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Giant Eagle(R)’s Business Transformation Soars with Oracle(R) 10g Software


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Leading Food Retailer Increases Business Agility with Oracle’s Open Standards-Based Software

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Oct. 4, 2006 04-OCT-2006 Giant Eagle(r), Inc., one of the nation’s largest food retailers and distributors, is using Oracle(r) 10g software as the foundation of its service-oriented architecture (SOA). With Oracle, Giant Eagle is creating an open, standards-based IT infrastructure that better enables the company to respond to changing business conditions and customer demand.

Founded in 1931, Giant Eagle consists of 144 corporate and 72 independently owned and operated supermarkets and more than 100 GetGo(r) fuel and convenience store locations throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland. Faced with multiple legacy, homegrown and packaged applications - some based on .NET - and more than 200 unique application interfaces, Giant Eagle’s IT group sought a way to integrate its disparate applications and to create a more open and agile IT infrastructure. The team decided to build an SOA to address the company’s need to more rapidly adapt to changing business conditions and achieve its integration goals to meet their strategic transformation initiatives.

“The retail business changes very quickly, and Giant Eagle needed to integrate its applications and gain a competitive advantage through strategic technology investments,” said Keith Kaiser, corporate architect and director of Technical Services at Giant Eagle. “Before embarking on our integration initiative we evaluated a number of different vendors and their offerings. Oracle’s support of heterogeneous environments and open standards were critical factors in our decision to select the company’s software - their products deliver on our vision of SOA.”

The Path to SOA
Central to Giant Eagle’s goal of increased agility was the creation of an open, standards-based SOA that enables the company to extend the value of its current applications including Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management and PeopleSoft Enterprise Financial Management, while allowing new applications to be incorporated into the SOA as business requirements change. Using components of Oracle Fusion Middleware - Oracle Application Server 10g, Oracle BPEL Process Manager 10g, Oracle Internet Directory and Oracle Portal 10g - and Oracle Database 10g, Giant Eagle deployed an SOA that is enabling the company to meet its business objectives.

As a result of its SOA implementation, Giant Eagle reduced point-to-point integration interfaces and significantly decreased the amount of time required to bring applications online. Utilizing Oracle BPEL Process Manager, Giant Eagle rapidly integrated several disparate applications, including the company’s .NET-based master data management, store scheduling, handheld lookups, fuel station and facilities applications. With its enterprise-wide SOA in place, the company can now more rapidly respond to changing business needs.

Driving Greater Business Insight with Oracle
For more than a decade, Giant Eagle has relied on Oracle for decision support, enabling greater business insight throughout the organization. Giant Eagle uses a 15-terabyte (and growing) Oracle data warehouse for aggregating and analyzing promotions, customers’ purchasing patterns, store sales, and supply chain data. The company’s data warehouse is also used for sales forecasting, to support Giant Eagle’s customer loyalty programs based off of the Giant Eagle Advantage Card(r), and to identify areas for process improvements. Using Oracle, Giant Eagle has been able to gain access to data from legacy systems and use a variety of homegrown tools for dynamic reporting and greater information sharing companywide.

Streamlining Systems Management
Giant Eagle has simplified system management by utilizing Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g to centrally manage and monitor more than 40 production Oracle Databases and application servers. Overall, the company has improved the performance and reliability of its infrastructure using Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g. The systems management product handles all system alerts and notifications, and is used extensively by Giant Eagle to monitor disk space utilization, database sessions, throughput and server and database performance.

“Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g is the standard for our database and application server monitoring environment,” added Kaiser. “Not only does it provide the key alerts and notifications that ensure the reliability and availability of mission critical systems, but it allows our IT to review critical historical data that is valuable to effectively troubleshoot application performance issues.”

“Oracle is committed to delivering strategic business value to its retail customers,” said Gladys Lau, senior industry director for Retail, Oracle. “Giant Eagle is a key example of how retailers can succeed using our solutions to meet changing customer demands.”

About Oracle
Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world’s largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com.

About Giant Eagle
Giant Eagle Inc., ranked 34 on Forbes magazine’s largest private corporations list and past recipient of Progressive Grocer’s Retailer of the Year Award and the EPA’s ENERGY STAR Retail Partner of the Year Award, is one of the nation’s largest food retailers and food distributors with approximately $5.5 billion in annual sales. Founded in 1931, Giant Eagle, Inc. has grown to be the number one supermarket retailer in the region with 144 corporate and 72 independently owned and operated supermarkets in addition to more than 100 fuel and convenience stores throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, north central West Virginia and Maryland.

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