To meet customer demand for innovative online and in-store services, Guitar Center, the world’s largest retailer of musical instruments, has switched to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Guitar Center has seen performance improvements of more than 30% since moving its core systems to OCI, including order management, warehouse management, demand forecasting, enterprise resource planning, and its e-commerce platform.
Over the next three years, Guitar Center hopes to save more than 40% on data platform costs. Additionally, Guitar Center can now offer additional services to customers in their chosen channel while improving customer response times because of the inventory and catalogue systems, e-commerce platforms, and contact center technologies running on OCI.
“The past two years have been punctuated by massive fluctuations in customer demand, creating a ‘bullwhip effect.’ As we navigated the challenges, we realized that we needed to gain elasticity across our infrastructure so that it could be adjusted quickly based on business conditions,” said Ravi Balwada, CTO of Guitar Center.
“With OCI and its Exadata Database Service, we’re able to operate a highly connected, distributed cloud environment without needing to re-platform our core systems. We’ve improved the efficiency of our systems and expect to be able to realize cost savings of more than 40 percent – while delivering new services and experiences to our customers,” Balwada added.
More than 13,000 Associates are employed by Guitar Center and its brands throughout more than 550 retail locations in the United States and online, where they serve musicians of all ages and skill levels by providing new and used musical instruments, rentals, repairs, and training. The epidemic presented the retailer with two distinct challenges: the global lockdowns caused problems with product supply and customer demand, and the reopening that followed generated a significant uptick in business.
Guitar Center understood that its on-premises infrastructure needed to be improved to assure uptime and successfully traverse these enormous swings in client demand. This was done to provide the scale, adaptability, and robustness required.
As a result, the retailer chose Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI for its scalability, security, and capacity management capabilities. The retailer also migrated its infrastructure, customer-facing apps, and mission-critical workloads to the cloud.
“Few industries have faced more upheaval over the past two years than the retail sector, and retailers have had to become extremely resourceful in finding new revenue streams to grow their businesses,” said Greg Pavlik, senior vice president and CTO of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Guitar Center’s move to the cloud highlights the flexibility and economic benefits cloud technologies can deliver.”
