For many decades, retailers have been on the lookout for ways to streamline business processes such as warehousing, invoicing and accounting in a bid to improve services and profit.
In today's demanding business climate, characterised by a revolution in e-commerce and social networking, the challenge is to enhance business processes by adding new capabilities to match changes in consumer purchasing behaviour, while investing in solutions to boost information security and application uptime.
The Internet, with its 'anytime, anywhere, any device' approach to digital technologies, has increased the level of competition for most retailers, squeezing margins and forcing business managers to re-evaluate all aspects of their operations.
Research has revealed that slow and outdated infrastructures incapable of keeping pace with changing consumer capabilities and emerging business needs are the biggest impediments to improved efficiencies in the retail environment.
Retail revolution
While retail is not the only industry to feel the disruptive influences of these challenges, few industries face the seismic transformational shifts that retailers now have to deal with.
They are tasked with having to roll out new business applications more frequently, while driving technology-based innovations across entire organisations in the shortest possible time to meet challenges from competitors keen to match evolving consumer demands with cutting-edge technologies.
One of the biggest advantages of cloud technology is its flexibility, allowing new application roll-outs using essentially the same technologies and tools as modern, tech-savvy consumers. This results in improved infrastructure, service delivery and after-sales support.
Retailers who aren't ready or willing to introduce cloud technologies will find it increasingly difficult to compete in an age in which all computing and IT services and capabilities can be accessed through the Internet. On the other hand, those who are accepting of the cloud evolution will open their doors to a host of best practices ideally suited to the retail industry.
Cloud-based solutions allow retailers to open new locations more quickly and to enter new territories with a lighter IT 'footprint'.
For example, cloud technology is able to 'virtualise' the data centre, increasing the utilisation of computing resources. It is also able to centralise IT resources to reduce costs and create platforms to optimise efficiencies at customer, business partner and associate levels.
In the cloud, resources including equipment and business applications such as e-mail, accounting, CRM, scheduling, forecasting, scenario modelling, pricing optimisation and real-time inventory management, are all purchased and accessed through Web interfaces.
These often time-consuming and data-intensive processes can now be fulfilled more quickly and cost-effectively. What's more, cloud-based solutions allow retailers to open new locations more quickly and to enter new territories with a lighter IT 'footprint' than traditional deployment models.
Right for retail
Underlining this, the cloud's 'pay per use' pricing model is ideally suited to the retail industry, with its often seasonal highs and lows. This flexibility also allows retailers to scale up quickly to meet growth targets and scale down just as quickly when business conditions change and new approaches are required.
A company can, for example, make use of a dozen servers one week and a hundred the next, at the same time taking advantage of the cloud service provider's free or low-cost development tools.
By moving IT resources to the cloud, retail IT departments can effectively 'do more with less' while all but eliminating the costs associated with servers, software licences, maintenance fees, and data centre space and the electricity to power and cool them.
In the cloud computing model, the management and maintenance of equipment, software updates and system upgrades all are handled by the cloud service provider. In addition to eliminating variable support costs, this also allows the retailer to focus on its core business while maintaining minimal in-house staff and expertise.
A wide variety of business applications, with unified sales, support, transaction and provisioning, can be accessed under one secure cloud login. From a Web-based dashboard, a retail business - no matter what its size - can order product, initiate a support ticket, manage customer relationships, secure important IT resources and backup critical data.
This type of technology integration is set to increase efficiencies several-fold, particularly as an increasing number of retail-specific cloud providers now have the ability to track the performance of products and brands, identify trends and provide analytical results to the retailer.
Where to begin? In order to realise these benefits, cloud proponents suggest retailers start their quest by first migrating non-mission-critical, non-integrated applications to the cloud. Then be prepared to scale up once the advantages are proven. Overcoming hurdles such as integration with existing systems and all aspects of data security may require the services of an advisor. The results will be worth the effort.
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