorough evaluation of the market - was a migration to jBASE. The council intends, over time, to integrate all its applications, from housing and property management, to car parking services and financials, to SUN Solaris Servers. Immediate benefits were experienced, especially the ease at which jBASE allows access to non jBASE data such as Ingres and even Reality-X data. "There's no doubt about it", commented Andy Billington, "jBASE gives us the performance and flexibility we were looking for, and the support is superb. We are pretty happy with our decision."