Built on IBM's core SOA strategy, the Retail Integration Framework helps retailers to integrate disparate customer-facing applications, data and processes, offering retail-specific components and templates for areas like product introduction and assortment, cross-channel selling, point of sales and store-to-enterprise integration, multi-channel customer experience management and business intelligence.

IBM said the framework integrates best data management practices gleaned from thousands of its retail implementations. Technically, it comprises of products from IBM's Websphere, Tivoli and DB2 information management lines.