Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Bar code pioneer and scanner manufacturer Intermec Technologies Corp. planned to unveil a new generation of bar code readers that rely on pure silicon to read bar codes, rather than mechanical means. Intermec predicted its readers would be 80 percent more accurate with the new approach to scanning.

Traditional bar code readers use several lasers set at different angles, and mirrors to direct light from the laser across the whole bar code, even when it’s on a product that is cylindrical or irregularly shaped.

One key part of a CIO’s job is to protect company information. That forces a healthy amount of paranoia, as the exec must anticipate the unlikely and envision the impossible. Maybe we should call CIOs Chief Imagination Officers? Perhaps a Stephen King-like imagination.

SAP AG officially made its countermove to Oracle Corp.’s retail efforts with the announced purchase of Canadian POS player Triversity. Not coincidentally, the deal—which had been in the works for almost two months—was announced the day Oracle’s OpenWorld conference opened.

Financial terms of the deal were not announced, nor were the revenues of privately held Triversity confirmed.

TSAP and Oracle are fighting a marketing battle that recalls the grand days of vaporware. By making acquisitions to fill product holes, instead of filling product holes, they promise to deliver a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts. But retailers need to wait months and years to see if it pans out.

The software industry has for years had a proud tradition of announcing product long before an actual product existed—vaporware, in other words: software specs and capabilities that didn’t really exist but might exist in the future.

A U.S. Court of Appeals panel this week issued a ruling in a long-running patent infringement lawsuit that threatened retailers using bar-code readers. The panel affirmed a lower court ruling that the patent infringement case should not go forward.

The case involves several bar-code system manufacturers that were sued by a foundation that owns the patents from an early bar-code inventor named Jerome Lemelson.

The concept of e-commerce micropayments—small Web purchases typically less than $2—is nothing new, but it has never gained widespread acceptance among e-retailers because credit card fees took too much of a bite out of a micropayment to make the exchange profitable.

When Emcor Group CIO Joe Puglisi recently decided to upgrade his company’s version of Lotus Notes, he quietly “pre-deployed” it with a cross-section of his company’s business managers. He plans, he said, on using the favorable comments from that group to act as a sort of viral marketing to make the upgrade come as more of a customer desire than an IT demand.

It has been said that CIOs at large companies today have limited direct power and—more than almost any other C-level executive—need to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders.

Taking that to heart, the CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren’t working out.

Are consumers seeing self-checkout as the anti-customer-service initiative they feared? Not according to one industry study, which predicted self-checkout revenue would double in 2005 (compared with 2004) to $161 billion, and could hit $454 billion by 2008.

The study, conducted by retail consulting firm IHL Consulting Group, found some intriguing trends.

With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily.

But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow?

A major regional fast-food chain—with 433 restaurants in the Southeastern United States—is going to offer free wireless connections to anyone who wants to surf while sitting in a burger joint.

The Krystal Co. (the nation’s second-oldest fast-food restaurant chain, founded in 1932) is clearly hoping that a lot of customers will be intrigued and will munch on a burger and fries while gulping from its unlimited refill 802.11 fountain.

At a time when IT executives are finding users less and less tolerant of network delays, CIO William Morgan has perhaps the least tolerant set of users in the world.

Morgan runs technology operations for the 215-year-old Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s first stock exchange. But its age doesn’t make its daily load any easier, with networks having to handle 120,000 messages per second and peaks of 200,000 messages per second.
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Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn’t the experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek.

The Overstock.com Web site is all about pricing, as it pitches itself as saving consumers as much as 80 percent compared with other retailers. But in its rapidly growing IT department, the obsession is speed.

How fast? During a major deployment of some large Teradata packages—including CRM, profit analytics and an enterprise data warehouse—Teradata bid on the assumption that such large installations typically take between nine and 12 months to deploy. Overstock’s IT department finished the deployment in 70 days, said company CIO Shawn Schwegman.

Retailers are using cameras and pattern recognition software to fight back against shoplifters who try to hide items in the compartments underneath grocery carts.

Those spacious compartments underneath grocery carts may be convenient for shoppers, but retailers say they are also attractive to shoplifters as they usually can’t be seen by a cashier nor by typical security cameras.

As the CIO for a $4.1 billion health care products distribution company, Jim Harding knows only too well the changing face of medical technology today.

He sees senior physicians hand-writing prescriptions, penciling notes in patient folders and resisting electronics while the younger physicians embrace PDAs and digital transcription units.

In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from the top 19 e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found sites that were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period.

In analyzing more than 6,500 data points from each of 22 top e-commerce sites, a new Keynote Systems report found that many sites were too slow, failed too often and often glitched during the crucial checkout period.

Jim Harding, CIO for the $4.1 billion health care company Henry Schein Inc., doesn’t like taking risks with other people’s money. Especially not the money of the people who control his salary.

It’s certainly fair to say that Harding is risk-averse, but that doesn’t prevent him from considering unproven, cutting-edge technologies such as voice over IP. That’s why I was startled when he spoke so vehemently this week about his fear of buying products from Oracle.

Corporate Web sites are becoming bloated bandwidth hogs, which should surprise absolutely no one in high tech. But a survey is proving that the reckless use of multimedia, animation, JavaScript and other impressive but non-informational offerings is starting to have a negative impact on site traffic. The site visitor’s pain from overdesigned or overprogrammed sites—those being two different but equally sinful efforts—is more than mere time-wasting.

When Cingular announced it was buying AT&T Wireless, top executives promised a seamless integration for users. Easy for them to say.

The top execs of the $32 billion combined wireless phone company who were making those announcements didn’t have to wrestle with 2.5 petabytes of data, more than 600 overlapping applications, and tons of redundant and incompatible systems. That task fell to CIO Thaddeus Arroyo and his team of more than 6,000 IT professionals.

Trying to make eBay as attractive and comprehensive as possible for small businesses that represent a huge portion of eBay’s revenue, the auction company is offering to help customers create their own Web sites to complement their eBay presence.

The conventional wisdom in large-scale networking is that sitting a virtual private network atop the Internet is the most cost-effective way to build a wide area network. But the CIO of $558 million children’s shoe chain Stride Rite isn’t so sure.

Stride Rite is in the final stages of contracting for an $8 million upgrade to the point-of-sale systems and network for its 270-store national chain. CIO Yusef Akyuz is hoping the upgrade will yield major productivity improvements.

Larry Buresh, the CIO of the 1,138-store CSK auto-parts chain, said he knew that his current store technology was out-of-date and not especially competitive, but he also knew that the short-term productivity cost—not to mention the actual dollars and time investment—of a major, enterprisewide upgrade was not practical.

Buresh’s answer? Replace all of the hardware, but somehow keep all of the software. That’s easier said than done when the to-be-replaced POS (point-of-sale) systems are, “12 years going on 50 years old,” Buresh said.

Global retail IT spending among midmarket companies is expected to sharply increase in the next few years, from about $22 billion last year to almost $31 billion by 2009, an almost 41 percent increase, according to a new report from technology analysis firm AMI Partners.

AMI defined the midmarket retailer as one with between 100 to 999 employees.

SAP AG opened a volley in what has become a series of charges and countercharges between it and its former Retek acquisition target by amending its Safe Passage program to provide incentives for Retek customers to jump ship.

Among the lures: a partial credit of the user’s original Retek software licensing (no floor mentioned, but a ceiling of 75 percent) to be used to pay for SAP for Retail packages; “an on-site business case benefits assessment of migrating from Retek to SAP, delivered by SAP or one of its retail industry partners”; and SAP training.