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 a mixture of CA-OPENROAD 3.5/02 under MS Windows NT 3.51 and CA-INGRES ABF/4GL and SQL under 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.