Sun Micro, JDA to Tap Indian Retailers
By Sonal Desai
Mumbai, 26 Aug 2008, 1546 hrs IST

Sun Microsystems and JDA software who announced a worldwide alliance to address the needs of retailers in January 2008 are introducing joint solutions in the Indian market. The solutions chiefly cover JDA appliances over Sun hardware.

"We will jointly target tier 1 and tier 2 retailers in India," Amit Didolkar, national manager, Strategic Alliances for Sun Microsystems told CXOtoday in an exclusive interaction today. JDA that has been present in the Indian retail space since the 1990s has customers like Shoppers Stop, Reliance, Future Group and Essar among others. Sun has also supplied hardware to retailers such as Spencer, Aditya Birla, Subhiksha among others.

In an era when most retailers have their IT architectures in place what value will the alliance provide? "We will help address pain points and expand business," said Phillip Ichallalene, group vice president, Consulting Services, Asia-Pacific for JDA.

"For such retailers the chief pain points lie in transaction management, POS and optimization, essentially space optimization, the reason being all of them are increasing business and geographic presence across India. We are offering them enterprise planning in a box; this box has 10 different servers that have the ability to scale and protect investments and therefore impact ROI."

"A special mention must be made of food and groceries rack," said Didolkar. "They have not been able to see traction and are therefore slow growth areas. There are various reasons; some of them being inability to comprehend customer behavior, lack of predictive analysis, ad hoc placement of products etc. F&G will be one of the chief interests to be addressed as a joint customer/segment."

On the go to market strategy, Didolkar said, "will be mostly joint go to market strategy where we will address joint customers with transactional and optimizing solutions."

"We have a list of JDA customers who we want to address. These are the customers who need bigger and better functionalities. We have also developed pre-architected solutions of JDA applications on Sun and are taking those to customers. In this case, JDA provides licenses for the applications and also do the deployments in case of bigger accounts."

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