Retail giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is testing out a new checkout system that enables shoppers to avoid long lines and scan items in store aisles using their smartphones.

Acumatica, a provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software in the cloud, has integrated its product with the AccellosOne Cloud WMS (warehouse management system).

Thrive Technologies Inc. has released Firstcast, a demand-forecasting service.

ERP systems are used throughout most large enterprises, with SAP and Oracle accounting for 80 percent or more of the installed based in regulated sectors such as pharma and energy. But these same systems, with their million-dollar development budgets and long learning curves, have been singularly unsuccessful in smaller enterprises.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, wrote George Santayana, and if you've observed technology long, you know that the cycles of repetition become shorter with each passing year. When it comes to CRM, we're seeing it again in the form of social CRM: companies are making the same mistakes they made at the start of the CRM era.

In the last few decades, statisticians and computer scientists have produced a dazzling arsenal of extremely powerful tools to help managers translate data into business decisions.

An IDC MarketScape report from IDC Retail Insights finds that product lifecycle management has evolved to become a central lynchpin for retailers to conduct customer-centric, efficient and effective brand management. The new study, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Product Life-Cycle Management (PLM) Applications 2012 Vendor Assessment, examines the impact of retail PLM and its ability to improve return on capital and brand equity, while reducing risk. Vendors evaluated in this report include: Centric Software, Core Solutions, Dassault Systemes, Gerber, Lectra, NGC, PTC, SAP, Siemens and TradeStone Software.

Cloud computing is slowly becoming a mainstream technology. However, even before the hype cycle has died down, cloud providers are already starting to see downward price pressures. Every hosting provider under the sun is now repackaging itself as a cloud provider, and basic capacity and services are quickly becoming commodities.

International Asset Systems (IAS) has introduced ChasssisManager, a service intended to simplify the rental process and maximize asset utilization for chassis providers.

In today's business milieu, the likelihood of successfully selecting and implementing corporate software, particularly large and complex solutions such as enterprise resource planning, is very difficult to foretell owing in large part to the nature of those projects.