Guitar Center has moved to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to meet customer demand for new online and in-store services. By moving its core systems to OCI, including order management, warehouse management, demand forecasting, enterprise resource planning, and its ecommerce platform, Guitar Center has seen performance improvements of more than 30% and aims to save more than 40% in data platform expenses over the next three years. Additionally, with its inventory and catalog systems, ecommerce platform, and contact center technologies now running on OCI, Guitar Center is able to provide improved response times to customers while offering new services in the channel of their choice.

Guitar Center and its brands employ over 13,000 Associates across more than 550 retail locations in the United States and online, offering new and used musical instruments, rentals, repairs, and lessons to musicians of all ages and musical ability. The pandemic created two contrasting challenges for the retailer, as the global lockdowns led to product supply and customer demand challenges, and the subsequent reopening sparked a huge resurgence. Guitar Center realized that its on-premises infrastructure needed to be upgraded in order to provide the scale, adaptability, and resiliency necessary to ensure uptime and successfully navigate these huge swings in customer demand.

As a result, the retailer decided to move its infrastructure, customer-facing applications, and mission-critical workloads to the cloud, and selected Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI for its scalability, security, and ability to adjust capacity based on demand.