Okay, so Sears Holdings has been promoting its technological advances for some time, although it is hard to see how these have helped either Sears or Kmart in any substantive way. Fortunately, this is not an article to recount the company's numerous retailing missteps over the years.
Last April, Sears Holdings announced it had created a wholly owned subsidiary, MetaScale, to offer data management and analytics via the cloud for large-scale enterprise projects.
As an Advertising Age article points out, at the core of MetaScale is Hadoop, a file system for companies "looking to transform traditional data operations to enable speedier access and analysis."
MetaScale is seen as a leader in the field and was chosen along with Netflix and Yahoo to run an educational track last June at the 2013 Hadoop Summit in San Jose.
Philip Shelley, CEO of MetaScale and also CTO at Sears, told Ad Age that the progression into data management for others was a natural for the company because it was "leading edge" when it came to the use of "big-data tools."
In an April 2012 RetailWire poll, respondents were evenly split on whether the creation of MetaScale was a good or bad move for Sears Holdings.