A number of years ago, Sun Microsystems looked at the future of retail and announced that SmartStores would make shopping super easy.
Since then Sun have introduced 2 customizable retail solutions, “Sun Retail Store Processor” and “Sun Retail Integration Architecture Software” where they claim that their innovations are based on open standards and can cater for any sizable growth.
Sun also claim that ten of the top 20 retailers – including Amazon, eBay, and Wal-Mart, depend on Sun systems for critical business operations. Sun could turn out to be a big player in retail and RFID, and spurring Sun toward retail solutions could be spurred on by the fact that some of their traditional businesses have been in decline.
Given Suns healthy bank balance and acquisition of MySQL (an open source database), it will be interesting to see what they bring to the retail space.
