Fujitsu has extended its partnership with Microsoft to help retailers increase revenue and reduce operating costs by creating a more connected retail experience.

The Fujitsu Business Analytics for Retail service provides solutions for retailers’ biggest challenges, including business intelligence, enterprise content management, store modernisation, data centre optimisation and legacy migration.

The service will solve the critical retail business challenge of connecting data in multiple silos in order to service customers effectively. It demonstrates both vendors' commitment to affordable solutions for succeeding in today's challenging retail environment.

"The Fujitsu partnership with Microsoft continues to drive significant innovation in the retail space,” said Bruce Kopp, senior vice president of the Retail Business Unit, Fujitsu America. “In today's uncertain and highly competitive environment, retailers must be able to increase their operational efficiency and squeeze out every dollar of profit. These companies can continue to rely on solutions created by Fujitsu and Microsoft to turn the promise of improved retail performance into reality."

The Fujitsu Business Analytics for Retail service rapidly delivers insights to help retailers optimise stock levels, determine seasonal buying trends and create and manage effective promotions. It also maximises clients' existing investment in Microsoft Office and SharePoint by using ithe new Microsoft PowerPivot business insights solutions for Excel and SharePoint.

The Fujitsu ECM and task-management integration and management services help retailers train and track performance of employees, ensure employee expertise on constantly changing products and report on task management. The solution leverages Microsoft SharePoint enterprise content management and task management technology.

Fujitsu also offers on-premise or hosted IT infrastructure services and retail store systems management to help retailers lower the cost of data centre operations, reduce IT service complaints and consolidate servers for maximum efficiency and flexibility. These managed data centre services options leverage Microsoft Hyper-V virtualisation technologies. Companies can also take advantage of a full spectrum of services and technology to migrate legacy systems onto modern platforms seamlessly by building on the Microsoft ASP.NET platform.

"Fujitsu has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to provide retailers with Microsoft technologies in the form of innovative, highly reliable solutions that offer immediate performance benefits and deliver long-term value from Microsoft's evolving feature set,” said Brendan O'Meera, managing director, WW Retail EPG group at Microsoft. “We look forward to continuing to work with Fujitsu to provide retailers with the solutions they need to compete in an extremely dynamic marketplace."