Today Oracle announced the next release of it's Big Data Appliance, an engineered system composed of hardware and software targeting the efficient processing of big data.  The solution leverages 288 Intel cores running Cloudera's distribution of Apache Hadoop in 1.1 TB of main memory.  This monster helps companies acquire, organize, and analyze large volumes of structured and un-structured data. Additionally a new versions of the Oracle Big Data Connectors and Oracle NoSQL Database were released.

Why is this important to retailers?  As the infographic below conveys, mobile and social have added even more data to the already huge collections of POS transactions and e-commerce weblogs.  Retailers know that mining that data will help them make better decisions that lead to increased sales, better customer service, and ultimately a successful retail business.

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