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BJ's recently went through a major upgrade of its XBR system when it served as Oracle's beta site for XBRi, a cloud-based version that uses a front-end analytics and reporting tool called Ingenium. "The new tool has several components that have helped us," says assistant VP of asset protection Brendan Fitzgerald. "It comes with a series of canned reports that we have been able to modify to meet the needs of our business. One thing we're doing is creating subscriptions for our regional asset protection managers to review weekly, which gives them a look at their region and their clubs. We've also been able to use the available functionality of those reports to send a weekly set of reports to our clubs that they can use to investigate activity and identify cases."

Amazon just obtained a new competitor for its Amazon Web Services cloud hosting and development platform. Oracle is going head-to-head with Amazon with a slew of more than 24 new additions to the Oracle Cloud Platform. Oracle's new integrated cloud services include infrastructure, platform and software delivered as a service. Specific cloud-based services include hosted Exadata-based production databases, archive storage, Big Data, enterprise mobility, and application integration. Oracle says it offers the same products, with 100% compatibility, in the cloud and on premises, which means that companies can move to and from the cloud without changing applications. Furthermore, workloads can be moved to the cloud instantly. "Oracle is growing really fast," said Larry Ellison, CTO of Oracle, in public remarks. "Oracle is the only company on the planet that can deliver a complete, integrated, standards-based suite of services at every layer of the cloud. Those technology advantages enable us to be much more cost-effective than our competitors. Our new Archive Storage service goes head-to-head with Amazon Glacier and it's one-tenth their price."

News coverage of the Oracle Retail Cloud news release. The article states that the new cloud services are focus on helping retailers track their business-wide activity. The reporter notes in the Author's view section that, "by building out its Retail Cloud offering, Oracle appears to be making a strong play for the retail sector, across both online and physical stores. It is likely a push into vertical markets is a bid by Oracle to gain a competitive edge against rivals in the cloud market, such as SAP, IBM and Salesforce."

Retail is becoming an increasingly hot market for hosted cloud computing providers. Some of those providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Aliyun cloud division of Alibaba, are operated by retailers.