With the rise of e-Commerce, Asian retailers are under tremendous pressure to continuously push traditional boundaries and embark on digital transformation to engage consumers. Keeping up with the latest trends in providing the best consumer experience have retailers looking to tech innovations, particularly digital technologies, to play a key role in capturing and keeping customers’ attention and loyalty.
Technologies such as the cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), mobility solutions, and augmented reality (AR) are driving customer-facing innovations such as digital marketing, smart shopping carts, couponing, and mobile apps – that bring people into the store and keep them coming back. Cloud applications also make it easier for store associates and corporate staffers alike to collaborate and take care of back-office needs.
The reality is that retailers need to embrace digital transformation and use technology in innovative ways to enhance the customer experience if they want to remain competitive.
Technology Challenges
However, rapid adoption of digital in retail not only improves outcomes but ignites new challenges for IT administrators in retail organizations. Among the challenges are how to:
- Support increased customer engagement with in-store technologies that have high-bandwidth demands
- Support increasing use of applications in the cloud with a resilient and secure network
- Ensure connectivity and provide secure access for point-of-sale (POS) applications and electronic payment transactions
- Ensure performance for real-time applications such as voice, video, and unified communications
Taking on one of these efforts in the past may have required every resource, but now all of these must be accomplished by the same IT staff. Also, these changes must be deployed across hundreds and even thousands of store locations spanning vast geographical regions.
Yet the connective element that brings everything together for retailers – existing networks are now too complex, too expensive, and frankly, too outdated to support the challenges and opportunities that come from digital transformation. A new approach to the retail network is required.
With a Virtual Cloud Network, retailers can create an end-to-end software-based network architecture that delivers services to applications and data wherever they are located at global scale from edge to edge, with consistent, pervasive connectivity, and security.
Faster service delivery on the cloud
Alfamart in Indonesia is an example of a retailer that embarked on digital transformation by adopting cloud and mobility solutions, and reaped the benefits of a modernized, connected business network.
Faced with a vast network of over 10,300 minimarts spread across the Indonesian archipelago and basic internet infrastructure in many far-flung areas, it was difficult for Alfamart to convey information in a timely manner across its network.
The slow flow of information impeded the business’ ability to make critical decisions in a timely manner, resulting in them not being able to react quickly enough to customer feedback or market trends, and affected overall competitiveness.
Alfamart decided to connect all of its store employees and partners with a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy and an enterprise mobility management platform over the cloud.
All store employees are now equipped with the most up-to-date product information, prices and stock level at their fingertips, enabling them to act quickly to meet market trends, and manage peaks in demand for the fast-moving perishable goods they provide.
This has improved their speed-to-market, reduced training costs by 20 per cent, enhanced mobility across device and platforms, and improved internal communications between management and employees. Customer satisfaction levels have also gone up.
Keeping systems up and goods in stock at all times
City Mart in Myanmar is another retailer which benefited from modernizing its legacy IT infrastructure by adopting virtualization. Lengthy downtimes were a common occurrence under their old IT system, which affected their supply chain and resulted in unfulfilled customer orders, negatively impacting revenues.
The supermarket network implemented a software-defined IT infrastructure and automated certain IT processes, which not only eliminated server downtime but also cut operational expenses by half. Predictive analytics and smart alerts also helped improve the system performance.
With a new inventory management system, City Mart is now able to gain visibility of their stock across their entire network of 180 stores, whether on storeshelves or in the warehouse. This enabled them to better understand changing consumer demand patterns across different stores, ensure that goods are in stock at all times, and build stronger relations with suppliers.
Ultimately, the virtualized IT infrastructure supports City Mart’s expanding business, enabling the retailer to meet the needs of Myanmar’s growing consumer class.
Networking for Retail 2020
The future of networking is software, and the network of the future is the Virtual Cloud Network. Virtual Cloud Networks allow retailers to create a digital business fabric for connecting and securing applications, data, and users across the entire network in a hyper-distributed world. In this way, retailers can simplify networking and wide area network management, optimize cloud access from all locations, assure high performance for even the most demanding applications, and enforce security and compliance across the network in every store location.