Sun Microsystems India in association with Technopak Advisors has launched a white paper on IT requirements for retail companies and Sun's solutions for the retail industry. Rapid growth in retail and subsequent industry dynamics will necessitate the availability of coherent integrated information across the supply chain. Companies of all types and sizes in all industries have found that the lack of such information is far more expensive than they imagined, while the opportunities that even a single information view can bring about are huge.
With multiple stores, call centers, campaigns, and delivery channels to coordinate, retailers can benefit tremendously from the single customer view. They can target their marketing campaigns more precisely based on the customer's unique spending activities, improve the speed and personalization of their customer service, and understand and maximize the value of each customer.
Sun Microsystems can now facilitate the move to this new approach with Java CAPS, a comprehensive integration platform that enables real-time application connectivity, data synchronization, and process-centric composite applications. By building composite applications on top of a standards-based SOA (service oriented architecture), companies can achieve a single information view and make their applications more flexible and agile.
Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite
Sun offers a combination of products and services to help companies achieve a single customer view by deploying an SOA platform and building composite applications. The cornerstone product offering is the Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS).
Overview
Java CAPS provides a comprehensive integration platform to build and manage SOA -based composite applications that enhance, aggregate, and leverage the customer data within them, enabling companies to achieve a single customer view.
Using service-oriented process integration, a single-view composite application can access customer data held in customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), financial, and legacy applications. It employs intelligent data standardization and matching algorithms to recognize related customer information distributed across these applications, and link the siloed, application-centric customer identities to a universal customer ID, building a master customer index.
As customer information is loaded into the single-view application, each customer's data is cleansed and distilled into a single best-record view that can be used to improve source system data quality, identify and build programs around the most valuable customers, and serve as the foundation for a new generation of customer-centric services. Implementing this approach to customer data integration is a relatively low-risk undertaking and can be done incrementally, at the organization's own pace.
Key advantages
Java CAPS provides the backbone to enable an organization to:
• Combine existing back-end services such as billing into a single customer experience
• Integrate existing and custom applications and enable them to share information and data
• Provide a single point of entry for online customer self-service
• Lower operational costs by enabling once-and-done processing across lines of business
• Identify most valuable customers and leverage this awareness within operational systems
Globally Sun Microsystems has substantial business in the retail sector. Leading retailers like Target, Home Depot, eBay, Amazon are all Sun's customers.
Sun India: Retail Practice
Sun in India has taken the approach of understanding the information flow in a retail business and identifying the pain points of the retail CIO to create a solution matrix that will address the end-to-end technology needs of any retail business.
Sun's solution matrix in retail has been created along with best of breed partners in the retail space to deliver value and flexibility along with the convenience of a single stop shop from an accountability perspective. The solution matrix is a combination of all stakeholders in the retail technology space: Infrastructure partner, Application partner and Implementation partner to present a complete solution framework. |
