TECHNOLOGY

How Digital Tech Is Transforming Retail

Published

1 year ago

February 28, 2023

Digital technology is transforming every aspect of the world we live in, and retail stores are one of the primary places consumers are feeling the change.

Technology is changing the way we shop and pay for purchases, and even check out our purchases. Here is a quick guide to some of the major changes that digital technology has made to the retail customer experience, and what we can expect from the near future.

Rise Of The Robots

AI Robot Musk

Take a trip to any store and you will find self-checkout technology. This is one of the first customer-facing transformations that digital technology has brought to retail spaces. At supermarkets, fashion outlets, and hardware stores, consumers are being encouraged to check out their own items and complete their purchases with little to no staff supervision. This is a much more convenient way to shop for most people, and traditional checkouts are often available for those that prefer old-school customer service.

The technology is not only more cost-effective to operate, but it is also simple and cheap to buy too. Even small, family-run stores can afford to implement the tech. With the help of Kiosk Buddy, any tablet can be transformed into a self-checkout system. Their simple-to-operate app can easily be integrated with existing points of sale and makes shopping and payments quick and convenient for customers. This frees up existing staff to concentrate on stocking shelves or handling customer queries.

Your Phone Is Your Wallet

More and more consumers are now using their smartphones to make their purchases. This comes with many added benefits for both retailers and consumers, the biggest of which is the speed of service. No longer do people need to search for their cards or count their cash during checkouts. With a simple tap of their phone, they can make regular purchases and keep track of their spending all in one place. Some electronic point-of-sale systems can even provide them with an itemized digital receipt.

Making payments with a smartphone using ApplePay or Google’s Wallet is not only quick, but it is also more secure. These apps often use biometric features like fingerprint or face recognition to allow payments. This is better for both consumers and retailers as it reduces the chance of fraud or theft. Cash is becoming a less common way to pay in retail, which makes many aspects of running a store quicker and easier.

Engagement Through Apps

PWA Progressive Web Apps

The lines between traditional in-store commerce and online eCommerce are becoming blurred. Brick and mortar retailers are beating their online competition at their own game by using their apps and websites to increase consumer engagement and get shoppers back where they belong; in their stores. More and more retailers are tailoring their apps to their consumers and pushing offers and discounts based on in-store purchasing.

Some stores use their apps as a way for consumers to earn points or take advantage of app-only discounts on popular products. This not only helps consumers save money by shopping in the store, but it also generates valuable consumer-based data that retailers can use in several ways. The data can help them identify trends, offer consumer-specific deals, and refine the customer experience they offer to help them retain their customers and keep them coming back.

Bluetooth Beacons Beckon Shoppers

The fastest-growing retail tech today is Bluetooth beacons. These are Bluetooth devices placed throughout the store that can notify shoppers of sales, promotions, and even the locations of their favorite products. With these notifications enabled, shoppers can take advantage of specific deals and discounts while retailers can promote or push products to help generate sales. These beacons can also be used to send shoppers advertisements for other products and services, creating a new revenue stream for retailers.

The Bluetooth beacons can be part of a wider system that integrates other consumer information to make targeted advertisements and offers. If a consumer has visited the retail website and looked at a product or added it to their wishlist, the system can tell them where they can find that item in a store and even offer them a coupon. This can help drive sales and maximize consumer spending while in the store. These beacons are going to become much more common in the near future and help consumers to make more purchases while they are in the store.

These are just the first of many changes. As the competition between online commerce and in-person shopping increases the lines between the two will blur even further. Digital technology is changing how we find, choose, and pay for our products as well as how we check out from the stores.

Bigger changes will come in the future and will benefit both consumers and retailers. The biggest winners from these changes will be the companies who provide the hardware and software that makes these changes possible.

