iAnywhere, a subsidiary of Sybase, has announced that award-winning UK footwear retailer, Faith Footwear Limited, has extended its use of iAnywhere technology with the deployment of iAnywhere Afaria - which has been rolled out throughout head office as well as to 75 Faith stores and 100 plus concessions across the UK.

Afaria has enhanced the remote back office management and transfer of information between Faith's branch offices and concessions, and its main headquarters including sales figures, inventory details, stock ordering and customer service information. It has superseded the company's incumbent data management solution - iAnywhere RemoteWare. The latter had been in use at the company for five years when Faith decided to expand the functionality of its back office systems to include a number of additional features.

Offering both a logical and ideal upgrade path, Afaria was an obvious choice according to Faith Footwear Head of IT, Luke Phillips.

"Afaria does exactly the job we needed it to, whilst also delivering all the extra functionality on our wish list," he says. "It provides the enhanced back office communications that were essential in the new solution, together with easier software deployment, configuration, and management, and better interactivity with our outlets' remote desktops. It also makes data movement and patch management a great deal easier, while offering us much greater cross-system uniformity and a single view of our organisation."

Faith had initially considered designing and building an upgrade solution for itself, in-house, and set about investigating potential platforms. However, it soon became apparent that a bespoke DIY system would be prohibitive for several reasons, and so the company looked to the market for a ready-built answer.