Reports of the physical retail store’s death have been greatly exaggerated. As a recent survey from the Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) found, 93 percent of products sold in the United States are still bought in brick-and-mortar locations. And while technology has upended many product categories and more than a few individual retailers, it simultaneously creates opportunities for retailers to continue to make the store shopping experience both relevant and compelling. Big Data in the store is key to achieving this.
Cisco and NetApp have been partners for over a decade, and in January we announced the planned expansion of our partnership. We are always looking to work with our partners in new ways to offer customers greater choice, and Cisco and NetApp are working toward delivering a complete platform for enterprises in data-intensive industries with business-critical SLAs. The solution will offer pre-sized storage, networking, and compute in a highly reliable, ready-to-deploy Hadoop stack, and it is planned to be generally available summer 2013. But, who can wait until summer?! I know we can’t, so we’re going to offer a demo of the joint reference architecture at Cisco Live! Melbourne March 5-8, and we hope you’ll stop by to check it out!
To give you more information on the solution — it will be pre-validated for enterprise Hadoop deployments built using 6296 Fabric Interconnects (connectivity and management), a pair of Nexus 2232s, C220 M3 Servers (compute) and NetApp E5400 and FAS 2240 series storage arrays. Following the -- highly successful -- FlexPod model of pre-sized rack level configurations, this solution will be made available through the well-established FlexPod sales engagement and channel. Field sales and partners from both companies will resell the solution upon general availability.
Retailers looking at the Big Data opportunity may well find themselves with an array of choices: the opportunities seem so vast, where does one begin?
Well, a pragmatic way forward is to focus on some pragmatic possibilities and then “follow the money”!
In examining the Big Data opportunity for retailers, Cisco IBSG has identified three key areas where we believe value can be generated through Big Data analytics – and we have put together a framework for assessing and comparing the financial impact of options within these areas.
As outlined in our previous report, “Surfing the Data Deluge: How Retailers Can Turn Big Data into Big Profits,” three areas – video, social and mobile data –promise unprecedented insights into what consumers want or need, at the earliest stages of interest, and will drive the Big Data thrust in retail over the next few years. These three essentials not only represent a major stream of incoming data, but also provide an outbound mechanism to communicate with customers on a more personalized basis. In other words, they are both a source of Big Data analytics and a way of implementing Big Data insights! Read More »
By Henky Agusleo, Vertical Manager, and Neeraj Arora, Director, IBSG Service Provider – Singapore
A rapidly expanding, tech-savvy middle class is driving an explosion of connected mobile devices, with close to a billion smartphones and tablets in the world today. These users are looking for new cloud-based “Connected Life” experiences from their mobile devices, creating tremendous opportunities for service providers (SPs). The key is in mobile cloud. The Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) projects a direct worldwide mobile-cloud service opportunity of more than $60 billion by 2016, with an additional cloud pull-through market of $335 billion.
But so far, service providers have not taken the lead in offering cloud-based Connected Life services. That claim belongs to over-the-top (OTT) application developers, content providers, and device manufacturers, such as Google and Apple, who have moved quickly to take the high ground in this market.
Today Paul Perez, Vice President and CTO of Cisco’s Data Center Group joined on stage downtown San Francisco Boyd A. Davis, Intel Architecture Group Vice President and GM, Data Center Software Division to announce a proposed extension of the alliance between Cisco and Intel into Big Data .
Over the past months, our readers had the opportunity to appreciate the growing investment of Cisco in this market frequently articulated by our experts Raghunath Nambiar and Jacob Rapp through blog postings and speaking at industry events.
Cisco and Intel have worked together for years to deliver enterprise solutions that improve performance and enable organizations to deliver new services. As we have stated several times recently , Intel has been a critical partner and significant contributor to the phenomenal success of the Cisco UCS. So it will not come as a surprise to anybody that Cisco and Intel are looking to partner again to offer you a leading Big Data solution.
In this video, Cisco Paul Perez and Intel Boyd Davis explained how Cisco will support the Intel distribution of Apache Hadoop on UCS, and how both companies intend to collaborate to address the growing Big Data needs of our joint customers.
