Summary
Oracle organized this year’s Cross Talk retail industry event at the Ballantyne Hotel in Charlotte, NC last week. As in previous years, the event was full of insightful presentations shared by retailers and partners on experiences learned. Oracle shared significant updates on the latest features added to the Oracle Retail solution portfolio.
Oracle Updates – Platform
Oracle has announced multiple key updates to its cloud platform becoming available shortly (September 2023).
One such key update is the next generation cloud platform data sharing capability, which means solutions running in the cloud now share data with each other seamlessly and automatically. This means that if an Oracle Retail cloud solution is implemented and integrated, all the data integrated for that solution is also available to other solutions. In other words additional solutions do not need additional integration during implementation, they simply share the existing data already integrated before (the only exception is when the additional solution also needs additional data that was not integrated before). For example, if a retailer chooses to implement Oracle Retail Merchandising Foundation Cloud Service (MFCS), and integrates item, location and sales data (among others) to the cloud solution, then moves on to implement Merchandise Financial Planning Cloud Service (MFP), no additional integration work is needed for item, location and sales data, since MFP can use the data already in MFCS.
An additional key update is the Data Private Endpoint (DPE). This feature extends the already existing Retail Data Store (RDS) which complements every Oracle Retail cloud service subscription and allows access via REST API and APEX to data stored in the cloud solution database by replicating that database to a separate database hosting the RDS. While the database inside the subscribed cloud service can only be accessed through the solution UI and predefined APIs, the RDS database can be accessed directly with the possibility to add additional tables and inserting/updating/deleting data directly in those tables. Extensions built on cloud services using micro services to implement additional functionality typically use the RDS database
to store additional information. The challenge is that when a retailer would like to access cloud data in high volume, the RDS database was not accessible directly for such purpose in the past. DPE solves this problem by providing a private and secure IP address, through which the RDS database can be accessed directly, allowing mass data transactions in any technology available on the Oracle database. This way a retailer can easily connect any, for example a PowerBI reporting (or any other) solution or system to the data in an Oracle Retail cloud service.
Conclusion
Oracle’s cloud platforms have reached a key milestone in maturity, based on improvements from several years of growing deployment count in various formats and segments. Oracle has invested wisely in improving its platform and solution capabilities relying on industry feedback and key consumer trends driving retail evolution.
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