Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Helps Guitar Center Tune its Business for Increased Customer Demand

Guitar Center, the world’s largest musical instrument retailer, has moved to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to meet customer demand for new online and in-store services. By moving its core systems to OCI, including order management, warehouse management, demand forecasting, enterprise resource planning, and its ecommerce platform, Guitar Center has seen performance improvements of more than 30 percent and aims to save more than 40 percent in data platform expenses over the next three years. Additionally, with its inventory and catalog systems, ecommerce platform, and contact center technologies now running on OCI, Guitar Center is able to provide improved response times to customers while offering new services in the channel of their choice.

Guitar Center and its brands employ over 13,000 Associates across more than 550 retail locations in the United States and online, offering new and used musical instruments, rentals, repairs, and lessons to musicians of all ages and musical ability. The pandemic created two contrasting challenges for the retailer, as the global lockdowns led to product supply and customer demand challenges, and the subsequent reopening sparked a huge resurgence. Guitar Center realized that its on-premises infrastructure needed to be upgraded in order to provide the scale, adaptability, and resiliency necessary to ensure uptime and successfully navigate these huge swings in customer demand. As a result, the retailer decided to move its infrastructure, customer-facing applications, and mission-critical workloads to the cloud, and selected Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI for its scalability, security, and ability to adjust capacity based on demand.

“The past two years have been punctuated by massive fluctuations in customer demand, creating a ‘bullwhip effect.’ As we navigated the challenges, we realized that we needed to gain elasticity across our infrastructure so that it could be adjusted quickly based on business conditions,” said Ravi Balwada, CTO, Guitar Center. “With OCI and its Exadata Database Service, we’re able to operate a highly connected, distributed cloud environment without needing to re-platform our core systems. We’ve improved the efficiency of our systems and expect to be able to realize cost savings of more than 40 percent—while delivering new services and experiences to our customers.”

“Few industries have faced more upheaval over the past two years than the retail sector, and retailers have had to become extremely resourceful in finding new revenue streams to grow their businesses,” said Greg Pavlik, senior vice president and CTO, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Guitar Center’s move to the cloud highlights the flexibility and economic benefits that cloud technologies can deliver.”

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