Retail is all about understanding what a customer wants and how to get it to them in the most efficient fashion. Online ordering has made this easier than ever – but it’s also given another set of data to the companies that is extremely helpful. By tracking browsing behavior and what customers are ordering in a specific zip code, stores can use the digital data to adjust their inventory in the physical stores in that area.

To give insight on this and other areas involving retail, Mike Webster, senior VP and GM at Oracle, spoke to John Furrier (@furrier) and Peter Burris (@plburris), hosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during Oracle OpenWorld, taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

Scaling to fit markets

As seen in the digital-to-physical example, understanding how customers engage in one market hints at how they’ll perform in a different one.

“What the cloud allows us to do is take these powerful tools we have used to serve large customers and scale them down to serve a larger pool of customers we previously couldn’t. The weight and cost of our offering used to be too much to be feasible,” said Webster.

Now with its services open to the mid-range market, Oracle itself is able to grow, feeding into a loop of expansion and innovation.

Simplify and scale

Innovation is precisely what Oracle plans to keep pushing forward, and Webster said he’s excited for what the next year will bring, including a conference in Florida in March 2017 called Oracle Industry Connect.

And just in the next few months there will be a new version the Oracle Retail cloud-enabled platform (Version 16). This version will “drive simplicity in the business model and anticipate changes that are coming. … It’s a great time to be in service to these communities,” said Webster, explaining that oracle’s business model is different than competitors, from the level of investment to the breadth of its portfolio.

“It all helps our customers simplify and scale,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Oracle OpenWorld.

(* Disclosure: Oracle and other companies sponsor some OpenWorld segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Oracle nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE