Revolutionizing the Retail Industry

Due to continuing digitization and the massive surge in ecommerce sales in the past three years, the retail industry is undergoing a period of immense change. Customer engagement and user experience are becoming increasingly important for retailers to remain profitable in an increasingly competitive environment. Retail stores are looking to bridge the gap in customer experiences between physical store and digital channels through improving real time visibility and efficiency to increase customer engagement.

Customer experience is increasingly seen as a key brand differentiator, surpassing both product and price. By synchronizing customer experience across in person, online and mobile interactions, organizations can better respond to individual customer needs and preferences, creating a better overall customer experience and increasing brand loyalty. This synchronization requires real time access and processing for a massive amount of data at the storefront.

This massive amount of data can be managed locally by deploying edge architectures at retail stores to process the data onsite rather than send to the cloud. This real time local processing allows retailers to implement new store functionality like: smart shelves, smart checkout, interactive displays, AI/ML computer vision, and real time video analytics without the expense and delay of sending the data to the cloud.  Moving to an edge architecture also allows real time feedback on inventory status, letting stores manage inventory in a more cost efficient manner as well as enabling store-based fulfillment of online orders to improve operational efficiency. Retail as an industry has already begun to embrace edge architecture across their distributed locations. When asked “Which technologies are most likely to be implemented by 2025?” 65% of retail chief information officers (CIO) surveyed by Gartner selected edge computing as their priority.

In addition to enabling AL/ML at retail locations, the move to an edge architecture enables better responsiveness across point of sale, inventory management, and other systems, ensuring decisions are made in near-real time, increasing inventory accuracy, stock availability, fill rates, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Overcoming Edge Challenges

While retailers understand the future is at the edge for their store operations, moving to an edge architecture is not without its challenges that need to be overcome including:

• Highly distributed environments Multiple locations, often geographically dispersed, require any solution to be easily managed remotely.
• Few or no onsite IT staff Limited onsite IT resources require any solution to be easily secured and provide robust visibility from a central location.
• Legacy software investments Many retail systems, including point of sale (POS) systems in the field, are based on legacy software and can’t just be abandoned as retailers invest in new edge-native applications
• Security for distributed networks and devices Security of distributed environments is often weak due to a lack of network control and physical perimeter. Many devices in stores are typically on the sales floor, not locked in a secure location and are subject to tampering and potential theft. Learn more about how ZEDEDA handles security. Learn more about how ZEDEDA handles security in this security whitepaper.
• App management Updating apps deployed across distributed environments is cumbersome and difficult to manage.