Retailers Generate High-Volume Sales with IBM Solution for Smarter Commerce

ARMONK, N.Y. - 16 Sep 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced an optimized hardware and software solution designed to help retailers quickly turn customer insight into action and increase sales revenues. The Smarter Commerce™ on Power Systems™ solution is the latest edition of IBM’s growing portfolio of solutions for Smarter Commerce. This solution focuses on tightly integrating systems based on IBM POWER7® processor technology and WebSphere® Commerce software to provide high-volume retailers with the ability to personalize their customers’ online shopping experiences, handle online sales surges during peak shopping seasons without loss of performance and integrate customer buying information across all sales channels, including online, mobile, in-store, POS and site kiosks.

In an effort to meet growing competitive demands of the online marketplace, Staples, the world’s largest office products company, tapped IBM to realign the technology that powers its website, Staples.com, to create an easier, more efficient online purchasing experience for its customers. By deploying IBM WebSphere Commerce 7 e-commerce software on Power Systems, Staples gained a website optimized for high volume transactions to support its customer-centric business model. According to Internet Retailer, Staples has the second-largest Internet retail revenue in the world with $10.2 billion in global e-commerce sales, more than 40 percent of the company’s total revenue in 2010.  

“From a performance perspective, we saw customer experience and page download times improve anywhere from 25 percent to 55 percent with the move to IBM POWER7 Systems,” said Ken Moore, vice president, IT, Staples North American Delivery. “That’s substantial especially when you consider mobile computing over a 3G and 4G connection delivering the same great experience that our desktop users get — that is very important for us. Staples.com is part of our $10 billion in global e-commerce sales and we expect to see the new Staples.com platform help us better meet our customer’s changing needs and drive growth in our e-commerce sales.”   

Power Systems are built to manage demanding applications that rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing information in real time. Retailers can quickly scale their systems to handle large volumes of online shoppers during times like the back-to-school shopping season, Cyber Monday or Black Friday, without impacting performance. It also raises the quality of customer service by boosting data availability and analysis so retailers can easily personalize a customer’s shopping experience – leading to fewer abandoned shopping carts. Power Systems enable faster building and deployment of Smarter Commerce solutions than on competitive platforms by reducing development time from months to weeks. As a result, retailers can deliver technology services faster, with higher quality and with superior economics. 

IBM’s Smarter Commerce offerings span the entire spectrum of commerce, responding to all customer needs throughout the relationship. The pre-integrated solution optimizes the cross-channel selling capabilities of Smarter Commerce, accelerates implementation and reduces total cost of ownership. The key component is WebSphere Commerce 7 e-commerce software that integrates marketing and shopping across all channels and runs on IBM WebSphere Application Server and utilizes IBM DB2® database software. The IBM WebSphere MQ reliably transports messages internally to enable fast responses to transaction demands. 

The solution allows clients to choose the appropriately-sized Power Systems server as the base of their high-performance IT environment with the AIX, IBM i or Linux operating systems. Clients also have the option to add IBM XIV® Storage System, a high-end disk storage designed for growth, or IBM Storwize® V7000, a midrange disk storage alternative, for maximum flexibility.  

IBM offers optimized solutions for various industries, including the IBM mCommerce Appliance Solution for financial institutions, mobile operators and enterprises that enables rapid global deployment of the broadest mobile commerce capabilities – including mBanking, mPaymernts and mRemittance. Already in use by banking institutions around the world, the IBM mCommerce Appliance Solution features Power 750 systems running DB2, WebSphere Application Server, IBM System Storage® DS5300 and the end-to-end Sybase® mCommerce 365 solution. 

About IBM 

For more information on IBM Smarter Commerce, visit  www.ibm.com/press/smartercommerce. 

The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit 2011, scheduled September 19 to 21 in San Diego, CA, will provide business executives and IT professionals with insight and resources to effectively connect with today's empowered customers.  It is the single largest gathering of experts and peers for discovering new solutions to today’s most complex digital challenges. For more information visit www.ibm.com/events/commercesummit.

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