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Oracle Retail Riding the SOA Wave into Next-Generation Technologies

Oracle is harnessing a series of next-generation technologies--from service-oriented architecture (SOA) to business activity monitoring (BAM)—that will increase retailers' competitive advantage even as they accelerate ROI on technology investments.

"Integration with Oracle Fusion Middleware solutions represents the cornerstone of future innovations by uniting disparate solutions on a single technology stack," says David Dorf, director, technology strategy, Oracle Retail.

SOA, in turn, powers a wide-ranging set of innovations, from closed-loop merchandising to an alert-driven retail portal, that turn real-time information into profitable action.

From Forms to Action
Oracle developers have already begun to move Oracle Retail applications toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA), reconfiguring Oracle Forms-based applications for a Java-based environment.

"With SOA, business logic can be exposed as a service and then easily hooked together by retailers in the way that they think best," explains Dorf.

SOA, in turn, provides the foundation for event-driven architecture (EDA), making it possible to create and manage event-driven processes with little or no coding.

Together, SOA and EDA power BAM—interactive, real-time dashboards and proactive alerts for monitoring business processes and services.

"EDA and BAM are crucial innovations for an industry where profitability depends on the ability to respond instantly to changing market conditions," says Dorf.

Built-in pro-active alerts at all levels of retail applications, from store managers to boardroom executives, will change the way retailers work. SOA also makes it much easier to consolidate those alerts into a single Web portal page, along with all other relevant information and applications.

The result: less toggling and more profitable action-taking.

The Master Key
To help retailers capitalize on all the potential benefits of SOA, Oracle has also embarked on a project to integrate “siloed” data systems with master data management (MDM).

By coordinating disparate applications, warehouses, and other data sets across the enterprise, MDM provides a single source of truth for retail data, which ultimately drives BAM and event-driven systems with maximal accuracy and efficiency.

MDM may sound like a lofty goal, but in fact Oracle's data hub model allows customers to implement MDM incrementally, one subject area at a time.

Next-Generation Merchandising
Building on the innovations that Oracle Fusion Middleware make possible, Oracle is also in a "major push to drive merchandising processes with real-time, or near real-time, information," according to Dorf.

Already, Oracle is offering prebuilt, out-of-the-box integrations with financials applications, increasing performance insight across the retail organization while eliminating complex integrations.

But that's just a first step in the drive to align nuts-and-bolts merchandising data with high-level planning and forecasting, according to Dorf. Besides data sharing, Oracle Retail will empower business users to create and/or adjust business processes and rules for particular products and markets on the fly.

The result: The right products in the right stores at the right prices.

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