The board of directors at the House of Fraser Group were due to meet last week at the company’s London office in Victoria to decide on an expansion of computing resources for the jewel in its crown, Harrods of Knightsbridge. Information technology director Paul Livesey says that Harrods will be going down the Unix route, at least in part. Harrods was not included in the recent sale of NCR Tower 32/600 systems, networked to the central mainframe at Victoria and installed in the 46 largest stores around the UK, including the D H Evans and A & N chains, as well as Barkers of Kensington. According to Livesey Harrods requires a different systems solution. It has a wider product range than the rest of our 80 stores and has its own distribution centre. The board will be looking to extend the existing IBM mainframe and point of sale equipment with distributed systems, and adding applications generator and database software. Oracle is thought to be the most likely database – other suppliers should be named at the meeting. NCR said it could not comment on the future intentions of its customers.
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