Oracle Wins Strategic Deals With HBO, Abercrombie & Fitch

Oracle has landed two significant new deals: with HBO to help it shift more IT spending away from internal operations and more toward content creation and customer engagement, and with Abercrombie & Fitch to create a global single instance for store merchandising and operations as the retailer undertakes a global expansion.HBO said that as its business continues to diversify and its customers demand "a continuously improved viewing experience," the company realized its current collection of disparate and home-grown systems were not delivering the operational and financial visibility required for HBO to meet those new demands.

"The migration from analog to digital leaves media companies facing big challenges in how they manage, protect and distribute programming, while providing a continuously improved viewing experience for our customers," said HBO senior VP of application development and support Greg Fittinghoff in a statement.

HBO has consolidated its financial and operations into Oracle's E-Business Suite Release 12 that lets HBO "view and leverage that information in new ways, and run deeper, more-detailed and more-transparent reports" that let HBO management make faster and better-informed decisions about its rapidly transforming business.

For Abercrombie & Fitch, a new set of applications are vital for the company's global-expansion plans, with a critical point coming in the fall of this year when Abercrombie opens its first stores in Tokyo and Milan that will be powered by the global single instance of Oracle's Retail Merchandising System, the companies said in a statement.

The deal with Oracle extends across all of Abercrombie's brands, including Abercrombie & Fitch, abercrombie, Hollister, RUEHL and Gilly Hicks. To date, Oracle's Retail Point-of-Service application has gone live in 20 stores, and the companies said it will be rolled out in all new stores opened across the globe this year. By the end of 2010, the retailer expects the retail applications to be rolled out across all its stores across the globe.

Abercrombie & Fitch senior VP and CIO Kristen Blum said in a statement that her company's "strategic relationship with Oracle Retail … will take on an increasingly important role as we move forward with our strategy and key growth initiatives."