Why the hybrid cloud is the future of retailing

The frictionless store

For many retailers, the hybrid cloud represents how they can perform the digital transformation they need to meet customer demand and future-proof their enterprises.

Building a business that understands its customers has, of course, always been a core driver across the entire retail sector. However, today’s consumers want more: They want new experiences. They want seamless retailing that is secure and personalized to them.

For CIOs and CTOs, how they deliver these new retail channels means understanding how a hybrid cloud deployment would become the foundation of their IT. Neill Hart, Head of Productivity and Programs at CSI explained to Silicon: “Retailers will not only use cloud providers for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or even platform as a service (PaaS). Many niche business applications will be offered in a software as a service (SaaS) model – for example, software that plans how merchandise should be displayed on shelves, based on sales, demographic and seasonal data. Business process as a service (BPaaS) offers cloud-based services for managing an entire function such as invoice processing. Like many other sectors, retailers are re-evaluating what gives them a perpetual edge over their competition – and finding cloud-based alternatives for non-differentiating processes.”

Glen Koskela, CTO Retail and Hospitality EMEIA at Fujitsu also noted:
“Planning and implementing consistent guidelines and policies that ensure application manageability, workload portability, data security, application access, network design, and end-to-end systems resilience and HA (High Availability) and DR (Disaster Recovery) functions for a converged infrastructure brings many challenges to retailers.”

Koskela also said: “For example, traditional timelines to bring new things into the store do not work anymore. Payback and delivery need to happen in days, not months. That means retailers need to have systems and processes in place to help them achieve that. Speed is really important. Yet being able to respond to business needs with speed and control is just one piece of the puzzle: retailers also need to know their customer.”

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