REDWOOD SHORES, Calif. — January 30, 2018 — Today, Oracle announced that Italian fashion company Miroglio Fashion deployed the Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service and Oracle Retail Customer Engagement to drive innovation and create connections between product, data and people. The Italian fashion retailer operates more than 1,100 stores, six commerce sites and 2,400 wholesale outlets in 34 countries and has 12 distinctive womenswear brands as Elena Mirò, Fiorella Rubino, Motivi and Oltre.

“As the consumer continues to evolve, our business must follow and innovate. With Oracle Retail, our physical and digital locations can now operate as part of a network to better serve our customer with unified stock management and unified shopping experiences across channels. Customers are empowered to engage with our brand as they choose,” said Hans Hoegstedt, CEO of Miroglio Fashion.

Miroglio Fashion launched the Retail 4.0 program as an initiative to foster innovation, drive efficiency and increase performance. With the help of Oracle Retail Consulting, Miroglio Fashion implemented Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service and Oracle Retail Customer Engagement. In 2013, Oracle quickly declared Oracle Retail Xstore Point-of-Service as the strategic Omnichannel platform to deliver more innovation to the market.

“We needed speed, efficiency and reliability to execute toward the vision of our Retail Innovation Program. Our leadership team declared explicit business targets. We designed the roll-out and a progressive migration process in advance of the implementation,” said Francesco Cavarero, group Chief Information Officer, Miroglio Fashion.

“We are thankful for the collaboration with the IT and business leadership teams of Miroglio Fashion. The clarity and focus of the project and commitment to a vanilla implementation allowed my team to deliver on-time and on-budget in seven working months,” said Lou Frio, vice president of Global Consulting, Oracle Retail. “Miroglio Fashion leverages a remote deployment process to keep an aggressive yet healthy pace for the rollout.”

Oracle will convene a global community of retail leadership at Oracle Industry Connect April 10-11, 2018 in New York City. Oracle Industry Connect provides attendees with intimate peer networking opportunities in addition to over 30 customer-led presentations on adapting to market changes, simplifying operations and empowering authentic brand experiences.

Posted January 30, 2018

Source: Oracle

PORTLAND, Ore./REDMOND, Wash. — January 30, 2018 — Columbia Sportswear Co. and Microsoft Corp. have announced plans to collaborate on enhancing Columbia Sportswear’s global consumer experience and drive its digital transformation using intelligent cloud technology.

As consumers continue to change the way they engage with brands, Columbia Sportswear is working to deliver a more personalized, seamless experience to those consumers by leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Microsoft Azure cloud platform for its retail, call center, customer relationship management and merchandising operations. With a single, holistic view of its consumer and improved omnichannel capabilities, Columbia Sportswear will be able to personalize engagement at every touchpoint by providing employees with enhanced digital tools and information across its global customer relationship management database. Columbia Sportswear also intends to use Dynamics 365 and Azure to gain greater consumer insights and business intelligence through every consumer interaction, whether through its wholesale businesses, brick-and-mortar retail stores, ecommerce experiences or mobile channels.

“At Columbia, we have a long history of leveraging innovative technologies to help connect active people with their passions,” said Michael Hirt, chief information officer at Columbia Sportswear. “This practice extends not just to our products, but across every aspect of our business. Through our collaboration with Microsoft, we’re implementing intelligent cloud technology to streamline our global operations and provide additional flexibility and convenience to our consumers.”

In addition, Columbia Sportswear will be able to manage merchandise globally and streamline operations with increased efficiency, providing the ability to garner valuable insights and improved business intelligence through customized reporting and analytics. Columbia Sportswear is implementing these innovations through Microsoft’s flexible, agile development platform, Visual Studio Team Services, and creating revolutionary data platforms at scale with Azure data services and integration platforms.

