Global DIY Retail Chain Accelerates Business Insight with Actian

Online, December 8, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Actian Corporation (formerly Ingres Corp.), today announced that GROUPE ADEO, the leading international home improvement retailer, based in France, has renewed and extended its relationship with Actian, selecting its DBMS products Ingres and the world's fastest analytical engine, Vectorwise.

With 24 companies in 12 countries, GROUPE ADEO's market presence includes leading retail outlets Leroy Merlin, local chains (AKI, Bricocenter, Weldom), warehouse stores (Bricoman and Bricomart) and a number of other innovative concepts stores like Dompro, Zodio or KBane. The group is the second largest home improvement retailer in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. The industry is estimated at nearly 400 billion Euros and has seen an average growth of 4% per year over the last 10 years.

With hundreds of stores and multiple retail concepts (hypermarkets, small and medium-sized local stores, discount stores and franchisor activity), thousands of product references and millions of sales translations made every day; huge data volumes are aggregated across the groups' datamarts. Despite the company's experience of using Business Intelligence across this wide range of data, GROUPE ADEO looked for an agile analytical database to complement its existing environment. Companies in the group needed a more affordable and user-friendly solution.

"Two of our major retailers have been using Actian's relational database, Ingres for their critical Point Of Sale applications. Ingres proved to be a robust and proven solution," explains IT systems director, GROUPE ADEO. "It was logical for us to continue with Ingres and also implement Actian's analytical database, Vectorwise. We'll also be looking closely at the forthcoming development of Action Apps, as we see this directly affecting our business efficiency".

Actian's Action Apps are lightweight, consumer-style applications that automate business actions, triggered by real-time changes in data. This new solution will be designed to offer customers the ability to create Action Apps in a few easy steps, from the monitoring and analysis of data to the definition of priority data events and the automatic delivery of Business Actions, when data events occur.

As an example, Action Apps could monitor the buying preferences of regular customers actually in a store, based on consented mobile location information. This could trigger promotional activity directly to their phone via an SMS. For retailers, this automated action on real time data is invaluable, creating an action enabled enterprise.

"We're pleased to see GROUPE ADEO invest further with Actian, particularly as our recent innovations will drive true data insight for retailers," said Steve Shine, CEO, Actian. "GROUPE ADEO's commitment to working with Actian is testament to our vision of the Actian Enabled Enterprise."