Retailer Sears, Roebuck and Co. plans to implement 95 new terabytes of EMC networked information storage, as well as open management software and global services, in a move to improve customer satisfaction and the performance of 2,500 stores nationwide.

"The retail business is tougher than ever, with aggressive competition in both price and assortment. Our challenge is to ensure that customers find the merchandise and service they want in our stores, while eliminating what they don't want - faster than the competition," said Jonathan Rand, Sears' Director of Merchandise Planning and Reporting. "Our EMC infrastructure will allow us to tightly integrate information about customer buying trends with other data sources such as inventory and sales. This way, we can more easily correlate various data points and improve our decision-making about assortments, promotions, margins and inventory - in short, optimize productivity."

Sears said it is working with EMC Global Services to implement an EMC storage area network (SAN) based on EMC Symmetrix Enterprise Storage systems and EMC Connectrix fibre-channel switches that the company said will consolidate data residing on Sun Solaris/UNIX and Compaq servers running Windows NT. In addition, EMC ControlCenter, Symmetrix Optimizer and ESN Manager have been implemented, as well as EMC Data Manager (EDM) integrated hardware and software solutions to provide data backup and restore for a variety of business applications.