Oracle Corp. is rolling out six new services to its burgeoning cloud arsenal that are meant to help large retailers address their evolving operational requirements more effectively. The additions continue the trend of providers increasingly turning to industry-specific functionality for differentiation.

That shift is most pronounced in the competition between the database giant and its traditional rivals, IBM and SAP SE., which are also trying to gain a foothold in the cloud as demand for the on-premise software weakens. The retail sector in particular has emerged as a key battleground for the three legacy titans.

Big Blue is making brick-and-mortar merchants a central focus of its much-touted partnership with Apple to develop business apps for iOS, while the German enterprise resource planning giant is likewise targeting that crowd through mobile efforts and the public cloud. The new services from Oracle up the ante.

The biggest of the six additions is an e-commerce toolkit that the vendor says encompasses all the major aspects of running an online retail operation, including everything from creating personalized offers to increasing search engine rankings. Organizations can process purchases made through their Oracle-powered sites using a complementary ordering service.

The solution monitors the status of shipments and verifies the availability of an item before a customer places an order. That information is in turn also made accessible through another one of the new additions to the vendor’s cloud arsenal, which tracks merchandise across all of a retailer’s locations. That kind of visibility is handy in scenarios where a person calls a store about a product that has run out of stock locally but may still be accessible from another branch.

It’s also useful for operational planning, which Oracle is also attempting to address as part of the launch with a service for orchestrating merchandising activities and dealing with suppliers. It’s introducing another management solution on top of that promising to provide comparable functionality for handling customers and everything that entails, notably gift registries and loyalty programs.

Rounding out the six is a fraud detection service that analyzes metrics from the other new solutions to identify suspicious transactions and correlates them with localized information such as surveillance video to track down the culprits. The services are derived from the technology that Oracle gained through the $5.3 billion acquisition of MICROS Systems Inc.  last year.

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