Ambica was brought in to improve the performance of the SMS databases and applications and to work on enhancements. SMS was a client/server system used to store information about cable TV and telephone customers and was divided into three applications: Sales Order Processing (SOP), the Despatch Management System (Despatch) and VT (Batch and Standing Data Maintenance). The front-end had been written using:
- CA-OPENROAD 3.5/02
- MS Windows NT 3.51
- CA-INGRES ABF/4GL
- SQL
- VAX/VMS 6.2.
The back-end was on four CA-INGRES 6.4 databases on two Digital VAX machines running VAX/VMS 6.2.