“Established in 1938, Columbia Sportswear is setting itself up to be an industry leader for another 80 years,” said Judson Althoff, executive vice president, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft. “Columbia Sportswear will leverage Microsoft’s intelligent cloud to connect data, people and processes globally to deliver personalized shopping experiences for its customers.”

Posted January 30, 2018

Source: Microsoft Corp.

CARY, N.C. — January 30, 2018 — SAS is making it easier for customers to build artificial intelligence (AI) solutions by leveraging machine learning, deep learning, text analytics, forecasting and statistics. Its latest SAS® Platform release includes a new offering, SAS Visual Text Analytics, and significant enhancements to SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning. They both take advantage of the new capabilities available in SAS Viya®.

Recent adopters of SAS Viya analytics products include the American Red Cross; Cisco; Klingel Group, the second-largest traditional online fashion and apparel company in Germany, represented in 12 European countries; and Munich Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers.

What’s New?

SAS Visual Text Analytics extracts value from unstructured data using the combined power of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and linguistic rules. It addresses business challenges across industries, including managing and interpreting notes, assessing risk and fraud, and using customer feedback for early detection of problems. Capabilities of SAS Visual Text Analytics include text mining, contextual extraction, categorization, sentiment analysis and search within a modern and flexible framework. The software allows users to prepare data for analysis, visually explore topics, build text models and deploy them within existing systems or business processes. Users can quickly analyze large volumes of data using predefined templates and integrate the output of text analytics with other machine learning and forecasting techniques.

The new release of SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning offers an end-to-end visual environment that covers all aspects of machine learning and deep learning — from data access and data wrangling to sophisticated model building and deployment. In-memory, distributed processing provides faster answers to critical business questions and more efficient use of valuable data and skilled staff. It also supports programming from popular open source languages like Python and R.

One of the hallmarks of this release of the SAS Platform is a web interface that unifies the entire analytics life cycle, helping cross-divisional teams collaborate. Now, all activity — from data preparation, to interactive discovery and exploration to model building and deployment — is supported from a single, visual interface. This tightly integrated environment speeds the production of modern machine learning algorithms that can, for example, build more profitable customer relationships, fight fraud and effectively manage risk.

“With SAS combining advanced analytics, model deployment, data preparation and visualization into one platform, users are now able to go through all the stages of the analytics process without the need to switch from software product to product,” said Dan Vesset, group vice president for Analytics and Information Management Research at IDC. “After previewing the SAS Platform updates, incorporating the latest statistical, machine learning, deep learning and text analysis algorithms and supporting open source languages, it’s apparent that SAS is going to continue as a leading analytics as well as cognitive/AI platform provider for years to come.”

Munich Re enables more users, expands deep learning capabilities 
”As an early adopter, Munich Re has played a key role in helping us shape our new solutions and platform,” said Saurabh Gupta, director of Analytics Products at SAS. “While working with them, we heard that the new release unifies their analytics infrastructure and enables users of varying skill sets to collaborate to solve the organization’s challenges faster. Customer feedback has always been instrumental in helping SAS release world-class products.”

As a reinsurer with worldwide operations, Munich Re has access to massive amounts of data that are pulled into a centralized environment. Being able to use SAS to run sophisticated machine learning algorithms on big data within a collaborative user interface will allow the company to gain analytic insights to quickly address business challenges and serve clients. Plus, having access to embedded AI capabilities and the latest deep learning algorithms helps the company to stay at the leading edge of what is possible with analytics.

“The newest version of SAS allows all our users to quickly get started and collaborate with a unified and visual interface,” said Wolfgang Hauner, chief data officer at Munich Re. “We like that it allows those who aren’t as familiar with SAS to code in Python and R and run the same actions in the same platform. It is both in tune with the end-to-end needs of an advanced data scientist and is also convenient for beginners. This ability to appeal to data scientists and non-coders will allow multiple users and teams to explore and analyze the same data, making the data discovery and model-building process more collaborative.”

Posted January 30, 2018

Source: SAS