The application software company selling more new HP e3000s than any other is making changes to its flagship product, upgrades that propose more reliance on the non-3000 part of the solution.

Smith-Gardner is releasing Ecometry in June, the latest version of its MACS and WebOrder non-retail store solution. The company is retiring the MACS and WebOrder names with the release, and shipping Ecometry in a 5.0 version, which is in sync with the MACS and WebOrder numbering.

Ecometry — a name chosen that’s designed to be a blend of e-commerce and the Latin suffix “metry” meaning configuration or arrangement. Smith-Gardner VP of marketing Sharon Gardner said the name “represents a configuration of front-office and back-office e-commerce applications arranged around a central customer database.”

In the new version of that product, the central database could well be something other than IMAGE/SQL. Smith-Gardner is retaining the HP 3000 and IMAGE as the back-office component of Ecometry; the company only sold its first Unix version of the product this year. But the front-office part of the solution will be relying more than ever on Oracle databases, running on NT and Unix platforms.

Smith-Gardner’s use of platforms other than the 3000 isn’t new. Ever since the company began offering WebOrder, its product for putting catalog sales online, an NT or Unix system has been required to link the Web customers with HP 3000 information. Ecometry takes the use of non-3000 platforms further by creating a Universal Data Interchange (UDI) database. This is an Oracle database acting as a data mart, populated with information from the 3000 back office module.

Ecometry is designed to give Smith-Gardner customers — more than 300 companies now use S-G solutions — a way to branch out into wireless, call center, TV and radio and retail operations. Gardner said the company chose Oracle for its data mart for the database’s connectivity options, and because some of the largest S-G customers wanted a non-3000 database.

The data mart is called the Ecometry Knowledge Center, more than 20 Oracle tables that maintain categories of enterprise data such as Product Content, Marketing Content, Customer Profile Data and Customer Interaction Details.

S-G says that the Knowledge Center will enable interaction at a new level for some companies. For example, they may have customers who shop a Web site after returning an item for sizing problems, and those customers can automatically get special discounts and special customer service messaging while spending time at the site. The front office modules deliver real-time access to corporate customer data to drive the application, and enable this type of customer relationship management.

Ecometry integrates the newest levels of front office support — a Web publisher using Dreamweaver, and a Content Manager that expands on the application’s Product Master — with recently introduced WebOrder options such as Predictive Response, Wish Lists and Internet Gift Registry, E-mail Executive to route e-mail messages between departments and the back office module, and an Internet Campaign Manager.

“We ported the software to the other platforms to have a check in the box,” Gardner said. With only an HP 3000 entry, “sometimes we didn’t even get asked to participate. It’s opened up those doors for us, and then we go and sell the HP 3000, because it is our development box.” In the company’s strategy, it develops on the 3000 and ports every four months to the NT and Unix platforms it has begun to support.

“It’s our belief that the HP 3000 is the best workhorse for the back office and e-business — the order processing,” Gardner said. “It’s also extremely reliable, and cost efficient.” The company is now selling more to larger, traditional retailers, a shift away from the smaller catalog companies who gave the company its start. These customers want what S-G calls “the next generation of seamless, limitless and highly scalable business infrastructure – which encompasses all customer interaction mediums.”

Ecometry’s front end functions “don’t require the performance level that the back-office functions need,” Gardner said, “so NT and Unix are fine at this point. We hate it, but the perception that we run across about the 3000 is more negative than we’d like.”

The solution, which is almost always sold turnkey with HP 3000 hardware, begins at $150,000 at the lowest level, using a Series 918 HP 3000. Customers have to purchase their own NT hardware for the front-office functions at additional cost. Existing customers of MACS and WebOrder can get into the new Ecometry features for an additional $30,000 to $50,000, Gardner said.