Business Intelligence (BI)

London – Big Data technology provider ECommera has named Kevin Sterneckert as chief marketing officer. Sterneckert, who most recently served as the lead retail analyst for Gartner, brings with him more than 20 years of experience in retail leadership.

New York – Retail marketers say social media and digital, customer data and brand awareness are their top three marketing challenges. Findings from a retail marketing survey SAP conducted with University of Arizona students also showed that survey participants said 100% of respondents cited digital advertising among the most important marketing tools for their organization.

Colorado Springs, Colo. – Acellos is integrating its Prophesy Dispatch TMS (transportation management system) productnwith MacroPoint, a service that provides location tracking for brokered loads. The integrated solution provides transportation brokers with a way to automatically track loads including arrival, departure from stops and GPS position updates.   

Fort Worth, Texas – Snowstorms that affected as many as two-thirds of the selling days in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014 in some key markets dampened financial performance at Pier 1 Imports Inc.

Compared to the same period the prior year, net income fell 31% to $42.6 million from $61.7 million. Total sales fell 6% to $515.8 million from $551.6 million and same-store sales dropped 4.6%.

Armonk, N.Y. -- IBM Corp. announced it will acquire digital marketing technology provider Silverpop. The Atlanta-based Silverpop allows marketers to target highly personalized offers and promotions. IBM said the technology will enhance its enterprise marketing capabilities.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Salisbury, N.C. – Delhaize America has entered into a multi-year agreement for Revionics Life Cycle Price Optimization solutions, which include Revionics Price Optimization, Revionics Promotion Optimization and Revionics Markdown Optimization. The agreement also includes Revionics Advanced Analytics services: key value item (KVI) analysis, item clustering and market basket analysis.

Reston, Va. – Clarabridge, Inc., a provider of intelligent customer experience management (CEM) solutions, is acquiring Market Metrix, an enterprise feedback management platform in the leisure and hospitality industries. Market Metrix will complement and extend Clarabridge’s analytics and measurement-focused CEM offerings with the addition of a robust, results-oriented feedback management platform.

Ankeny, Iowa -- Casey’s General Stores has selected Softeon’s warehouse managements ystem (WMS), as well as its load planning, yard management, and labor management applications, to improve efficiency and accuracy of its DC operations and drive additional throughput from existing DCs to enable them to support addition of new retail stores in the same physical footprint.