When John Lewis, a leading U.K. retailer, faced challenges with running its new, geographically distributed at home shops, Cisco IBSG knew that the problems could be solved through the innovative use of video technology. Within the retail industry, video collaboration has historically been regarded as a head-office capability, with the notion that video and mobile technology at the shop level were both too expensive to implement and too complex to use. This was an opportunity to prove otherwise and create a retail industry first.
Maggie Porteous, head of at home for John Lewis, was challenged with helping the new teams get to know the new shop format and with bringing them together to share learnings and improve operations. And while she wanted the dispersed shop teams to be able to work together, frequent travel was time-consuming, costly, and, most important, meant time away from serving customers.
Working with John Lewis CIO Paul Coby, we chose two critical concepts to pilot for the core retail use cases:
Two days ago, DC Shoes, retailer of footwear & gear for Extreme Sports, released the latest of their GYMKHANA video series, titled “DC and Ken Block present Gymkhana FIVE: Ultimate Urban Playground; San Francisco.” This video broke all the records from their previous videos, currently achieving 14 million views in its first four days.
Gymkhana is a form of motorsport where drivers a preset course featuring obstacles such as tires, cones and barrels in timing/speed competition. DC shoes CEO, Ken Block is their president, chief brand ambassor and an accomplished rallycross racer.
Some interesting facts about the DC Ken Block Gymkhana Project’s marketing effectiveness
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:
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.
