Last week at the Interop conference in Las Vegas Cisco announced the 2012 Global Cloud Networking Survey where more than 1300 IT professionals in 13 countries were polled to find out the top priorities and challenges they face when moving applications and services to the cloud. The survey was commissioned by Cisco and distributed by Insight Express and addressed a range of questions from what are the top applications considered for migration (Storage, ERP) and the role of the network in supporting a Cloud strategy.
Retailers today are considering cloud computing to support business agility and innovation. This include reducing the number of servers in the store and moving them to the cloud, optimizing data center computing resources and virtualizing desktop applications.
Some of the recent inquries to Cisco retail team have led to development of the following content that we hope will help you in your road to the cloud:
There’s a lot of buzz in industry circles these days about the impact of “showrooming” on brick-and-mortar brands. Witness the excellent overview by Ann Zimmerman in the April 11 US edition of the Wall Street Journal,“Can Retailers Halt ‘Showrooming?’”
Ms. Zimmerman notes the anti-showrooming efforts of such retailers as Target and Walmart, and the challenge of meeting-and-beating pure play pricing and assortment breadth.
And, she also gets to the core of the issue: It’s not about competition between stores and pure play websites. It’s about competition between the websites of brick-and-mortar brands, and the websites of the pure plays.
We live in the era of Google, an era of web-based search, an era where just about any detail of just about anything can be found on the Internet. Studies of recent shopper behavior show a steady climb in the number of US shoppers who begin their purchase journey with online research. Nearly two-thirds of US adults do so regularly.
The Internet is the front door to all retail brands these days – not just the pure plays. It’s where shoppers are initially won or lost – and where store traffic is increasingly generated.
My colleague Bharat Popat and I just published a perspective on Cloud computing for retail that we think will help retail technologists cut through the cloud around Cloud.
Our hypothesis is that Cloud basically consists of custom combinations of four IT best practices:
Virtualization.
Network-centric enterprise and store ICT architectures.
The acquisition of services – ranging from enterprise applications to infrastructure to complete business processes.
The pursuit (and use) of new financial models.
All of which are in rapid adoption throughout developed world retailing (and enterprises in general.)
John Lewis, a leading U.K. retailer, is now piloting two Cisco StyleMe Virtual Fashion Mirrors at its flagship London department store on Oxford Street, providing customers with a virtual way to try on clothes. The mirrors were developed by the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), with partners C In-store, AITech, and The Team.
The 6- by 3-foot mirrors incorporate built-in cameras that capture shoppers’ body dimensions and positioning. Using artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and gesture-recognition technology, the mirrors then superimpose clothing items over customers’ on-screen images.
In effect, the mirrors become virtual changing rooms where customers can create complete outfits from more than 500 women’s-wear garments and accessories selected from johnlewis.com. This makes the shopping experience easier and more enjoyable by letting customers see how they look in new outfits without getting undressed.
In previous blog I wrote about the impact of omnichannel on retailers and how some retailers are coping with the new realities succesfully, and some are not. In our next conversation with Brian Kilcourse, managing director of Retail Systems Research we talked about the impact of omnichannel on the retail supply chain.
I happened to pause last week at a pile of newspapers in my father’s house in Atlanta.
The reason: A feature article about Cisco on the front page of the March 25th business section of the Journal-Constitution.
The article was interesting. But best of all, it jumped from the front page to the inside pages of the section… which is why, on page D2, I stumbled across one of the best, common sense advisory articles on retail technology I’ve read in a long time.
My colleagues Jon Stine and Lisa Fretwell with Cisco IBSG recently published research about consumers that are constantly channel hopping in their shopping journey. We all have personal experiences shopping on the web, in the store and on mobile devices.
I recently in the middle of a conversation during lunch, made a reservation on Open Table app, purchased a case for my phone on amazon app and bought a music album on iTunes (Doctor Who Series 6), and pulled up directions to the local home improvement store, all in 10 minutes. Obviously the consumer trend is shopping across multiple channels, and some retailers are succeeding in this new world, and some are not.
I sat down with Brian Kilcourse, managing partner of Retail Systems Research and this was one of the topics we talked about.
Ever had a customer who hesitates to buy a dress because she worries she’ll never find the right accessories to tie the look together? Or because she’s just not sure it’ll pass the boyfriend test? Too often such customers leave empty-handed, promising to come back with the man and/or potential shoes and jewelry in tow so she can decide.
Sometimes she comes back. Usually she doesn’t.
That doesn’t have to happen anymore, and retailers have technology to thank for it.
We are excited to showcase our latest retail video case study with Sport Chalet, a chain of 54 stores in four western states. California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, plus an online store, www.sportchalet.com.
In this video Craig Levra, Chairman and CEO and Ted Jackson, Vice President of information technology and CIO of Sport Chalet discusses the importance of customer experience to Sport Chalet. The video overviews how technology is an enabler to help their current and future business needs.