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TECHNOLOGY

Next-gen chips, Amazon Q, and speedy S3

Published

5 months ago

December 1, 2023

Max

AWS re:Invent, which has been taking place from November 27 and runs to December 1, has had its usual plethora of announcements: a total of 21 at time of print.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the huge potential impact of generative AI – ChatGPT officially turns one year old today – a lot of focus has been on the AI side for AWS’ announcements, including a major partnership inked with NVIDIA across infrastructure, software, and services.

Yet there has been plenty more announced at the Las Vegas jamboree besides. Here, CloudTech rounds up the best of the rest:

Next-generation chips

This was the other major AI-focused announcement at re:Invent: the launch of two new chips, AWS Graviton4 and AWS Trainium2, for training and running AI and machine learning (ML) models, among other customer workloads. Graviton4 shapes up against its predecessor with 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth, while Trainium2 delivers up to four times faster training than before and will be able to be deployed in EC2 UltraClusters of up to 100,000 chips.

The EC2 UltraClusters are designed to ‘deliver the highest performance, most energy efficient AI model training infrastructure in the cloud’, as AWS puts it. With it, customers will be able to train large language models in ‘a fraction of the time’, as well as double energy efficiency.

As ever, AWS offers customers who are already utilising these tools. Databricks, Epic and SAP are among the companies cited as using the new AWS-designed chips.

Zero-ETL integrations

AWS announced new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon Relational Database Services (Amazon RDS) for MySQL integrations with Amazon Redshift, AWS’ cloud data warehouse. The zero-ETL integrations – eliminating the need to build ETL (extract, transform, load) data pipelines – make it easier to connect and analyse transactional data across various relational and non-relational databases in Amazon Redshift.

A simple example of how zero-ETL functions can be seen is in a hypothetical company which stores transactional data – time of transaction, items bought, where the transaction occurred – in a relational database, but use another analytics tool to analyse data in a non-relational database. To connect it all up, companies would previously have to construct ETL data pipelines which are a time and money sink.

The latest integrations “build on AWS’s zero-ETL foundation… so customers can quickly and easily connect all of their data, no matter where it lives,” the company said.

Amazon S3 Express One Zone

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon S3 Express One Zone, a new storage class purpose-built for customers’ most frequently-accessed data. Data access speed is up to 10 times faster and request costs up to 50% lower than standard S3. Companies can also opt to collocate their Amazon S3 Express One Zone data in the same availability zone as their compute resources.

Companies and partners who are using Amazon S3 Express One Zone include ChaosSearch, Cloudera, and Pinterest.

Amazon Q

A new product, and an interesting pivot, again with generative AI at its core. Amazon Q was announced as a ‘new type of generative AI-powered assistant’ which can be tailored to a customer’s business. “Customers can get fast, relevant answers to pressing questions, generate content, and take actions – all informed by a customer’s information repositories, code, and enterprise systems,” AWS added. The service also can assist companies building on AWS, as well as companies using AWS applications for business intelligence, contact centres, and supply chain management.

Customers cited as early adopters include Accenture, BMW and Wunderkind.

Want to learn more about cybersecurity and the cloud from industry leaders? Check out Cyber Security & Cloud Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars powered by TechForge here.

TECHNOLOGY

HCLTech and Cisco create collaborative hybrid workplaces

Published

5 months ago

November 29, 2023

Max

Digital comms specialist Cisco and global tech firm HCLTech have teamed up to launch Meeting-Rooms-as-a-Service (MRaaS).

Available on a subscription model, this solution modernises legacy meeting rooms and enables users to join meetings from any meeting solution provider using Webex devices.

The MRaaS solution helps enterprises simplify the design, implementation and maintenance of integrated meeting rooms, enabling seamless collaboration for their globally distributed hybrid workforces.

Rakshit Ghura, senior VP and Global head of digital workplace services, HCLTech, said: “MRaaS combines our consulting and managed services expertise with Cisco’s proficiency in Webex devices to change the way employees conceptualise, organise and interact in a collaborative environment for a modern hybrid work model.

