Oracle Corporation and ProfitLogic, Inc. have announced a definitive agreement for Oracle to acquire ProfitLogic, a privately held provider of Retail Profit Optimization solutions. ProfitLogic's software analyzes customer demand patterns to help retailers make inventory, pricing and merchandising decisions. ProfitLogic's current customers include retailers such as American Eagle Outfitters, Ann Taylor, Bloomingdale's, The Children's Place Retail Stores, Famous Footwear, JC Penney, Marshall Field's, Nordstrom, Reitmans, ShopKo Stores, and Toys R Us, among others.
“ProfitLogic's software provides analysis that helps retailers put the right product, in the right store, for the right customer, at the right time,” said Duncan Angove, general manager, Oracle's Retek Global Business Unit. “Our acquisition of ProfitLogic will create the most comprehensive software solution for the retail industry. With ProfitLogic's Retail Profit Optimization software, Retek's end-to-end retail products, and Oracle's infrastructure software and ERP applications, we will be able to offer an integrated solution for retailers of any size and in any industry.”
“ProfitLogic has been a pioneer in the area of merchandising analytics and optimization for more than 20 years. Our solutions help many leading retailers enhance their merchandising with greater insight into customer demand, enabling more localized assortment, allocation and pricing decisions,” said Scott Friend, co-founder and president, ProfitLogic. “This powerful combination will enable us to accelerate our ability to drive dramatic financial improvement for a larger set of leading retailers worldwide.”
Scott Langdoc, Vice President of Research noted in an AMR Research Alert, Retail Decisions for 2005: “The top priority for retailers in 2005 is to inject insight from all aspects of customer demand into every retail process flow-not just individual applications, as is often the case today. These retailers also act on these demand signals with better merchandising and store execution. Thoroughly leveraging customer information will enable retailers to move from traditional hunch-based decision-making to fact-based decision-making. Benefits include tighter execution, more accurate forecasting, and a reduction in out-of-stocks, resulting in potential 10 percent sales and 5 percent margin growth for an average Tier 1 retailer.”
“Since we rely on ProfitLogic, Oracle, Retek and PeopleSoft as strategic technology partners that help us manage and grow our business, we feel this is a positive move for us and the industry as a whole,” said Doug Deruchie, CFO of Reitmans, Canada's largest women's specialty retailer. “The synergy that will be created by combining these industry leaders will enable Reitmans to get to the next level of performance and even faster and far more efficiently than we had anticipated when we chose each independently.”
Oracle and ProfitLogic anticipate closing the transaction by the end of July 2005, subject to certain regulatory approvals and other customary conditions.
