Interflora is to consolidate the management of the four million orders placed through shops, call centres and its website.

The florist chain has outsourced the operation of its back-office systems to BT Global Services, and will begin migrating its order processing system by the end of 2004.

Orders from all of Interflora's member shops across the UK and the Republic of Ireland will be dealt with in the centre by late 2004.

The move combines a technology refresh with improved management of transactions, and removes the overhead of maintaining servers, according to Ian Scott, head of technology solutions at Interflora UK.

"With legacy databases spread out, it is difficult to get a single picture of our data. But it frees our guys up from the routine tasks of making sure our boxes are fed and watered," he said.

Interflora will also be updating the hardware in its members' shops. Stores will get thin client terminals which can send and receive orders, linking to the central system.

The company currently receives around four million orders a year. By outsourcing the transaction management system, it can ensure that the technology is kept up to date, said Scott.

Customer behaviour also dictates that the infrastructure needs to be scalable to deal with peak times, such as Mother's Day, Valentine's Day and Christmas.

To account for such loads, the system has been designed to deal with a five-fold increase in concurrent transactions, said Raymond Hendry, application specialist at BT Global Services.

"We will also be working with the customer to help grow the platform," he added.

The data centre will use Oracle database and financial software on Sun Microsystems servers.