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Since early 2000, incentive marketing companies have been working hard to build a formerly stalled industry and now almost every company in Brazil has or will institute some form of incentive marketing as a way to reward employees and customers and stay ahead of the competition.  The challenge has been to deliver attractive incentive content easily and cost effectively with the right security mechanisms in place.

Tradecom’s Best Pontos application is an online reward system for incentive and motivational programs.  This system is used by companies, industries, employees and customers to measure everything from sales performance, to employee productivity and customer retention. 

The main benefit to customers using Tradecom’s application is having a very quick and clean way to reward employees and customers with virtual points instead of having to contend with how to securely and accurately deliver money into individual bank accounts.  Using the point system, employees and customers have access to hundreds of rewards through a single online catalog that pulls together products from most of Brazil’s top online stores.  Tradecom’s application is unique because it is a Rich Internet Application that is interactive, delivers content very fast and is visually appealing with a much improved user experience.

While Tradecom had developed a strong competency in building commercial websites using HTML and Flash, they did not have the skills for a new project that required programming in Flex.  As a result, they worked toward building a competency in Rich Internet Application programming and more specifically Flex development. Then came the challenge of figuring out how to integrate  Flex and .NET.  Initially, the team had developed an integration between Flex and .NET using web services, but they experienced performance problems and needed a resolution fast.   The development team was given about 6 weeks to make the transition from web services to AMF.  This deadline and new requirement for chat/instant messaging functionality was what led Tradecom to WebORB for .NET. 

These were some of the major benefits Tradecom enjoyed as a result of using WebORB for .NET:

• Faster Development - Tradecom's development time was cut in half, just by using the code generator.  This in turn reduced development cost and enabled the team to meet important project deadlines.
• Improved Performance - Tradecom's support and administration team were the first to see performance improvements.  WebORB cut data loading times from 1.5 minutes to under 30 seconds.  This was hugely important to Tradecom as more and more data and customers are added to their system.
• Scalability - WebORB enables Tradecom to support more traffic on their system. According to Fabio, "With WebORB, after the client app is loaded, data flies in and out, consuming much less bandwidth."

• MS Windows Serve 2003
• 1 Intel Xeon Dual Core 3.0 GHZ
• 2 GB RAM
• MySQL
• WebORB for .NET