RCA

Project: rca.com
Type: Website and Content Management System

Overview:
RCA is one of the world's leading consumer electronics brands. In fact, it is very possible that you are viewing this web-site on a monitor utilizing RCA technology, if not a branded RCA monitor itself. Léger was contacted by Thompson Consumer Electronics in late 1998, to create an e-commerce web-site for their RCA Electronics Brand.

The requirements Léger uncovered for RCA were very interesting, in that Léger would need to produce an international sales and marketing content delivery/management application (CDA/CMA), integrated with an existing product database. All of this would also require Léger to create the data-modeling and e-commerce back-end systems from scratch. Fulfilling this "Open Market Transaction" requirement also meant writing a new piece of proprietary software, which would serve to bridge the existing RCA database to an e-commerce search engine. This encryption software would collect credit-card information from customers, and store it securely into a custom distribution interface. Once again, Léger successfully produced an application "Ahead of its' time", as this entire system had to be constructed to scale to support international storage and retrieval, and be capable of "Adding Markets" in real time.

The result of Léger's involvement with RCA was ground-breaking and successful. The CMA and CDA developed by Léger successfully integrated RCA's international data catalog with the new, proprietary e-commerce back-end. Furthermore, the subsequent addition of international markets has scaled as planned, and been utilized as a "base model" for other e-commerce applications world-wide.

"RCA was a great project, because it marked the point when these larger companies began to realize their need to not only create new systems, but the necessity of integrating existing ones. Once we did the strategy document, RCA realized that they were going to need a lot of proprietary software that didn't exist anywhere, in order to bridge to their inventory their systems. We wrote both their open market transactions, e-comm engine and encrypted billing systems from scratch, because there was nothing off the shelf at that time that would interface with anything. There hasn't ever been a time at Léger when we said, 'we CAN'T do that'. If it hadn't been done, then that was our challenge. At Léger, we have the talent to basically do anything a client wants done. They wanted it, so we wrote it and launched it successfully. I guess what we're most proud of, is that all of the projects we have been involved with both launched successfully, and are still in use today. They say Quantas Airlines is 100% safe, because they've never had a crash. Well, I'm not sure anything is 'Crash-Proof', especially in our IT world, but we can say that until now, we have never been involved with a project that hasn't launched successfully. What's more, we can look around on the web and still see things we did in the mid-90s being used every day. That's probably what I'm most proud of, and our guys are proud of it to. I think they should be." (Justin Léger, Founder)

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See It Live:
www.rca.com