Business Intelligence (BI)

SAN JOSE, Calif. & KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa.  -- Ebay Inc. announced that it has agreed to acquire GSI Commerce, a leading provider of e-commerce and interactive marketing services, for $29.25 a share, or total consideration of approximately $2.4 billion. The acquisition, which will be financed with cash and debt, is expected to close in the third quarter of 2011.

Minneapolis -- Carlson Restaurants, parent of T.G.I. Friday’s, announced at a conference in Dallas last week that it plans to double the number of units globally under a program it is calling Ambition 2015.

"With the strength of our Friday's brand, our management team and our franchise partners, we are uniquely positioned to dramatically increase the footprint of our business," said Nick Shepherd, president and CEO of Carlson Restaurants.

Beachwood, Ohio -- Developers Diversified Realty Corp. announced Friday it has furthered its commitment to risk management with the formalization of its Enterprise Risk Management Program.

The new program, according to Developers Diversified, is an integration of strategy, process, people and technology that promotes the identification, prioritization, ownership and management of the company's critical risks.

New York City -- Tesco has installed wind turbines, each with a capacity of nearly 1 MW, at three of its grocery distribution centers.

The company installed two of the 90-meter, 800kW wind turbines at its distribution center near Newport in Wales, BusinessGreen reported. The other turbines are at two sites in England’s Midlands region.

Redmond, Wash. -- Stein Mart announced the selection of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 as the centerpiece of its new Mission Critical platform and subsequent business intelligence solution. As a result, company executives can use responsive forecasting tools, which have enabled them to quickly identify business trends within the company's 265 stores and to position the company for expansion.

New York -- LexisNexis announced that it has a launched a suite of products designed to protect retailers from the risks associated card-not-present, or fraudulent credit card orders.

According to LexisNexis' 2010True Cost of Fraud Study, conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research, retailers are consistently experiencing more than $100 billion in annual fraud losses.

By Will Ruiz,  [email protected]

Indianapolis -- MID Retail said Tuesday that Rue21 has selected its Advanced Allocation Software for Allocation and Store forecasting.

According to MID, its Advanced Allocation Software was designed to help multi-store, multi-SKU retailers increase accuracy, efficiency and profitability.

Consumers today are smarter and savvier than ever. Over the past decade, the continually growing use of the Internet has made it easier and faster to comparison shop. During the “Great Recession,” shoppers learned to lean even more heavily on the Web to do research and find good deals. Now, as the economy recovers, these sharp consumers are not about to go back to their old ways. In addition, future technology advances will only make it easier for consumers to comparison shop. So what’s a retailer to do?

REDMOND, Wash. -- Target has enlisted the services of Microsoft to help run 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, Microsoft announced. According to Microsoft, Target is using Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center to virtualize inventory, point-of-sale, supply-chain management, asset protection, in-store digital media and more.