April 29, 2015 at 12:30Retailers gradually go to the "clouds"
About 75% of US retailers expect an increase in revenue from their online services by 17% in 2015. Such expectations are based on the growth of cloud services and investments in the mobile sphere, the eBay Enterprise report said. The 2015 Retail Growth Outlook report is based on a survey of more than 1000 ecommerce industry employees from retail companies with annual revenues of $ 3 to $ 250 million.
The results of the report show that most Internet companies associate their own further growth with the development and subsequent implementation of cloud technologies. In particular, this year, more than half of the US retailers surveyed plan to switch to cloud hosting and services.
Ecommerce hosting goes to the clouds
Cloud technology really helps support the growth of the ecommerce industry. 55% of retailers plan to transfer (and are already transferring) inventory, marketing programs and CRM to the cloud ecosystem.
26% of surveyed retailers want to switch to cloud services, but so far refuse to do this for security reasons. This is due, in particular, to the fact that some companies lack a sufficient number of IT professionals. Nevertheless, 26% of the largest retail companies with revenues of $ 50- $ 250 million consider the transition to the cloud environment as vital for further development.
It is cloud services that help companies scale their capacity, if necessary. More and more entrepreneurs are moving to IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Joyent and Rackspace.
By the way in February eBay Enterprisesigned an agreement with IBM, agreeing to move Magento to the IBM Cloud.
Optimization for mobile devices is a key factor
In addition to moving to the cloud, Internet companies consider it extremely important to optimize their sites and services for mobile devices. Now 54% of the largest ecommerce companies invest in related projects, plus 46% invest in the development of mobile applications. 51% of companies develop mobile applications for Android OS, and another 50% for iOS.
Clouds and Big Data
Many cloud services now provide the ability to process and analyze big data to identify relationships and factors that can be extremely important for a business. For example, the same Azure service helps you find implicit patterns by analyzing huge amounts of data. Moreover, data from sensors and surveillance cameras in stores can be “tied” to such services in order to determine the preferences of customers at such points.
As a result, the system makes recommendations to both the company's management and individual sellers. Individual enterprises test the so-called “trajectories” of the buyer in order to determine the preferences of various categories of customers.
Now retailers are gradually increasing investments in technologies that allow them to analyze customer behavior.
Outsourcing and cost savings
The transition to the "cloud", among other things, allows the company to save on the deployment of its own infrastructure for data storage and processing. Instead, ready-made solutions are used that can be easily scaled with an increase or decrease in one's own needs.
A large number of large trading organizations have long been using the services of commercial virtual data centers. This solution allows you to reduce capital and operating costs, while at the same time you can easily launch a new service.
At the same time, SaaS is a solution that allows you to analyze the work of any enterprise at any stage of work.
Not only giants
According to many experts, cloud services should be used not only by large retailers, but also by smaller enterprises, which can easily improve their work processes by monitoring the most effective working methods. One of the areas of application of cloud services for small companies is video surveillance.
In this case, the company can simply connect to a third-party "cloud" camera, paying for access to its data. The video recording is analyzed on the fly, and is not stored without any benefit to the company.
GenerallySome experts see the future of cloud technologies in retail as a rejection of their own data center using specialized cloud services offered by third-party companies. The number of customers on the Web is growing, sales and loads are growing. As a result, companies need to be prepared for optimization and scaling, while increasing fault tolerance and reliability of their own services. And the best way to do this is to use cloud platforms.
