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Customers want retailers to be available to them around the clock, necessitating systems that run constantly. Senior Director of Technology Strategy for Oracle Retail David Dorf offers a preview of an Oracle OpenWorld session devoted to the advantages of running Oracle Retail on Oracle systems.

Customers want retailers to be available to them around the clock, necessitating systems that run constantly. Senior Director of Technology Strategy for Oracle Retail David Dorf offers a preview of an Oracle OpenWorld session devoted to the advantages of running Oracle Retail on Oracle systems.

Highlighting that Oracle's recent testing has demonstrated that the Oracle Utilities Meter Data Management 2.0.1 system, running in tandem with Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2, can successfully process 1 billion meter reads per hour. The article notes that the test used data from 5.5 million smart meters measuring consumption in 15-minute intervals. The article also includes comments from Linda Jackman, group vice president of industry strategy, Oracle Utilities noting that the test assures utilities that Oracle hardware and software - engineered to work together, and available today - can process the huge volumes of data arriving from interval reads and ensure the usability of the data to produce the accurate, timely bills customers expect.

Highlighting that Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2.3.1, running with Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2, processed an unprecedented 16,500 bills per minute or 993,240 bills per hour. The release notes that in tests, a typical night's billing run for a utility with one million customers-47,600 bills- was processed in 2.87 minutes. The release also includes comments from Linda Jackman, group vice president of industry strategy noting that this benchmark demonstrates that Oracle software and hardware systems-engineered to work together, and available today-can process routine customer bills in a fraction of the time traditionally used by most utilities.

Highlighting that Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing 2.3.1, running with Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2, processed an unprecedented 16,500 bills per minute or 993,240 bills per hour. The article notes that in tests, a typical night's billing run for a utility with one million customers-47,600 bills- was processed in 2.87 minutes. The article also includes comments from Linda Jackman, group vice president of industry strategy noting that this benchmark demonstrates that Oracle software and hardware systems-engineered to work together, and available today-can process routine customer bills in a fraction of the time traditionally used by most utilities.

Tony Stephenson, IT Operations Manager, Morrisons, said, "As we are in a very competitive market we need a robust IT system we can rely on and can adapt to changing conditions...We have now extended the automation to Oracle E-Business Suite for our back-e

Retail IT is being transformed. CIOs are shifting from proprietary systems to package solutions and from an emphasis on cost reduction to a solid bump in IT capital spending. A strong customer focus means CIOs are fixing their attention on channel integration and analytics that will help them spot and anticipate shopper preferences more quickly. "Talking about re-engineering the foundation of retail IT may not be the sexy side of technology, but it's critical," Webster says. "If a company jumps into mobile-assisted in-store selling ... but doesn't have accurate visibility of inventory across the enterprise, what have they accomplished?" That's a point of view echoed by Gartner vice president of research Jeff Roster. "The big attack has to be on infrastructure," he says. "There are still a whole lot of retail companies out there that need to retire legacy systems and get out of the proprietary code writing business. Once they move to packaged systems, the opportunity to decrease infrastructure costs and reshape the business around today's customer can move forward at a quicker pace."