Aditya Birla Retail Limited has selected Oracle Retail applications to support its planned growth in the Indian retail sector, now the fifth biggest in the world (US$330bn in 2007).

Oracle Retail was chosen over competition which included SAP Retail and will be supplemented with financials modules from Oracle E-Business Suite and several application infrastructure components from Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Chief executive officer Sumant Sinha cited the excellent capability Oracle Retail has for supporting different store formats as a key point in its favour and expects to be able to roll out new stores more quickly with the software in place.

As an example of this retailer's ambition, Aditya Birla plans to open 17 new supermarkets of between 2,000 and 4,500 sqft in the city of Nashik alone. With this scale of operation, having a strong integrated retail software infrastructure in place will save it huge amounts of time and money.