Video Rental Chain Taps Inovis for VAN

December 16, 2008 Alex Woodie

Rogers Plus, a chain of movie and video game rental stores in Canada, has turned over the managements of its Inovis EDI software to Inovis and its Inovisworks value added network (VAN), the vendor announced recently. Rogers Plus is expected to benefit through easier access to additional trading protocols as well as historic trading data, Inovis says.

Rogers Plus owns and operates more than 300 stores that offer movie and video game rentals and cell phone services, making it the second largest video chain in Canada. (Blockbuster is the first.) The company is the retail division of Rogers Cable, which itself is a subsidiary of Rogers Communications, one of Canada’s largest cable companies.

The company is a licensee of Inovis TrustedLink System i, an EDI management package that runs on the IBM i operating system (i OS). The software enables Rogers Plus to communicate electronically with its trading partners using EDI and other e-business formats.

As part of the new deal with Inovis, Rogers Plus will augment its use of the i OS version of TrustedLink with the Inovisworks VAN, a versatile trading network managed by Inovis. Moving to Inovisworks should boost Rogers’ electronic trading capabilities and enable it to send and receive business documents not only in the EDI format, but also AS2, XML, RosettaNet, and others over a variety of different protocols (HTTP, SMTP, FTP) and security standards (SSL, IPSEC, VPN, PGP).

The other main benefit of moving to the Inovisworks VAN is it will give Rogers Plus better access to historical trading data. Instead of forcing customers to dig up the information manually, Inovisworks provides dashboards and other methods of accessing trading information.

“In terms of archiving alone, Inovisworks will save us many hours of time we had to waste researching thanks to the easy access of up to 10 years of historical data,” says Francois Chevallier, vice president of retail systems for Rogers Plus. Inovisworks provides 35 days of real-time online document tracking before the documents are moved to archive.

Chevallier also listed price as a factor in the switch to Inovisworks.