#Oracle ARCS implementation challenges

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Oracle ARCS Issues and Solution

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Mastercard Brings Its Payment Services To Oracle’s Retail Software

One of the biggest problems for retailers is marrying legacy systems to new technology practices.

Historically, those legacy systems have been made by companies like SAP, JDA and Oracle. In order for those companies to maintain their foothold in the retail space, they will need to change their systems to offer more business intelligence and flexible solutions to mix with the changing consumer behavior that retailers will face over the next 10 years and beyond.

One good step will be to fully integrate new payments solutions into retailer systems that fully take advantage of the evolving nature of omnichannel sales.

Today, Oracle took that step. In an announcement at Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona, Mastercard and Oracle said that the companies will partner to provide seamless payment experiences based on Oracle’s retail systems for retailers.

“This partnership brings together Oracle’s software platforms and technologies and digital payment solutions from Mastercard such as Masterpass to create seamless and secure user experiences across in-store, online or in-app,” said Chris Fendley, senior vice president for merchant development at Mastercard, in an email to ARC. “Rather than develop and implement separate payments solutions for their in-store and online operations, retailers can also benefit from a fully-integrated digital payment and fraud prevention offering through Mastercard Payment Gateway Services.”

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The partnership is focused on three areas for retailers, hotels and restaurants:

In-store experience: Oracle and Mastercard will partner together to scale the capabilities of Qkr! with Masterpass, an app for restaurants that enables order ahead and pay-at-table functionality.

Operational efficiencies: Retailers have long had a problem merging ecommerce and in-store payment systems to best capture data that helps to server customers along the omnichannel buying spectrum. Oracle will integrate Mastercard Payment Gateway Services into Oracle retail software to provide payments services and fraud protection.

Cross-channel consistency: Oracle will bake in Masterpass, Mastercard’s digital wallet program, into its retail software. This will help the adoption of digital wallets at retailers around the world without the need for Mastercard to make specific partnerships with merchants to adopt Masterpass.

The partnership between Mastercard and Oracle makes a lot of sense in that Oracle has a large presence in the backend software systems of major retailers. It would not be surprising to see Mastercard partner with other legacy system providers like JDA and SAP in the retail space as well.

“Oracle is the leading global provider of software platforms for the hospitality and retail sector,” said Fendley. “As the world’s leading payments technology company, Mastercard is designing rich, innovative, compelling and secure ways to pay and get paid across all channels and devices. Our joint work with restaurant chains such as wagamama, Carluccio’s, Young & Co.s Brewery and Geronimo Pubs in the U.K. has been very well received by these business and by their customers. We look forward to expanding our collaboration globally – and to enabling the best possible customer experiences in the retail and hospitality industries.

Did you know? Applause specializes in creating great digital experiences for retailers, restaurants, travel and hospitality. See what Applause can do to help retailers improve their digital quality here. 

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Here’s How Intel Thinks It Can Solve Retailers Biggest Problems

Retail has a technology problem with a thousand would-be solutions.

Thousands of tech, service and agency vendors claim that they can solve the problems that retailers face. If you are a business owner or an executive at a large retailer, there is a relative smorgasbord of a la carte solutions to choose from and an army of sales representatives that want to get you on a conference call for a product demo.

The biggest problems retailers face are centered on the physical world. Yes, ecommerce has eaten away at the margins of retailers, but the vast majority of shopping is still done in store.

For retailers, the physical problems separated into several areas: the store (the front end), inventory (the back end) and intelligence (the data that puts everything together). As yet there has been no single solution that ties all of these aspects together while integrating new technology into the business model.

This is exactly the problem that Intel wants to solve.

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At the National Retail Federation’s 2017 “Big Show” in New York, Intel made a splash by announcing a five-year, $100 million investment into the retail space. Intel calls the approach “Responsive Retail” and the chipmaker essentially wants to become the platform and integrator of all retail technology going forward.

“When we started looking at retail, obviously there is a gap between technology in the store and what people can get online,” said Ryan Parker, director of marketing and apps engineering at Intel, in an interview with ARC. “What we wanted to do was say, hey, how can we build a platform that really brings the entire store online. Including the customer, the associates, the products and the store itself.”

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Problem: Islands Of Technology

Retailers are attempting to perform a deft maneuver: adopt new technology to adapt to rapidly changing customer behaviors while trying to update or replace legacy systems that do not serve new business requirements.

