Shifting market conditions and increasing competition continue to hit pressure points for retailers as a whole.  Grocery is no exception.  The age of omni-channel is well underway providing more options for consumers.  New store formats seem to pop up on a regular basis.  Shopper loyalty hangs in the balance and all signs point to its continued erosion.  Intercontinental competition is about to escalate.  



One approach to overcome some of these challenges is…

In a recent interview on WGN, Bob Mariano, the CEO of Roundy’s was asked the question “What makes a great grocery store?” His response focused on customer care: “A great grocery store is made up of great people that care about their customers and go out of their way to make them feel appreciated.” Today, Mariano’s competes against global companies like Trader Joes and others and plans to merge with The Kroger Company in late 2015.   But they still regard themselves as…

How many times a day do we ourselves, or hear someone else, utter the phrase “Google it”? It’s hard to imagine that a phrase so ubiquitous and universally understood has been around for less than two decades. The word “Google” has become synonymous with online search, and when we think about why this, it’s because Google yields the most relevant, comprehensive results, quickly. Essentially, it has changed the way we find and interact with content and information.

We’ve seen the…

Organizations are struggling with a fundamental challenge – there’s far more data than they can handle.  Sure, there’s a shared vision to analyze structured and unstructured data in support of better decision making but is this a reality for most companies?  The big data tidal wave is transforming the database management industry, employee skill sets, and business strategy as organizations race to unlock meaningful connections between disparate sources of…

Technology to store, manage, search and analyze Big Data leaps to the top of the agenda for Financial Institutions as enterprise NoSQL databases come of age.

Financial Institutions are focused on initiatives to survive in a world where regulatory pressure, risk mitigation and increasing volumes of data continue to pressure legacy infrastructures. Improved…

A NoSQL database from MarkLogic provides the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) with the ability to unlock a treasure trove of assets.  Now the RSC can publish three times as many journals and four times as many articles. It also gave the Society the ability to develop new educational applications to make chemistry accessible to a wider audience.

Modern approaches to information products replete with full text search have the power to transform your business.  Built on an enterprise…

Here’s a brilliant presentation from Mike Bowers, Principal Engineer at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  It accomplishes two major objectives; Mike reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the five major classes of databases today (relational, dimensional, object, graph and document).  He then dissects the major NoSQL databases on the market including MarkLogic, Mongo, Riak, Cloudant/Couch DB and Cassandra.  How do they stack up? Are they enterprise ready?  If developer…