With their partnership with Cisco, Sport Chalet leverages technologies such as the network, data center and collaboration at headquarters and the stores to help run their business faster, enable their employees to put customers first and drive growth for the business.
For more information on how Cisco helps address retailers IT and business needs, please visit http://www.cisco.com/go/retail
A long-standing hypothesis around here is that we’ve entered a new age of internet-shaped shopper expectations.
The thinking is that, in this age of Google, Amazon, and ubiquitous connectivity, an increasing number of Western shoppers now expect the entire world to work like an iPad 3 hooked to a steroidal data pipe.
Where, with a flick of the finger, anything and everything can be found. In multiple choice. Where comparative price and product data is there for all to see. Where transparency is equated with authenticity, and authenticity with trust.
And where everything moves ahead at blink-of-an-eye speed.
Or faster.
Evidence of the latter was found this past week on the front page of the New York Times.
Steve Lohr (“For Impatient Web Users, an Eye Blink Is Just Too Long to Wait”) reported that Google researchers found that a delay of four hundred milliseconds or more between key stroke and computer response – that’s four-tenths of a second, literally the blink of an eye – will cause people to search less.
According to a computer scientist at Microsoft, a response time of 250 milliseconds is now the magic number “for a competitive advantage” on the web.
Truth be told, our impatient society will wait more than a few blinks for a big video file to download. But Google research shows that four of five online users will click away if a video stalls while loading.
In this day and age, it’s lack of speed that kills.
Worth remembering as one designs the next web experience.
Worth remembering as one designs the next store experience.
Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.
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p.s. I will be speaking at the Catch Em and Keep Em Webcast on Thursday March 8th, 2012 about our research released at NRF 2012 back January. We will talk about what in our research show how retailers can catch and keep the channel hopping consumers. You can register to watch the event here.
The conference call buzz of past weeks confirms that one of the retail tech topics du jour is the quest for a “mobility strategy.”
Requests from good retailers. Meetings with smart folks hard at work identifying use models and value-creation plays for both associates and consumers.
No question that it’s important.
But every retailer should be asking how important – especially consumer mobility. Especially in today’s world of cross-channel shopping.
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Thank you to everyone who visited the Cisco NRF booth last month. We had a huge of amount traffic and a number of exciting demonstrations plus the announcement of our “Catch Em and Keep Em” consumer research study. We also shot a number of videos from the show floor which I hope you all enjoy.
We announced the new Catch Em and Keep Em consumer research on how retailers can attract and retain channel hopping shoppers. The research is now avialable for download here
I was at a technology conference in London late last year, and the topic was mobility – and, inevitably, BYOD: bring your own device.
The mobility evangelists (and they dominated the four-person panel) waxed poetic as to all the fabulous things that iPhone- and Android-armed employees could bring to the business. Rich content! Social networking! Collaboration! Meeting each other for lunch!
Then a grouchy American analyst walked to the podium, and growled two words: “Data Security.”
And silence fell like a thick blanket over the room.
BYOD is one of technology’s topics du jour, an issue that will create a few tons of PowerPoint and a fresh revenue line for consulting firms in the next 18-24 months.
Cynicism aside, it’s a very important issue – and not just for ICT shops. And, it’s an issue that will be easily misunderstood.
Yes, BYOD is about data security. Yes, there’s a need for hard and high corporate security walls. Clearly-stated rules. And devout attention to PCI.
But beyond that, let’s pause and reflect.
BYOD is not about the devices. The devices will continue to evolve at Moore’s Law speed, and the stuff the kids are bringing into the office today will be obsolete by the time your new policies reach the governance committee.
Truth be told, BYOD is about the big tech-driven generational change in expectations and behavior. It’s about the new normal of life with the Internet. Life in the Internet.
It’s about Millennials who use technology like I use a knife and fork. It’s about a tsunami wave flooding every phase of business life – from the headquarters office to the distribution center to the store.
And this tsunami will not just touch devices. It will drive change in the cloud content that employees will use. It will drive change in their willingness to sit in cubes (versus do the work at home or at Starbucks or wherever there’s a fast wireless pipe). It will drive change in their expectations for interaction and participation, for education and training.
It will even touch the glowing third rail of data security. (As this is the generation of Wiki-Leaks and unbridled transparency on Facebook.)
Using stores as showrooms for online purchases is the “new normal” for today’s tech- and Internet-savvy shoppers. So how do retailers “catch” these channel-hopping customers and “keep” them buying within their own brand?
The Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) believes retailers can increase sales both in stores and online by creating “mashops” that combine immersive online content with engaging in-store experiences. This idea is backed up by Cisco IBSG’s latest research, which revealed that digital content has reached a new level of influence.
Surprisingly, shoppers now prefer online sources to people when making buying decisions. Read More »
