Retailer systems increase control

IBM, Sun and SAS lead releases

IT vendors last week promoted a number of new offerings for retailers, including new IBM systems based on blade servers to help firms better manage IT resources in remote stores; and two new systems from Sun to help retailers roll out unified applications.

IBM’s Systems Solutions for Retail Stores were launched at last week’s National Retail Federation Conference in New York. They are based on the firm’s BladeCenter products, and target large retailers.

IBM said the systems will help firms to consolidate their hardware, storage, networking and applications onto a single platform. This will let retailers more easily add new customer-centric store applications, and increase staff productivity, it added.

Brett McGill, IT vice-president at boat retailer MarineMax, said IBM’s BladeCenter platform had already helped his organisation to improve service for customers while reducing costs. “We have been able to provide our customers access to more than 7,800 products directly from our web site and streamline our supply-chain processes,” he added. “IBM’s new [release] promises to extend efficiencies for retailers even further in the store environment.”

Also at the event, Sun unveiled its Sun Retail Store Processor and Sun Retail Integration Architecture Software. The former lets retailers push out new capabilities to multiple stores across a retail chain with reduced human intervention, according to Sun; while the latter is an implementation for the development and deployment of retail applications, designed to help companies create a standards-based application platform from supply chains to web sites.

Larry Singer, Sun senior vice-president, said the new releases can help to improve management for retailers who have disparate systems that currently make it difficult to roll out new capabilities.

Elsewhere, SAS Institute unveiled new business intelligence software for sales promotions. Promotion Optimisation is a planning system that determines which are the best items, locations and prices for promotions, said SAS.

The firm also updated its Marketmax product, adding a new version of its Integrated Merchandise Planning system. SAS said this now offers advanced analytical capabilities, a business-process designer and data integration capabilities.

“We’ve taken direction from our user community and updated the Marketmax user interface so information is presented in an Excel-like style,” said Cyndy Renfrow, SAS’s senior director of global retail practice.