As a major research firm in media and markets, Scarborough Research measures lifestyle and shopping patterns, media behavior, and American consumer demographics.

Scarborough needed to upgrade PRIME, its proprietary data-analysis system for clients – marketers, media executives and sales staff, the press, ad agencies and industry analysts. Written in Visual Basic, PRIME required six programmers just for support.

Benchmarking Smalltalk and C, Scarborough developed the application in both and compared the results. No contest. When asked why he chose Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks, Jim Collins, Ph.D., Scarborough’s senior vice president of information systems, said simply, “I’m interested in solving problems, not writing a lot of code.” Rapid development, fewer support issues and faster access to data by clients.