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In today’s fast-paced business landscape, the need for seamless communication and data flow between various systems within an organization has become paramount. Gone are the days of siloed information and disjointed processes that hinder productivity and innovation. The solution? Business system integrations.
This blog is part of an occasional series that we share to help integration-focused IT and development professionals to educate your organizational peers and advocate for the important work you do.
Are you a retailer struggling to find the best solution for your IT integration? You need something that is agile enough to scale during peak periods and retract during slower cycles–a workable system that will integrate legacy on-premises architecture with cloud-based applications.
Most importantly, you need IT infrastructure that delivers the best omni-channel customer experience (CX) while managing massive levels of big data across multiple locations. That’s a tall order. No wonder it’s keeping you up at night. Your decision will have lasting effects on your company. The wrong move could hit the bottom line hard.
Composable commerce is a concept that has gained substantial popularity in the last several years, and is poised to be one of the critical business differentiators in the year ahead for retailers. While the concept of composability fundamentally resonates with IT professionals, the devil is in the details (as it always is). How do you define composability when specifically applied to ecommerce and retail tech? How do you define the benefits of composable commerce – and the risks of not moving towards composability? And most importantly, what can you actually do today that will start the transformation from monolithic to composable?
This blog is part of an occasional series that we share to help integration-focused IT and development professionals to educate your organizational peers and advocate for the important work you do.
Business and IT leaders struggle with complex – and often pricey – IT decisions that have significant and lasting effects on their companies. The IT landscape is constantly changing, so it can be difficult to know what’s best for right now and for the future. The wrong decision could hit a company’s bottom line hard and cause ongoing headaches that are entirely avoidable.
This article compares Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) models with integration-as-a-service (iPaaS) solutions for today’s integration needs. For a fair comparison, first, you should understand the difference between ESB and iPaaS.
An Enterprise Service Bus, otherwise known as an ESB, is a type of IT architecture that allows multiple applications to communicate through a hub or bus-like infrastructure. What is Enterprise Service Bus and what does ESB mean for your IT integration? An ESB integration basically establishes principles and rules that guide the communication capabilities of different applications. 
Delivering an exceptional, personalized customer experience (CX) requires more than a whizz-bang website and an intelligent chatbot (as engaging as these may be). The reality is that the customer experience is ongoing and forever. Yes, the biggest hurdle is converting an initial website or store visit into a sale, but the CX doesn’t end there. It’s really just beginning.
Successful retailers are resilient, able to respond to changes in the market with agility and poise. In recent years, the role of technology has proven to be the biggest differentiator, enabling retailers to easily accommodate the unexpected, while less prepared entities simply fade away.
But with new technology and business models comes new methods in how we measure business and performance outcomes.
In a recent Gartner report, analysts examine this shift. The research emphasizes the role of strategic CIOs and other leaders in creating new, digital KPIs that measure and quantify progress, informing important decisions, and ensuring the success of the business.
Retailers are firmly on board the digital transformation train, reinventing how they do business to delight consumers with omnichannel and personalized experiences. Gone are monolithic technology stacks, replaced with agile and composable architecture models that support the success of the business today and into the future.
However, in the rush to digitize, many retailers overlook the unprecedented volumes of data these new (and existing) technologies generate. While plenty of thought is invested in optimizing the customer experience (CX), establishing how to manage the storage and analysis of so much data is often an afterthought.
Customer experience is the key to unlocking profit in the retail industry. While keeping shoppers happy with your brand has always been a high priority for retail organizations, its importance has reached unprecedented levels.
And as economic uncertainties persist across the US and around the globe, the ability to deliver the optimum experience consumers expect in exchange for their business has become a matter of life or death for many businesses. So how do you optimize your customer’s experience – and what is the role of IT in retailing?
Retail information systems must find a way to work as a conduit between the digital world and the physical world, a real challenge when both are constantly changing in different ways. On one end, the customer expects a quick, easy, personalized omnichannel experience from the comfort of their couch, on the other end your retail IT solutions have to not only provide that, but then also provide a fast and seamless delivery of the physical items they bought, even if it’s 200 pounds of Italian marble for their kitchen counter.
Every physical product requires raw materials, manufacturing, and then shipping to (at a minimum) the end user. As there is no way around incurring these costs, ending up with excess inventory can quickly become a major expense. But since this manufacturing process also takes more time than a customer would be willing to wait, in most cases it has to be completed prior to a client’s order, meaning a retailer again ends up in a challenging position where they risk having too much or too little on-hand. In this way, accurate retail demand forecasting is essential for preserving your bottom line.
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