Business Intelligence (BI)

Armonk, N.Y. – IBM is launching a new event readiness services offering that will enable businesses in industries including retail to prepare for unexpected surges in online traffic and sales. IBM experts will work with clients through a series of questions that analyze the capacity of the current infrastructure in place and the potential impediments.  

E-commerce solutions provider Digital River Inc. has named a Groupon executive as its next CFO.

Digital River has announced that Hoke Horne has joined the company as chief financial officer. In this role, Horne, who has more than 20 years of financial experience, will be responsible for the company’s accounting, finance, tax, corporate development and enterprise operations activities.

San Jose, Calif. – Digital technology stands ready to significantly disrupt retail and many other industries, yet many companies are not showing concern.  

New York - Lack of a single customer view, an inability to deal with large amounts of data and lack of time for optimization are among the challenges that cause the biggest headaches for modern marketers. According to new research published by Econsultancy in partnership with SmartFocus, among the pain points marketers face are the challenges of making customer data actionable, bottlenecks caused by IT and web development teams and lack of time for campaign testing and optimization.

The report identifies the following key challenges:

Redwood Shores, Calif. – 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.

Seattle – Amazon.com is reportedly using a proprietary machine learning solution to analyze online customer reviews and present newer and more relevant reviews first. According to CNet, the system takes into account factors such as newness, whether the review was written by a verified Amazon purchaser and how many customers found the review helpful.

Cloud computing has become nearly ubiquitous, but are retailers making the best use of cloud services when it comes to managing sensitive customer data? Deciding what customer data should be stored in the cloud and what data should be stored on-premises behind a company’s firewall is a question every retail company has to grapple with.

Chelmsford, Mass. -- There is a disconnect between IT and loss prevention departments when it comes to budgets, focus and staffing, according to a study by IHL Group and Axis Communications.

In a little over three years as a public company, Facebook may now be worth more than Walmart.

The question is, will the social network's surge last?

According to Quartz, over the last year, Facebook’s stock has jumped roughly 30% as the broader S&P 500 has barely managed to keep its head above water. The climb has added more than $65 billion to Facebook’s market value, bringing it to more than $236 billion, just above Walmart’s $235 billion.

Walnut Creek, Calif. – Retailers are increasingly placing a high value on competitive price intelligence.

A new survey of 123 retailers from RSR Research co-sponsored by 360pi, “Pricing 2015,” indicates 59% of respondents reported competitive price intelligence as very valuable.

The survey also shows that competitive price intelligence was cited as the top intent for change at 34% of “retail winners” and 50% of “retail laggards.” Additional takeaways include: