Our Technology

At Vista, we take our technology seriously. It is built to be the most functional and feature-rich cinema management solution, so that your cinemas give you the best return on your investment.

Extensibility and integration are a core part of our philosophy:

• Custom extracts and data feeds can be configured to run on schedule and sent to other systems.
• Reports can be set up to be automatically sent to internal and external parties.
• Customer-created reports are displayed in standard menus and can be scheduled and emailed just like any standard Vista report.
• Web services are well-maintained and documented. They can be used by you or a third party to extend the Vista ecosystem.
• A flexible plugin architecture is carefully created and maintained, and is available for several areas of our software. Country, region, and customer specific integrations are plugged directly into core software and don’t require a software upgrade.

You can customise our software to work the way that’s best for you; present different views of the information; and create a quick menu or shortcuts for tasks you perform often. Our software is built to operate around the world. It is an easily maintainable and configurable system, made to adapt to a wide range of business processes.

• Flexible language support enables you to add new languages and to change software text and messages to match your requirements.
• Products such as Kiosk, Vista Web, Digital Signage, and Vista Mobile can be highly customised, giving you the ability to simply change the logo or change the layout and screen flow.

Specific hardware isn’t required to operate our software.

You can run products such as POS or Kiosk on PARTech, NCR, IBM, and J2 standard personal computers with touch screens and tablets. Using our plugin architecture, Vista software operates on a number of card swipe readers, cash drawers, and customer displays

Our software is primarily developed on the Microsoft .NET framework and runs on Microsoft SQL Server, supported by Microsoft’s technology, investment, and infrastructure. Vista is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and is PA-DSS Certified.

Vista is always thinking about the best way to translate technology into business value for you and your customers.

• We make use of the latest Angular frameworks along with Typescript and SASS to deliver rich compelling web experiences.
• Products like Elastic Search, Redis, Kibana and RabbitMQ are used in our suite to deliver the benefits of best of breed Open Source software.
• Desktop applications are developed with Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Framework technologies.
• We use a combination of web test tools (Karma, Selenium and Jasmine) and server test tools (primarily Specflow and MSTest) to confirm our software’s correctness during the development process.
• Well-designed RESTful Web services are developed with Web API and WCF technologies.
• iOS and Android ticket sale applications are created using native tooling and React Native is used by our in-cinema apps.
• Vista (and Veezi) make use of a broad range of cloud platform services to deliver highly available, functional and performant software on the cloud. We also support a combination of PaaS and IaaS cloud deployment for our products, enabling you to make use of the same cost and scale benefits of the cloud if you choose to.
• For on premise data storage, we support everything from SQL Express for individual cinemas, right up to Enterprise for multiple cinema circuits requiring data warehousing for vast amounts of data. On the cloud we use a number of best of breed RDBMS and NoSQL providers to deliver our products.

We maintain a single code base, ensuring that you benefit from a strong, well-maintained product. Regular functional enhancements add business value and ensure that you won’t be left with a version that can no longer be upgraded.

Vista’s agile development methodology and iterative release cycle lets us deliver enhancements to you on a regular basis.

A variety of system architectures are implemented to ensure the best approach for your situation:

• A distributed computing model is used when users and data are co-located. This ensures high availability, responsiveness, and no single point of failure.
• A centralised computing model is used for central data control and reporting. Access to remote application logic and data processing is provided via web services that can be load balanced across multiple servers for performance and redundancy.

Applications are built with ease of deployment in mind. Software installations can be installed via a simple wizard, or automated using the command line. Remote cinema clients such as POS and Kiosk are self-upgrading when a new version has been installed at the site. There is no need to go to each individual machine to upgrade.