“The common vision of our partnership is to elevate the collaboration experience at work and drive productivity through modern meeting rooms.”

Alexandra Zagury, VP of partner managed and as-a-Service Sales at Cisco, said: “Our partnership with HCLTech helps our clients transform their offices through cost-effective managed services that support the ongoing evolution of workspaces.

“As we reimagine the modern office, we are making it easier to support collaboration and productivity among workers, whether they are in the office or elsewhere.”

Cisco’s Webex collaboration devices harness the power of artificial intelligence to offer intuitive, seamless collaboration experiences, enabling meeting rooms with smart features such as meeting zones, intelligent people framing, optimised attendee audio and background noise removal, among others.

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, HCLTech, Hybrid, meetings

TECHNOLOGY

Canonical releases low-touch private cloud MicroCloud

Published

5 months ago

November 28, 2023

Max

Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio.

It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy and maintain it. Conveniently, enterprise support for MicroCloud is offered as part of Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro subscription, with several support tiers available, and priced per node.

MicroClouds are optimised for repeatable and reliable remote deployments. A single command initiates the orchestration and clustering of various components with minimal involvement by the user, resulting in a fully functional cloud within minutes. This simplified deployment process significantly reduces the barrier to entry, putting a production-grade cloud at everyone’s fingertips.

Juan Manuel Ventura, head of architectures & technologies at Spindox, said: “Cloud computing is not only about technology, it’s the beating heart of any modern industrial transformation, driving agility and innovation. Our mission is to provide our customers with the most effective ways to innovate and bring value; having a complexity-free cloud infrastructure is one important piece of that puzzle. With MicroCloud, the focus shifts away from struggling with cloud operations to solving real business challenges” says

In addition to seamless deployment, MicroCloud prioritises security and ease of maintenance. All MicroCloud components are built with strict confinement for increased security, with over-the-air transactional updates that preserve data and roll back on errors automatically. Upgrades to newer versions are handled automatically and without downtime, with the mechanisms to hold or schedule them as needed.

With this approach, MicroCloud caters to both on-premise clouds but also edge deployments at remote locations, allowing organisations to use the same infrastructure primitives and services wherever they are needed. It is suitable for business-in-branch office locations or industrial use inside a factory, as well as distributed locations where the focus is on replicability and unattended operations.

Cedric Gegout, VP of product at Canonical, said: “As data becomes more distributed, the infrastructure has to follow. Cloud computing is now distributed, spanning across data centres, far and near edge computing appliances. MicroCloud is our answer to that.

“By packaging known infrastructure primitives in a portable and unattended way, we are delivering a simpler, more prescriptive cloud experience that makes zero-ops a reality for many Industries.“

MicroCloud’s lightweight architecture makes it usable on both commodity and high-end hardware, with several ways to further reduce its footprint depending on your workload needs. In addition to the standard Ubuntu Server or Desktop, MicroClouds can be run on Ubuntu Core – a lightweight OS optimised for the edge. With Ubuntu Core, MicroClouds are a perfect solution for far-edge locations with limited computing capabilities. Users can choose to run their workloads using Kubernetes or via system containers. System containers based on LXD behave similarly to traditional VMs but consume fewer resources while providing bare-metal performance.

Coupled with Canonical’s Ubuntu Pro + Support subscription, MicroCloud users can benefit from an enterprise-grade open source cloud solution that is fully supported and with better economics. An Ubuntu Pro subscription offers security maintenance for the broadest collection of open-source software available from a single vendor today. It covers over 30k packages with a consistent security maintenance commitment, and additional features such as kernel livepatch, systems management at scale, certified compliance and hardening profiles enabling easy adoption for enterprises. With per-node pricing and no hidden fees, customers can rest assured that their environment is secure and supported without the expensive price tag typically associated with cloud solutions.

Tags: automation, Canonical, MicroCloud, private cloud