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Oracle unveils solution to ease e-commerce deployment, management

6/29/2015

Redwood Shores, Calif. -- Oracle is enhancing its efforts to attract customers in the e-commerce sector.



The company on Monday officially launched its new Commerce Cloud, a flexible and scalable SaaS solution designed to make it easy for retailers to include e-commerce as part of their larger digital customer experience strategy. The new tool, built for the Oracle Public Cloud, is part of Oracle’s Customer Experience (CX) applications portfolio.



“It’s rare that a retailer just wants to discuss commerce by itself,” Ian Davis, senior director of product management for Oracle Commerce, told Chain Store Age. “They want to discuss social media, marketing, customer service and sales.”



Oracle Commerce Cloud’s SaaS infrastructure allows online businesses to launch responsive storefronts across desktop and mobile devices. Pre-integrated core commerce features include search / navigation, recommendations, promotions, reporting, payments, design templates and SEO.



A unified experience management console enables catalog, content, design and merchandising management. Responsive design and HTML5 user interfaces let users build additional functionality or develop integrations that connect Commerce Cloud with other systems while also allowing consumption for third-party development efforts.



“We use an API-first development approach,” said Davis. “Exposing APIs makes the solution easy to use.”



Davis also commented on Commerce Cloud’s capabilities to seamlessly fit into retailers’ business-to-business efforts, as well as their business-to-consumer markets.



“A large number of retailers have business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer channels,” said Davis. “The lines between the needs of the two sides of the business often blur. Commerce Cloud offers a single solution to handle all those needs.”



In addition, Davis touched on how Oracle is directly competing with Amazon Web Services (AWS) with the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layer of Commerce Cloud.



“At the base, we have services like Oracle Compute Cloud and Oracle Java Cloud and Oracle Database Cloud as the building blocks to create solutions that run inside a managed cloud environment,” said Davis. “That directly competes with AWS. However, AWS doesn’t have an application layer, like Oracle has with Commerce Cloud and the whole customer experience offering and ERP solutions. AWS is just a platform to run and build apps. Oracle goes beyond it.”



Oracle Commerce Cloud was pre-released in the spring of 2015. Initial retail users include Houston-based vertical specialty retailer Elaine Turner and Chattanooga, Tennessee-based outdoor gear chain Rock Creek.


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