"Oracle Retail Category Management provides grocers, hardlines and other retailers with a significant step forward in creating a better customer experience through targeted product offerings," said Mike Webster, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Oracle Retail. 

"As we continue to grow sales worldwide, the Oracle solution will enable us to personalize and enhance the customer experience online, streamline service and introduce more international sites," says Stacey Shulman, CIO, American Apparel.

Faced with falling demand for its UGG boots Deckers Outdoor Corp. is preparing to more than double its retail operation and shift away from a strategy that had been predominantly focused on wholesale. To prepare for the rapid expansion, Deckers is rolling out a new IT platform that will allow the company to handle more data associated with more retail stores and better manage inventory levels, Yul Vanek, the company's vice president of information technology, told CIO Journal.

December 2012 sales increased more than 59 percent over December 2011, and it was the highest sales month in the history of the company's online business

To keep pace with strong and consistent online growth, American Apparel has replaced an internally-built infrastructure with Oracle ATG Web Commerce, "to get the scalability we need," stated Stacey Shulman, CIO of American Apparel, "as well as an agile platform for providing better service to our customers."

Since launching a new e-commerce platform, American Apparel has continued to deliver an increase in e-commerce sales, with a more than 38 percent increase over the same period last year.

Oracle today announced enhancements to Oracle Retail Category Management, which helps grocers, big box retailers, hardlines and department stores tailor assortments, pricing and promotions to specific customer segments

Oracle (NSDQ:ORCL) is upgrading some of its core logistics applications, offering new releases of its retail category management, transportation management and global trade management software.

Stacey Shulman, chief information officer and head of e-commerce for American Apparel: "We had anticipated four times the traffic from Cyber Monday 2011, but we ended up with 20 times the traffic," she says.

"Consumers want to interact with a brand like UGG on their terms, not anyone else's," CIO Yul Vanek said. "It is our responsibility to ensure that a premium brand experience is delivered consistently, and with ease across all potential touchpoints."

...Web traffic reached 30 times its normal volume immediately after Hurricane Sandy, says Red Cross vice president of information technology Suzanne Hall. By the time the ensuing telethon kicked into action, there were moments when the organization was processing up to 75,000 donations simultaneously through its website, a rate of up to 22 transactions per second. "A lot of the times, we'll geo-target the site so that they can immediately see what might be relevant to them," says American Red Cross vp of marketing Craig Oldham. During the height of a disaster, the Red Cross may change personalization rules and content every hour. 

The 27-store specialty department store chain implements a new operations solution to better maintain inventory levels across channels

Oracle vp of retail strategy Andrea Vandome: A new generation of mobile analytics is at the forefront of change this year. We are emerging from three consecutive years in which consumers adopted smartphones in record numbers and used them to bridge desktop and in-store shopping. Retailers are moving quickly catch up. Recent advances in business intelligence, among them the ability to tap multiple sources and deliver to a mobile device in real-time, place line managers on more equal footing and equip them to better engage the omnichannel shopper.

What follows is a compendium of educated guesses and forecasts, and the editors at STORES would like to think that most of them have value. Still, if we had to sum up our expectations for 2013 in one word, it would be "convergence" - tying together the web, Big Data, analytics, mobile, social and all things digital to deliver a seamless experience to shoppers...

STORES' annual predictions feature is the result of months spent absorbing and processing the insights of numerous retail experts. STORES wishes to acknowledge the individuals and organizations who generously shared their time and views on key topics... David Dorf and Michael Webster, Oracle; Gary Penn, QuikSilver; Michael Haydock, IBM; Brian Kilcourse, Retail Systems Research

Omni-channel growth and international expansion are fueling investment in technology that connects the entire retail organization with the consumer in both virtual and physical environments

Coverage announcing the release of the Oracle Retail Week Awards 2013 Shortlist in the Retail Week publications.

Coverage of HyperCITY's partnership with Oracle for their Retail solutions, to assist the 12-store hypermarket chain with integrating and optimising its retail store operations to drive better business insights and enhancing customer experience.

"It's become mission critical to understand what is going on across the enterprise and why it is happening," Morgan-Vandome explained. "To make this a reality, each different line of business user needs to get a perspective of activity impacting all divisions." Nine out of 10 C-level retail executives reported that their organization is collecting and managing an average of 98% more business information than two years ago, according to a recent survey conducted by Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif. And the sources are ever-growing. For example, 43% of data stems from customer information, 33% from operations, and 30% sales and marketing, according to the survey.

Making better business decisions requires retailers to break down silos between company divisions, and deliver scalable predictive tools that allow managers enterprise-wide to sift through mission-critical information.  Chain Store Age talked with Andrea Morgan-Vandome, VP retail strategy and solution marketing, Oracle Retail, about how retailers can use new BI tools to make it happen.