Over the years, retailers have built what Parker calls “islands of technology.” The islands are systems that a retailer may have adopted once upon a time but do not necessarily fit in all the other systems that have been integrated over the years.

Take the example of a department store. It may have integrated Bluetooth beacons when the idea became popular a couple of years ago. The retailer may have RFID chips for its inventory and a backend logistics system from the likes of Oracle or JDA. The point-of-sale—long the only system tied to the Internet—may or may not integrate with other systems and solutions. Maybe there is a system for employee engagement or digital signage for endcaps.

That’s a lot of moving pieces. In theory, all of those pieces can be generating very important in-store data that can help retailers better serve customers while also improving logistics on the backend.

“We can now use data online because we know that shoppers start online with their journey,” said Parker. “And then carry that all the way to the store. Bringing everything in the store online.”

Intel’s Responsive Retail platform—the crux of its $100 million investment—is an attempt to help retailers create, aggregate and simplify data which can be used across the entire omnichannel. From mobile or desktop browsing of products, to in store interactions, to inventory management, customer engagement and so forth. The platform is based on deploying and managing Internet of Things devices in the store, business intelligence and logistics management. Intel is building the core of the platform itself, but will work with all stacks of the retail technology supply chain to help vendors implement systems in stores that work with each other.

“Getting rid of the islands of technology accounted for about 40% of retailers’ pain points in this space. That was, by far, the biggest thing,” said Parker. “We wanted to make sure we could do it. We wanted to make sure that Intel is in a good position in order to get rid of those.”

The IoT Platform Approach To Retail

A long-running debate in the Internet of Things space has centered around device deployment and management.

The classic scenario is in the smart home. If a house has dozens of connected gadgets that can, theoretically, talk to each other, what is the center of the ecosystem? Is it a central hub-style router that everything connects through? Is it a decentralized mesh network based on communications protocols like Zigbee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth?

As the Internet of Things ecosystem matures, the answer to these types of implementation questions become industry and vertical specific. What works in the smart home is not necessarily going to work in a retail environment.

“How do I bring the goodness of the IoT ecosystem and the IoT platform to the experts and the retail software together into one place where the retailers can go,” said Parker. “You find often that IoT platforms are missing the vertical-specific implementation. We want to bring those two ecosystems together.”

At its core, Intel’s Responsive Retail Platform will be an attempt to create a reasonable data flow that will result in actionable decisions either in the storefront or at the corporate level. The platform resides between sensors attached to various parts of the business (customer, product, retail associate and store) and the actions those parts of the business perform. The data then gets rolled up to a business intelligence engine and the actionable insights are delivered to the right stake holder, be it the store floor manager or the executive team at headquarters.

The App Store Approach To Retail

When Apple’s App Store and Google Play came on to the consumer scene in 2008 and 2009, the notion of software delivery fundamentally changed. Coupled with the growth of the cloud, software was no longer something you purchased in a box from Best Buy and then bought updates for a year later. Software delivery became flexible, specific and seamless with updates continuous and automated. This is how software eats the world.

It is also an approach that’s entirely foreign to enterprises, retail or otherwise.

The continuous delivery/DevOps model of software has been difficult for big businesses to adapt. We first saw this with how companies complained to the likes of Mozilla and Google with constant updates to the Firefox and Chrome browsers. These are companies that were used to delivering updates on broad systems once or twice a year.

The goal for the Intel is to replicate the app store-like system in the retail sector.

“If we can bring that app store kind of mentality to the store where they can go up and find the various solutions that are already implemented and think of us as kind of the app store platform for them, now they can create those personalized experiences, the inventory management and those things, much more inexpensively than trying to integrate all of this IP,” said Parker.

The app store approach will help retailers of all shapes and sizes. The conversation of retail technology almost always focuses on the big brands, but the fact of the matter is that 95% of all retailers operate just one location and 40% of retail employees work for small businesses, according to NRF.

Small retailers do not have the technological expertise or resources to implement big, sweeping systems. Small businesses may need some specific systems managed by a small gateway or hub within the store.

Parker believes the rollout of systems like Intel’s Responsive Retail Platform will be bimodal. The big brands will come onboard with multifaceted systems while the long tail adopts niche solutions from specific vendors. Either way, the extensibility of the system is design to make continuous integration seamless for retailers.

Did you know? Applause specializes in helping retailers solve some of their biggest in-store and ecommerce problems. See how Applause can help improve the digital experience of retailers customers here.

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