Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

When Cingular announced it was buying AT&T Wireless, top executives promised a seamless integration for users. Easy for them to say. The top execs of the $32 billion combined wireless phone company who were making those announcements didn't have to wrestle with 2.5 petabytes of data, more than 600 overlapping applications, and tons of redundant and incompatible systems. That task fell to CIO Thaddeus Arroyo and his team of more than 6,000 IT professionals. Read more...

Trying to make eBay as attractive and comprehensive as possible for small businesses that represent a huge portion of eBay's revenue, the auction company is offering to help customers create their own Web sites to complement their eBay presence. Read more...

The conventional wisdom in large-scale networking is that sitting a virtual private network atop the Internet is the most cost-effective way to build a wide area network. But the CIO of $558 million children's shoe chain Stride Rite isn't so sure.

Stride Rite is in the final stages of contracting for an $8 million upgrade to the point-of-sale systems and network for its 270-store national chain. CIO Yusef Akyuz is hoping the upgrade will yield major productivity improvements.Read more...

Larry Buresh, the CIO of the 1,138-store CSK auto-parts chain, said he knew that his current store technology was out-of-date and not especially competitive, but he also knew that the short-term productivity cost—not to mention the actual dollars and time investment—of a major, enterprisewide upgrade was not practical.

Buresh's answer? Replace all of the hardware, but somehow keep all of the software. That's easier said than done when the to-be-replaced POS (point-of-sale) systems are, "12 years going on 50 years old," Buresh said. Read more...

Global retail IT spending among midmarket companies is expected to sharply increase in the next few years, from about $22 billion last year to almost $31 billion by 2009, an almost 41 percent increase, according to a new report from technology analysis firm AMI Partners. AMI defined the midmarket retailer as one with between 100 to 999 employees.Read more...

SAP AG opened a volley in what has become a series of charges and countercharges between it and its former Retek acquisition target by amending its Safe Passage program to provide incentives for Retek customers to jump ship. Among the lures: a partial credit of the user's original Retek software licensing (no floor mentioned, but a ceiling of 75 percent) to be used to pay for SAP for Retail packages; "an on-site business case benefits assessment of migrating from Retek to SAP, delivered by SAP or one of its retail industry partners"; and SAP training. Read more...

The CIO of the $3 billion Wawa convenience food chain was frustrated that various business units saw business data in different formats—and, consequently, were basing decisions on different numbers. So, he sought bids to consolidate all retail software systems and present a more unified view for the 13,000-employee chain with stores in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. Read more...

Wal-Mart started quietly testing a university-created robot designed to help visually impaired consumers navigate store aisles and find their desired products. The robot—named RG, for Robotic Guide—is the creation of Vladimir Kulyukin, an assistant professor of computer science at Utah State University and the director of the university's Computer Science Assistive Technology Laboratory. Read more...

Little E-Commerce turned 11 years old in 2005 and, like its human counterparts, it was an awkward part of its corporate adolescence. It was no longer the cute little tyke from '95 and '96, with those adorable Web sites selling dog food from around the world, which its corporate parents dutifully placed on their boardroom freezer door. Read more...

There are tons of practical definitions of how using technology in retail is strategic versus tactical.

One definition we're fond of is quite practical: Using technology to truly help your customer is strategic, in that it will make those customers more likely to repeatedly come back and spread favorable word-of-mouth endorsements. Using technology to address a short-term problem—or to help your bottom line but not the customer's—is tactical in that it is unlikely to improve revenue or profits for the long-term. Read more...

Trying to strengthen its retail technology position, Oracle Corp. purchased ProfitLogic Inc., a small but well-positioned retail software company. The acquisition came only a few months after Oracle's takeover of Retek Inc. Both Retek and ProfitLogic counted some high-profile retail companies among their customers. ProfitLogic's 30 customers included Bloomingdale's, Macy's, JC Penney, Nordstrom, Toys R Us, Marshall Fields, The Gap and Ann Taylor. Read more...

