Business Intelligence (BI)

The 330-unit specialty retailer Kirkland’s is looking to grow sales following a dramatic upgrade to its assortment planning process.

The company switched from a manual system running on Microsoft Excel to Oracle’s portfolio of assortment, financial, location and item planning solutions. Kirkland’s work with Veltio, the leading consultancy in the design, implementation and tuning of Oracle planning and optimization solutions for the retail industry.

New York – Multicultural consumers are growing in importance as the U.S. increasingly becomes a multicultural country. According to an upcoming study from Nielsen, “The Multicultural Edge: Rising Super Consumers,” multicultural consumers today are leaders in technology adoption.

Armonk, N.Y. – Mobile app use continues growing rapidly, but businesses are not keeping pace with security. According to new research from IBM and Ponemon Institute, nearly 40% of more than 400 large companies studied, including many in the Fortune 500, aren’t taking the right precautions to secure the mobile apps they build for customers.

Digital commerce continued its meteoric rise in the fourth quarter, according to the Shopping Index by Demandware.

The index, which measures digital commerce growth across two key attributes -- shopping attraction and shopper spend -- reveals that shopper attraction, which measures the number of shoppers, was up 25% in the fourth quarter 2014 over the fourth quarter last year and drove 81% of the digital commerce growth.

San Jose, Calif. - Customer experience optimization is becoming an increasingly critical discipline as organizations enter a new era of marketing. Ninety-six percent of companies deem customer experience optimization as "important," with more than two in five companies (41%) claiming that this is now a "high priority" for their organization, according to the study.

Seattle – Amazon.com is moving forward in the burgeoning arena of the Internet of Things (IoT), but isn’t making a big deal about it. According to multiple media reports, Amazon has purchased 2lemetry, a Denver-based IoT startup, for an undisclosed sum.

2lemetry provides an enterprise platform that can track and manage Web-connected IoT devices, such as autos and appliances. The company was founded in 2011 and has raised $9 million in venture capital funding since that time.
 

Menlo Park, Calif. – Facebook has purchased personalized shopping engine TheFind.com, with the intent of making its ad more relevant to individual users. The social media giant will integrate TheFind’s functionality into its personalized ad-matching capability, rather than keep TheFind operating as a separate entity.

In a message on its homepage, TheFind said some employees will make the transition to Facebook.

Chris Allan was a co-founder of Quantum Retail Technology and now he is the company’s CEO too.

Allan rejoined Quantum, a provider of merchandise optimization and inventory solutions, in late 2014 to lead the company’s retail development and delivery organizations. He will maintain that role in addition to serving as CEO.

Paris - Nature & Découvertes, a French-based European retailer with 83 stores across France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany and Switzerland, has partnered with Ipanema Technologies as part of an enterprise-wide, 24-month digital transformation. With Ipanema’s help, the retailer successfully reduced application response time by 50%, and reduced network costs and OPEX costs by 50% and 10%, respectively.
 

Following a recent series of data breaches targeting both large and medium sized retailers, many retailers are investing in technology that will help encrypt credit card data at the point of sale. Although a meaningful way to reduce risk, endpoint encryption is not the silver bullet solution hoped for by many retailers.