One of the biggest turnoffs to Oracle, says Sport chalet CFO Howard Kaminsky, was the lack of integration between Oracle financial applications and the retail apps of Retek, which it acquired about 18 months ago.

IW covers the piece here,SAP recently announced recently that it beat Oracle in a bid for the business of Sport Chalet, a $350-million-a-year retailer.With the Sport Chalet deal, SAP also is gloating over the win of a "midmarket" company, or one under $1 billion in revenue, which is key to SAP's aggressive plans to grow from 35,000 to 100,000 customers by 2010. "We went out and looked at all the usual software companies that relate to retail," Kaminsky says. "At the time we didn't expect SAP to be in the running; we didn't know they were that interested in the middle market. They came back very aggressively and said they were very interested."

Sport Chalet plans to replace multiple disparate, homegrown finance and merchandising systems with the newest release of mySAP ERP, and expects the package to help get it in compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley. BearingPoint will do the implementation.

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Prashanth Rai