Microsoft

Redmond, Wash. -- Microsoft Corp. announced Monday that Target Corp. is running business-critical workloads for all its retail stores on 15,000 virtual machines using Microsoft virtualization and management technologies, giving its IT department greater agility and economies of scale. Target has virtualized inventory, point-of-sale, supply chain management, asset protection, in-store digital media and more on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center.

The March issue of Fortune contains the magazine’s annual ranking of the most admired companies, and this year’s list shows Target ranked 22nd. Only Walmart (11) and Nordstrom (21) were ranked ahead of the company. Other notable retailers on the list who ranked lower than Target included Costco (29), Best Buy (36), eBay (45) and Lowe’s (49).

The March issue of Fortune contains the magazine’s annual ranking of the most admired companies and this year’s list shows Walmart slipped two spots from the prior year and now occupies the 11 position.

New York City -- The global PC-based point-of-sale market grew a solid 6.9% in 2010, according to new research from IHL Group, a global research and advisory firm.

Shipments grew in all four major worldwide regions (North America, Europe/Middle East Africa, Latin/South America, and Asia/Pacific). Strong double-digit growth in the Asia/Pacific region was driven by new shipments in China, India, Korea, and Indonesia, according to the research. 

New York City -- J&R Electronics stays customer-centric by partnering with Microsoft to keep its customer data up-to-date and available to staff both online and in the stores.

Click here to find out how the retailer is looking to Microsoft technology, specifically Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail, to help its drive their business moving forward.

Retailers at NRF’s convention this week got a citing of Bill Fields, a former Walmart executive who spent 25 years with the company serving in various roles from 1971 to 1996. Today Fields is chairman of a group called China Horizon, a joint venture with the Chinese postal service charged with helping to develop retail and consumption in rural China, and it was the topic of China that Fields addressed during the super session: “Making the retail business dynamic,” sponsored by Microsoft.

New York City -- Microsoft Corp. announced that Bill Gonzalez, general manager of its worldwide distribution and services sector, has been elected to the associate member advisory council for the board of directors of the National Retail Federation. The announcement was made at the NRF Annual Convention & EXPO in New York.

As holiday promotions heated up in November and shoppers hit the Internet, there was a 44% surge in traffic to Walmart.com when compared with October, according to the online measurement firm comScore. The growth propelled Walmart to the 20th spot on comScore’ November ranking of the top 50 U.S. Web properties. The nearly 52 million unique visitors Walmart.com attracted in November 2010 was 5% more than in November 2009, according to comScore’s data.

Walmart, Target and Best Buy attracted record levels of customers to their websites during November, according to data released this week by the online measurement firm comScore. Retailers have come to expect a surge in traffic to their sites as the holiday approach and during November that proved to be the case and then some.