Clarion Case History: Cinemark

Clarion technology provided Cinemark with the ability to create some significant firsts: first major movie chain to sell tickets over the Internet, and first to introduce print-at-home ticketing. Clarion's level of productivity, which Cinemark describes as allowing "a single developer to do the work normally produced by a team of programmers," gives businesses a competitive edge by bringing products to close quicker than other tools.

As always, SoftVelocity is proud to bring you case histories of how Clarion has provided solutions to businesses of all sizes. This case history is a little special in that every word below was written by its subjects, Cinemark USA. Our thanks to Phillip Wood, Vice President of Information Systems.

Cinemark USA, Inc. is one of the largest motion picture exhibitors in North America, with 2,942 screens in 33 States and internationally. It is a world leader in the development of stadium seating multiplex theatres. As of May 15, 2001, the Company has opened four new stadium seating multiplexes with a total of 44 screens in four different countries bringing its aggregate screen count to 2,946 in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Colombia. During the remainder of 2001, the Company has no additional domestic theatre commitments but plans to open up to nine stadium seating multiplexes (93 screens) internationally in six different countries.

We needed to enhance the functionality of our legacy theatre point of sale system to be able to accept credit cards, store transaction level detail, access real-time information, and allow for remote ticketing.

Our legacy system was written by one of our employees with Microsoft Basic for a DOS environment. It met our requirements for 10 years.

We considered purchasing solutions from vendors that sell POS solutions for the theatre exhibitors. Most of these systems are written with BASIC, C++, or Delphi. These systems are extremely expensive and they are not customized to meet our operational requirements.

Because we wrote our original POS system we believed we could develop a superior system that had the features we had relied on for ten years. We had some experience writing some small systems with Clarion for DOS in our corporate office and we followed the evolution of the Windows product until we were comfortable with its performance and the stability of the Topspeed file system.

We used Clarion For Windows to create a touch-screen enabled POS application to sell movie tickets and concessions. After the core functionality of our legacy system was written in Clarion, we added remote ticketing through a connection to a web site. We added a feature to allow ushers to scan bar-coded tickets that customers printed from our web site. We also have web servers and kiosks running Clarion applications in our theatres.

The biggest challenge was finding an experienced Clarion developer. Once we did, we were able to move very quickly. Clarion allows a single developer to do the work normally produced by a team of programmers.

Our decision to use Clarion for Windows allowed Cinemark to become the first major movie theatre chain to sell tickets on the internet and introduce Print-At-Home ticketing to moviegoers. Our system is now the premier point of sale system for the exhibition industry. Our ownership of our own source code allows us to quickly make changes to the system to take advantage of future technologies to improve the movie-going experience.

Here are some actual screenshots (note: the application typically runs on a touch screen at 800 x 600 pixels, and these images are highly compressed):