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Oracle is focusing squarely on retail agility with the latest additions to its comprehensive set of retail cloud solutions. ..."Retailers can react to the market a lot faster," said David Dorf, senior director of product strategy at Oracle Retail, during a phone briefing with Chain Store Age. "Retailers do not have to focus on mundane IT tasks, but the retail business itself. They can also obtain access to more features and functions faster, with automatic upgrades in the cloud."

As technology and consumer expectations reshape the traditional shopping experience, IT departments must rapidly introduce new business capabilities while maintaining existing systems. Oracle Retail Cloud Services help retailers to ensure uptime and efficiency of key operations, while providing consistent, immediately available upgrades-enabling internal IT groups to focus on differentiating the customer experience and driving growth.

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."

Highlighting a recent Oracle survey suggesting that the top priorities for the next decade will focus on system reliability and operational efficiency.

Highlighting Linda Jackman's comments from a keynote address at The Networked Grid conference that Oracle is placing a larger focus on opportunities with water utilities.

The Feb. 14 edition of Connected Planet includes this article highlighting that Oracle announced at Mobile World Congress the latest release of its Oracle Communications Service Delivery (OCSD) product family. The article notes that with a converged serv

"Speakers at Oracle Industry Connect, being held March 25-March 26, in Boston, discussed how retailers can use advanced technology to enable growth and understand inventory levels across all channels (and share that knowledge with their customers)."

"Speakers at Oracle Industry Connect, being held March 25-March 26, in Boston, discussed how retailers can use advanced technology to enable growth and understand inventory levels across all channels (and share that knowledge with their customers)."

"Karen Katz , chief executive officer and president of Neiman Marcus Group, told a packed audience at the Oracle Industry Connect conference in Boston yesterday that the specialty retailer is putting a big focus - and a lot of money - into its technology infrastructure."

The retail industry hasn't traditionally given technology top priority, but with consumers' expectation of "anything, anywhere, anytime I want it," tech expertise has become a competitive focus for the industry's big players. Oracle Industry Connect, a two-day conference held March 25 and 26 here, brought together roughly 240 retail executives to network and share system implementation case histories as they chase omnichannel selling. Today, more than half of shoppers - 58 percent - rank product availability as more important than price, according to an Oracle study of 4,500 consumers worldwide. Mark Webster, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle's retail practice, said Amazon sold 426 items a second on Cyber Monday. "If you don't think consumers are taking advantage of new access points [to shop], then you are misguided."

Good Morning. Kohl's Corp. views the digital wallet as much more than a payments system. The retailer is betting that its loyalty program, which features a mobile, digital wallet inside the Kohl's app, will provide a key competitive advantage for this holiday season and beyond, and help make up for a bleak third quarter. A pilot program across 300 stores in 2013 and 2014 produced about 10 million enrollees in the loyalty program, CIO Janet Schalk told CIO Journal's Steven Norton. Since launching nationwide in early October, that number has doubled to 20 million. Most technology payments providers solely focus on payments, says Ratnakar Lavu, Kohl's EVP for digital technology. While he doesn't deny the importance of payments, he says "there's really no one who's doing something related to offers or rewards." Kohl's has redesigned its website and mobile apps, implemented Oracle Corp. systems to handle inventory and pricing, and is testing a new point-of-sale system. It also has rolled out "buy online, pick up in store" options at some stores, and is shipping products from about 800 locations. Eventually, Kohl's may look to integrate its loyalty program with its payments systems. The company has built systems that will take different kinds of payments and integrate with other mobile wallets in the marketplace.

In this exclusive interview, Janet Schalk, EVP and CIO of Kohl's, shares insights into the retailer's latest technology implementations related to an overall omnichannel focus.

Unicoop Florence, the largest cooperative of Italy whose origins date back to 1891, has a long history of customer focus. Not by chance Riccardo Rapi, CIO of Unicoop, says: "Our commitment is to provide the best customer experience possible, achievable goal by improving management processes of the store and warehouse .

Bylined article by Oracle's Bastian Fischer highlighting ways in which smart metering can help water utilities become more energy efficient and noting that European utilities are slow to implement the technology.