But he has one large fear about Oracle's intentions. He liked the idea of "Oracle having all those high-powered entrepreneurs sitting in its corner," but entrepreneurs tend to not be easily absorbed into a large enterprise such as Oracle, which has its own way of doing things.

"These are pretty entrepreneurial people. Mr. Ellison will have to encourage them to maintain and expand their entrepreneurial spirit so that they don't get woven into a large corporate culture," Deruchie said. "That's the kind of thing we're going to be watching for."

He doesn't fear Oracle trying to impose unfair licensing or pricing pressures on Reitmans any more than he fears IBM doing it. "I think they would be very foolish to do that, but fools are made every day," Deruchie said.

Beyond Oracle and IBM, Reitmans is also making a stronger commitment to Microsoft and will be using Microsoft's .Net as the basis for the new POS systems.

From a philosophy perspective, count Deruchie—who has been with Reitmans for 11 years—as a recent convert to the "do not customize" camp.

"We learned our lesson with customization, but we didn't learn it fast enough 11 years ago," he said, when the chain found itself heavily relying on third-party software companies—including Triversity—to maintain systems that had been seriously rewritten.

"The Retek system that we bought, we now call it Reitek. The Reitmans version of Retek," he said. "We still have the Retek 4 system, but no one would ever recognize it."

Click here to read more about the sale of Retek.

With their newest software—ProfitLogic for assortment planning—the policy will be more hands-off.

"With ProfitLogic, we're not touching the code in that stuff. And with PeopleSoft, we don't touch that code," Deruchie said. "We don't fiddle with the code anymore because you get off the upgrade track."

Those tweaks here and there make the transition to a new version—or even handling some patches—"a vastly more complicated issue" and he commented on what happened when his team tried deploying an upgrade that was supposed to be a simple plug-and-play installation.

"You plug and you play and then you plug and you replay and then replay again and then you try plugging again," Deruchie said.

The vastness of Canada had made disaster recovery another important issue for the CIO. Although the chain has a formal disaster recovery plan, one inadvertent part of that plan is based on the fact that many of their stores are comparatively small (between 4,000 and 5,000 square feet) so they have relatively little inventory on site.

But they also have minimal inventory in any centralized location. There is no huge warehouse. Only one large headquarters location and a distribution center about seven kilometers away.

That forces the vast majority of all inventory to be in the supply chain—on trucks, planes and ships—at any one point in time. So if a disaster struck, most of the chain's inventory would be safely spread out in the supply chain.

The stores do keep on hand about eight weeks of inventory, meaning even a six-to-eight week cutoff of shipments could be tolerated before the stores are theoretically unable to function, he said.

But Deruchie's fears are more from fashion gurus and teenage trendsetters than tidal waves or terrorists: "Clothes are like bananas," he said. "They go bad fast."

Retail Center Editor Evan Schuman can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.

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