OREANDA-NEWS. July 23, 2012. Fujitsu today announced that Hallmark Cards, Inc. has selected Fujitsu to provide a complete cloud-based, retail-as-a-service (RaaS) solution for its more than 2,500 independent retailers and corporate stores in the U.S. Hallmark and its independent retailers will use a monthly subscription model to cover a combination of Fujitsu TeamPoS(R) and third-party hardware, software, support, maintenance, and data center hosting services. The exclusive 10-year contract calls for the solution to be deployed over the next three years.

 "With our commitment to a retail-as-a-service strategy, our stores will essentially be able to run their point-of-sale and merchandise management operations through a subscription service, making those processes easier, faster and less expensive, " said Mike Goodwin, chief information officer at Hallmark Cards, Inc. "By creating a single, centralized platform that provides real-time updates on merchandise status, this end-to-end solution from Fujitsu will allow our stores and our sales associates to stop worrying about computing systems and focus all their attention on providing great customer service."

 As part of the agreement, Fujitsu will provide:
Deployment, support and maintenance of Hallmark's retail software technology infrastructure, using Retail.net software, by Tomax, as a private cloud solution hosted by Fujitsu Cloud
Full PoS integration services
Complete, real-time inventory management services
Web portal ordering service
Installation, de-installation, maintenance, and repair of all equipment

 The production environment will be hosted primarily in the Fujitsu Sunnyvale data center, and deployed through Fujitsu Cloud. Fujitsu will work with Hallmark to provide infrastructure design support, technical support, standard procedure development and assistance with more complex technical issues.

 "Our retail offerings are a vital and fast-growing area of our business, and our all-inclusive retail-as-a-service solution can be a real game-changer for highly distributed retailers like Hallmark Cards," said Mark Vayda, executive vice president of sales at Fujitsu America. "In the same way that software-as-a-service is making businesses around the world more agile and competitive, retail-as-a-service will make it easy for Hallmark to maintain a highly flexible, world-class retailing infrastructure that can scale and adapt to evolving needs and let retailers focus more attention on their customers."