As I described last year, Oracle Retail POS ran the bookstore at OpenWorld again this year. It's a great opportunity to see our software in action, as Jeff Grossman describes in this video.
For some reason, this has been the year for POS. The "perfect storm" has been brewing for a while, but we're only now seeing a big uptick in interest and implementations. Asking around for the reason, I've heard answers such as "retailers are limiting their investments to things that directly touch the customer," and "in order to feed the backoffice systems, retailers need better and faster sales data." I think another reason might be that retailers want to be ready when the economy rebounds, so taking the time to replace aging systems now is a strategic investment.
The theme of "Complete, Open, Integrated" continued this year, as described by Duncan Angove in this interview that was shot following his retail keynote. He goes on to explain why middleware matters and the advantage it brings to Oracle. Duncan predicts that retailers will "jump the curve" by combining facets of traditional merchandising with those from customer-centric software, like Siebel. Using Web 2.0 concepts to better understand customer demand will become a competitive advantage, and retailers need a strategy in this regard sooner rather than later.
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