SAN FRANCISCO — Gap Inc. deployed a slew of Oracle Cloud services over the past months, according to the retail giant’s CIO Paul Chapman, who joined Oracle CEO Mark Hurd on stage during an Oracle OpenWorld 2017 keynote.

This allowed the company, whose brands include Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy, Athleta, Intermix, and Weddington Way, to implement things like mobile checkout in stores. It also uses analytics to share information about price points, product placement, and customer demand across all of its brands, Chapman said.

“That institutional knowledge has been absolutely critical,” he said. “A huge percentage of our business is still store-based business and for us to leverage our capabilities within the stores is critical."

Additionally, Gap’s Intermix brand is the first retailer to be 100 percent up and running in the Oracle Cloud, Hurd said. Intermix uses these cloud-based retail services to synchronize merchandising operations. They also create dashboard notifications and alerts for daily tasks like purchase order approval and sales auditing. Oracle Cloud helps Gap streamline its supply chain and logistics operations and focus instead on the customer experience, Chapman said.

In addition to Gap, Oracle Cloud customers FedEx, Bloomenergy, Caesars Entertainment, and the City of San Jose, California, joined Hurd on stage or via video during the keynote.

“This movement to the cloud, this is an inevitable destination as opposed to an interesting charismatic turn,” Hurd said. “This is how computing is going to evolve over the next several years.”

Caesars Entertainment standardized its back-office processes with Oracle Cloud and is the first Las Vegas casino/hotel company to move to a cloud-based financial system, said President and CEO Mark Frissora in a video. “We have saved millions and millions of dollars in annual IT costs,” he said.

FedEx moved its recent acquisition, Genco Distribution System, a North American third-party logistics provider, “straight to the cloud,” said Chris Wood, VP of transformation at FedEx.

“Genco is the starting point,” he continued, adding that FedEx plans to replace other legacy systems with Oracle Cloud “where it’s a part of our supply chain business, using inventory management, and warehousing management. We’re trying to figure out ways to deliver more functionality and reduce our costs. Oracle cloud is a big part of that.”

Clean energy provider Bloomenergy used “a bunch of systems” prior to moving to Oracle Cloud, said CFO Randy Furr. “Some operated on premises, some co-location, some in the cloud. They didn’t talk to each other very well. We imported a lot of data, did it in spreadsheets, which took time and often the quality wasn’t there.”

Moving to Oracle software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) solved these problems, Furr said. “We have much more timely data, and it’s much more accurate.”

Photo: Gap Inc. CIO Paul Chapman joined Oracle CEO Mark Hurd on stage during an Oracle OpenWorld 2017 keynote.