QVS Introduces InSight

Our vision for InSight is simple yet far reaching. It is for retail. It is for today. It is about 2 things: making your systems more accessible and getting more from your existing systems.

QVS is a proven retail software technology company with particular expertise in system-level retail systems. This means operating systems, communications, and device drivers. With us it also means performance and it means efficient. With InSight QVS has combined many of our existing technologies and developed some new ones. These technologies will easily install into your existing store systems and provide powerful new capabilities which can help store managers, store helpdesk associates, loss prevention professionals, developers, network managers, and hardware support technicians.

QVS has tried to make this product, including its pricing model, one that will sell itself. We have made it very easy to install and try, and have strived to document it completely. We have also put considerable effort into the User Interface (UI), to make InSight usable for all including non-technical personnel. The InSight system components install on your store controllers. Installation is automated and is as simple as running ‘insighti’. There are 2 main system modules of InSight: a controller agent and a terminal agent. The outside world talks to InSight through the controller agent. The controller agent has multiple external interfaces one of which is SNMP. The terminal agent runs in the POS terminals essentially as an extension to the operating system. With these two components, InSight gives you access. You can see what is displayed on all POS terminals. You can monitor what is going on in any POS terminal from anywhere at anytime. You can remotely take control of any POS terminal. You can view device histories if there have been device or terminal problems. This is just a sample of some of the key functions. There are many more.

InSight’s user components consist of: a desktop UI, a handheld UI, and programming interfaces. The desktop UI runs on any Windows desktop and allows you to choose which store, which controller, and which terminal you wish to access. Its primary purpose is for viewing, monitoring, and controlling terminals remotely as well as extracting diagnostic information. Besides existing diagnostics such as system event logs, InSight provides its own additional capabilities one of which is something we call a non-intrusive ‘snapshot terminal dump.’

QVS realizes that there are other excellent network and remote management products available and being used today. It is our vision that we will work along side these products adding value with our ability to access system level information. For this reason and because we know customers do plenty of their own programming, we provide various programming interfaces which allow access through the controller agent. Everything the agents can provide or our UI can get to can be directly accessed by users through these programming interfaces.

Finally, we envision that InSight will go beyond remote access. We have plans for adding major features that will make existing store servers more truly inter-operable with other systems as well as substantially improving performance by enabling techniques such as totally safe disk-caching to systems that don’t already have it.

As usual, QVS products are designed to enable your systems as they are today. Reality says that we can’t require you to upgrade software, hardware or make application changes - so we don’t.

Last Updated: May 20, 2005