Why Trickle Poll?

Trickle-Polling is the repetitive process of monitoring and retrieving new data, as it is logged at the store. Each new segment of information is seamlessly attached to any previously retrieved segment. At the end of the salesday, the data appears as if was received all at once, as traditional "batch" polling solutions do.

If the same data is available by day’s-end, the question is: "Why trickle-poll?"

Trickle-polling brings benefits and cost savings in several key areas:

Executive – By processing the data as it is retrieved, decision makers get "real-time" access to critical sales and non-sales data, allowing them to analyze traffic and sales patterns, deploy sales staff where needed, even initiate promotional events. Since this important business information is available hours, (in some cases, a full day!) earlier than before, inventory replenishment, credit settlement and other processes and reports no longer need to be a day behind.

Operations and Network Control – Say goodbye to the "night"-mare of end-of-day polling. Since trickle-polling retrieves store information in real-time, the entire day’s sales activity is retrieved and ready for processing before the doors close for the night. Benefits include:

	Longer Nighttime "Window" – A growing number of applications need to send updates to the stores, during the night. By eliminating the time previously spent on nighttime polling, more time is available for the nighttime downloads.
	More Bandwidth/Processing Power – Trickle-polling greatly reduces network congestion and CPU utilization, since small segments of information are retrieved throughout the day, instead of all at once. In fact, one customer, experiencing performance bottlenecks, avoided a costly CPU upgrade by implementing trickle-poll.
	Disaster Recovery – In the rare but inevitable case of a store’s hard disk "crashing", data loss is minimized, since much of the data will already have been retrieved.
	Increased System Availability - With polling activity active throughout the day, connectivity problems will not first be discovered at night, when in-house technical support may not be as readily available.

In Summary:

Trickle-Polling is a classic example of how time really is money. It makes information available sooner, reduces operational delays and generates savings in support and equipment capacity costs. Customers using trickle-poll will quickly realize a large R-O-I (return on investment).