The Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (CAPS) is serving the needs of a number of retailers during this Christmas. Stores such as Karstadt AG, Harrods have moved to SOA and this has improved the inventory management and bottom line savings and hence improved the overall business of the companies. Sun has been fulfilling the needs of more than half of world's top twenty retailers and the SOA solution offered by the company enables them to enhance and reuse their existing IT assets.

Take the example of Harrods with around 1,000 cash registers and around 350,000 visitors daily which implemented a Single View Customer project which included the Enterprise Service Bus in the Java CAPS platform and this resulted in a single view of the customer, upsell and cross promotion and hence helped them achieve increased customer loyalty whereas Karstadt integrated its new back office systems for inventory control, logistics and finance through the Sun SeeBeyond eGate component of Java CAPS which has resulted in a gateway for loosely connected systems.

It seems that both retailers and customers would have a good time this holiday season.