Stories about: Home Depot

Two months after Oracle snatched Retek away from suitor SAP, SAP is eager to remind the industry that it remains committed to the retail market. At its Sapphire show Wednesday, the vendor put together a panel of customers to share their experiences deploying SAP's retail applications.

SAP Chief Executive Officer Henning Kagermann used his opening keynote address at SAP's Sapphire user conference in Boston to reiterate the vision of more flexible, modular IT systems that SAP has pursed for the last several years.

"You can't make intelligent investments within your organization unless you understand how your whole industry is changing," writes Anita McGahan in October's Harvard Business Review. McGahan, author of How Industries Evolve: Principles for Achieving and Sustaining Superior Performance (Harvard Business School Press, 2004), bases her theories on more than a decade of research on four trajectories of industry change. She told Kathleen Melymuka how CIOs can align IT investments with those changes.

Like cyclist Lance Armstrong in the Pyrenees Mountains, IBM's acquisitions strategists have picked up the pace. Just last month the company added application-monitoring software from Cyanea Systems and business intelligence development tools from Alphablox to its nearly $15 billion software division.

A wireless inventory system that's worked for tracking cattle is winning converts in the retail industry, but it's the suppliers who are getting prodded to adopt radio frequency identification.

As it prepares for its annual user conference in San Francisco this week, Sun Microsystems has a lot to prove. The company that once boasted of being the "dot in dot com" has watched its position as an industry leader erode over the last few years as the iconoclast image and corporate culture that served it so well during the Internet boom has worked against it during leaner times.

Linux: It's not just for servers anymore.

Borland Software continued its buying spree Wednesday with an announcement that it has signed an agreement to acquire TogetherSoft, North Carolina, a maker of software design and analysis technology. Borland will pay US$185 million in cash and stock for the privately held company.

Before I delve in to reader comments about the security of wireless LANs for use in retail operations, further to last week's article, I have a quick clarification. A Home Depot spokesman wrote in to say this: "Our entire front end - all of our point of sale terminals/cash registers - are hardwired and always have been."

One step forward, two steps back. That's the way it went with Best Buy's wireless plans. The company rolled out wireless cash registers to some of its retail stores, only to roll them back in amid security fears. The story goes that Best Buy was told by an anonymous source that they were able to grab credit card information from the wireless system while parked outside the store.

Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse needed a new operating system so its stores could deploy new applications and redeploy existing applications and services to take advantage of a Web-based architecture. At the same time, the company wanted to reduce costs and capitalize on its long-standing success with Unix, says Michael Prince, vice president and CIO.