Retail – Zale Corporation

Zale Corporation, North America's leading specialty retailer in fine jewelry, watches and diamonds deploys Fiorano SOA

Zale Corporation is North America's leading specialty retailer in fine jewelry, watches and diamonds, operating approximately 1,680 retail locations throughout the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico and offering an extensive range of products. Over the years Zale Corporation's application portfolios have increased in complexity. This required a responsive, consistent infrastructure platform to cater to market and customer requirements in near real-time. It was critical for Zale to move away from their legacy systems of disparate batch oriented systems to real time information systems.

At Zale, the Fiorano SOA product is used to address three primary areas:

• Application Integration - To date they have replaced a number of batch/flat file integrations with near real-time integrations using Fiorano. This has not only resulted in more timely data updates but has greatly reduced dependence of one application on another. By making use of database triggers and queuing systems like Oracle AQ and SQL Server Service Broker, Zales have been able to quickly build integrations with minimal impact on the hosting applications.
• Services - Using the service-based features of Fiorano they have been able to quickly expose HTTP and REST-based services to support their integration efforts. A service-based approach to real-time queries insulates an application from the details of data acquisition and reduces application dependence on other systems. Zales found Fiorano to be particularly well suited to rapid service development.
• ETL - Data transformation is a key service when dealing with external vendors. Zales have implemented a number of external integrations with Fiorano which allow them to easily work with both incoming and outbound flat files. The advanced transformation and parsing facilities in Fiorano have greatly assisted them in these efforts.