Bed Bath & Beyond adds Oracle ERP to its multicloud mix
Bed Bath & Beyond's tech stack now includes two bitter rivals after the home goods retailer announced Thursday that it's signed a deal with Oracle to use its enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology. The retailer said Oracle Cloud will become its provider of financial, supply chain and merchandising software, replacing its legacy suite of technology systems and bolstering its planning capabilities.
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Bed Bath and Beyond is also a Google Cloud customer since October, having tapped Google's BigQuery service for machine learning and analytics, along with Spanner, Google Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine to create a singular view of customer data. Bed Bath & Beyond is also using Google Cloud to optimize its fulfillment strategy.
With the Oracle deal, the retailer said the ERP deployment is the first key component in its $250 million technology investment roadmap. In regulatory filings last year, Bed Bath & Beyond said it will spend $250 million on investments in digital and strategic growth plans for fiscal 2020. Key areas of investments include search and navigation across digital channels, data integration, CRM, analytics, marketing, and e-commerce. During fiscal 2019, Bed Bath & Beyond also spent about $187 million on logistics, digital capabilities, and analytics.
"We are building authority in Home, Baby, Beauty and Wellness with a digital-first, omni-always and customer-inspired approach," said Bed Bath & Beyond's COO John Hartmann. "Oracle's proven leadership and state-of-the-art technologies will allow us to better serve customers and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of our business. Additionally, the agile partnership will enable continual innovation and improvement as our enterprise evolves."
Also: Top cloud providers in 2021: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, hybrid, SaaS players | Enterprise tips for managing the multicloud (free PDF)
Looking at the broader retail market, cloud players such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon have been touting the perks of their respective platforms and promising to support retailers on their digital transformation journeys. In 2019, Microsoft announced a retail-as-a-service (RaaS) partnership with supermarket chain Kroger, which is splitting its cloud buying between Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Meanwhile, Walmart is partnering with Microsoft to use its AI, Internet of Things tools and Azure. Best Buy has signed up with Google Cloud to unify its data sources across various legacy platforms, and Home Depot has tapped both Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure for its multicloud strategy.