Business Intelligence (BI)

Los Angeles -  Fast-fashion giant Forever 21 is on the fast-track, with plans to open 600 stores over the next three years. To help support its rapid growth, the retailer is using Oracle Retail solutions.

New York -- Amazon reported higher-than-expected profit for its fourth quarter, fueled by growth of its Prime memberships and holiday shoppers, even as its sales came in below forecasts. It’s a reverse for the e-commerce giant, which has typically sacrificed profits for rapidly-growing sales.

For the fourth quarter, net income totaled $214 million, down from $239 million in the year-ago period, but better than analysts had expected. Sales rose 15% to $29.3 billion, lower than the expected $29.7 billion.

Columbus, Ohio - DSW Inc. is shifting titles and responsibilities to its executive ranks, with all changes effective Feb. 2. Carrie McDermott, currently executive VP, sales and operations, will be appointed executive VP and COO.  

In addition, Bill Jordan, currently executive VP and general counsel, will be appointed executive VP and chief administrative officer, adding IT to his portfolio of responsibilities.

King of Prussia, Pa. – EBay Enterprise, an EBay Inc. company, has selected IBM as a hybrid cloud platform to enhance its Magento Hosting Partner ecosystem.

This agreement is designed to expand global infrastructure options for Magento's more than 240,000 retail users by giving them access to the IBM SoftLayer infrastructure.

Dayton, Ohio – Personalization has become something of a “family value” for marketers. According to the Teradata 2015 Global Data-Driven Marketing Survey, 90 % of marketers say making marketing individualized is a priority.  

They want to move beyond segmentation to true one-to-one personalization in a real-time context. Faster, more accurate decisions are key benefits of using data for nearly two-thirds of respondents.

Other findings include:

Boca Raton, Fla. - Office Depot Inc. is obtaining a little outside assistance with integration resulting from its merger with OfficeMax. Office Depot has selected Capgemini to drive critical technology migration and finance and accounting services resulting from the merger.

Sunnyvale, Calif. – Yahoo Inc. plans a tax-free spin-off of its remaining holdings in Alibaba Group. The spinoff will create an independent registered investment company called SpinCo.

Stock of the new company will be distributed pro rata to Yahoo shareholders, resulting in SpinCo becoming a separate publicly traded company. Following the spin-off, Yahoo will continue to operate its core business and hold its 35.5% interest in Yahoo Japan.

By Will Poindexter and Coleman Mark, Bain & Company
 
Retailers need to quickly build world-class IT capabilities for omnichannel retailing — a seamless, integrated shopping experience, whether the customers are in the store or online. The major reason: customer expectations are rising, in part thanks to the strides made by new competitors with business models built on technology, and pure-play retailers like Amazon, which are not encumbered by legacy environments and physical stores.
 

Stockholm, Sweden – Stockholm, Sweden-based EPiServer and Nashua, New Hampshire-based Ektron have merged to create a new global digital experience provider of scale. The combined company is backed by technology-focused private equity investment firm Accel-KKR.

The combined company, which will operate under the EPiServer name and continue to use the Ektron and EPiServer brands, has more than 8,800 customers in 30 countries backed by a network of more than 880 partners.

Boca Raton, Fla. - Office Depot Inc. has selected CoreMedia LiveContext software to help enhance the customer shopping experience for Officedepot.com by streamlining the collaboration between its online authors to ensure faster time-to-market for executing integrated campaigns. Late in 2014 and within a short period of time, CoreMedia LiveContext was integrated with the Office Depot product catalog, pricing information and front-end modules, providing business users with a single interface to access this real-time information and blend it with marketing content.