Here's How Oracle Is Helping Apple Store Guru Ron Johnson Turn JC Penney Around (ORCL, JCP, IBM)
Ron Johnson is best known for creating Apple's retail empire. He's now CEO of retailer JCPenney. This week, he detailed his amazing vision for turning JCPenney into a techno wonderland in Apple's image. And he's turning to Oracle for help. Apple's store design gets almost all the attention. Not as flashy but just as important is the software that does everything from tracking inventory to letting salespeople ring up purchases with iPhones. Like a lot of retailers, JCPenney has old, proprietary code. Johnson is yanking out about 500 applications, nearly all of them custom applications created over the years, and having Oracle be its one-stop shop. This is a big win for Oracle, since its archrival IBM has been entrenched with retailers for decades. (Look at this 1976 article about JCPenney installing IBM cash registers, for example.) Neither company disclosed the size of this deal for Oracle, but it's easy to see that it's big. JCPenney already used quite a b...