Data Management

San Francisco - Instacart is utilizing Zebra's hosted Zatar Internet of Things (IoT) platform for cloud printing and device management of Zebra printers. This new solution allows Instacart to print labels at locations across the U.S. securely and accurately.

Instacart chose to use the Zatar IoT platform for its ability to connect to and control devices in third-party locations via an API. The solution connects Instacart's printers to the cloud and enables the organization to interact with, monitor and manage Zebra printers globally.

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.

Membership buying club DirectBuy Inc. takes an unusual approach to retailing. It offers paid members the chance to directly purchase goods from manufacturers and wholesalers, without paying retail markup

So perhaps it is to be expected that 50-plus-store DirectBuy, which also offers online and in-home shopping options to its 250,000-plus members, approaches business intelligence (BI) a little differently, as well.

Montreal, Canada — Multidev Technologies Inc., a developer of ERP and omnichannel solutions for retailers, is adding web marketplace integration to its ChainDrive enterprise retail management platform. Users will be able to market, promote and sell their products through e-commerce channels including Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, and Newegg.
 

Washington, D.C. – At least two new strains of POS malware are reportedly threatening retailers. According to Bank Info Security, the FBI has released a warning about a new form of memory-scraping POS malware called Punkey.   Punkey can infect any Windows-based POS network and encrypts the data it steals, making detection difficult. Punkey may have been used in a recent breach at an unidentified U.S. restaurant chain.  

Scottsdale, Ariz. – JDA Software Group will release its next generation of cloud-based omnichannel and supply chain solutions on the public Google Cloud Platform. Through this collaboration, Google will provide a scalable and flexible technology platform via the cloud to support JDA’s future application development and delivery.   

Chicago -- Retail was the most compromised industry in 2014, making up 43% of breach investigations, according to a study by Trustwave that gathered data from 574 breach investigations the company conducted in 2014 across 15 countries. Retail made up 43% of the investigations, followed by food and beverage, which made up 13% of the investigations.

The “2015 Trustwave Global Security Report” found that 64% of the breaches in the retail industry were of e-commerce assets and 27% were of POS assets.