Point-of-sale terminal shipments grew about 8 percent in Europe, the Middle East and Africa in 2004 compared with a 5 percent annual increase in 2003, according to a market share study from the IHL Consulting Group. U.S. POS shipments increased almost twice as much (15 percent) during the same time period, said IHL President Greg Buzek. Read more...

Retailers and consumer goods manufacturers experimenting with RFID are still seeing higher-than-expected error rates, but they are starting to work out low-tech workarounds, according to a major European RFID analyst company that has analyzed about 1,400 recent radio-frequency identification trials. Read more...

A third definition for "POS" is two too many for this columnist. Beware the ides of DEC. The high-tech industry in general—and retail IT is certainly no exception—loves acronyms. The more obtuse, the better. Engineers, designers and programmers come up with them because it's fun. Marketing execs use them to simultaneously impress and baffle customers. And PR people use them because ... well ... the young ones don't know any better. Read more...

When Oracle bought retail-software specialist Retek, it learned a $670-million lesson about the new importance of retail software and its own inadequacies on the POS front. According to SEC filings as well as interviews with executives, attorneys and consultants on both sides of the battle, the battle for control of Retek Inc. was inadvertently influenced more by PeopleSoft than anything else.Read more...

When the $10 billion 1,000-store Winn-Dixie grocery chain went Chapter 11 (bankruptcy reorganization), the initial employee reaction was shock. But the chain's CIO said the secondary reaction was a remarkable focus on core business issues, including the strategic use of technology. Read more...

Back in May 1999, near the height of the dot-com insanity, one of a host of media darlings was an underwear sales dot-com called Underneath.com. Sending boxer shorts to various reporters, this dot-com was written up in BusinessWeek and the New York Daily News, and it made Time Magazine's picks for the best e-commerce sites. Read more...

As the young RFID retail market moves through its experimental stages to eventual full deployment, many retailers "are finding problems and frustrations" because they are trying to emulate cutting-edge market leader Wal-Mart. Read more...

One of the most frustrating parts of clothes shopping is that manufacturer size numbers are inconsistent, making the purchase of an outfit that fits a gamble, at best. A Philadelphia startup is trying to use technology to both get a more precise measure of consumers and to match it against a detailed database on what various apparel companies truly mean with their sizes. Read more...

As Oracle and SAP engage in their half-billion battle for who will takeover retail software vendor Retek, the most obvious reasons for the fight are not the true ones.

The biggest news this month in retail has been the battle between $9 billion SAP and $3 billion Oracle to take over retail software vendor Retek, which had barely $174 million in revenue last year and less than $7.7 million of profit. But that's pretty good compared with the prior year, when it lost a little more than $20 million. Read more...

As far as the retail customers of Retek are concerned, the current battle between Oracle and SAP for control of the Minneapolis retail technology firm would be better won by Oracle, according to an analyst report published Wednesday by the Aberdeen Group. Read more...

With causes ranging from new, low-priced vendors to needing more lanes open simultaneously, IHL Consulting Group reported that prices for typical point-of-sale base units in North America plummeted, from about $2,200 in 2002 to $950 in 2004.Read more...

Years ago, I was talking with the CEO of a major privately held consumer products company. He casually mentioned that he would never again work for a publicly held company.

Asked why, he said, "For the life of me, I can't think why I would want to publicly air all of our mistakes if I didn't have to." Read more...

Webmasters no longer know what their customers are seeing when they visit their sites, and they have anti-virus, ant-spyware, anti-popup and alternative browsers to thank. In the early Web days, all that an e-commerce site developer/programmer needed to worry about were operating system version and browser.Read more...

In the middle of Albuquerque, N.M., sits a 170,000-square-foot chunk of land that is slated to be the site for a new kind of retail store: one where customers can buy a week's worth of groceries without ever having to set foot outside their car.

On paper—and, thus far, that's the only place this grocery store exists—this proposal seems to have plenty to offer both retailers and customers. Read more...