You might be asking, If it works for Macys, Walmart and Kroger, will it work for me? What are my key benefits? Is it affordable?
Deploying a robust retail analytics platform requires a data centre and software designed to pull information from myriad sourcessocial media, internal sales and accounting files, CRM, data from users accessing the company web properties and, one the fastest growing cohorts, mobile users. Cloud analytics simplifies that task dramatically.
Lets take a look at three key topics that youll want to understand in making your decision.
Availability
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest cloud service provider, is what powers Amazon.com whether youre buying a book or a bunk bed. But more to the point, AWS has grown 81 percent in the last year by serving more than one million customers ranging from small retailers to multi-national corporations. AWS is the platform that powers Amazon.coms own Prime Video service. But that doesnt keep them from providing the same services to Netflix which streams its content to millions of subscribers. Expedia, Pinterest, Reddit, TIME and countless others have moved their business to the cloud. Not to be left out, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, EMC and others offer cloud services as well.
The ubiquity of cloud services allows retailers to choose the provider best suited to ones technical and business needs, and budget.
Cost
The price youll pay for any kind of cloud service continues to fall. Companies like BackBlaze, while they focus on backup rather than analytics, show the competitive nature of the cloud industry with their $0.005/GB a month rate. AWS often refers to the continuous drop in cloud prices as the race to zero. Building out a data centre to accommodate truly enormous volumes of data is expensive to deploy, operate and maintain. Cloud providers give you a turnkey solution. For instance, AWS recently announced its Snowball service that makes moving corporate data (50 TB for $200!) to the cloud faster, easier and cheaper than ever before.
These downward pricing trends, and the industrys focus on making truly huge chunks of data affordable, make this a good time to begin moving to the cloud. While the race to zero will continue for some time, todays price points, and other cost benefits youll achieve in the cloud, should provide a welcome savings to any retailer.
Ividata, a startup based in Paris, found this: Before, our bill for storing 1 terabyte of location data came to $5,000 a month. With Amazon S3, on which we were able to apply a 90 percent compression ratio, were looking at just $5 a month. Thats 1,000 times more cost-effective than our previous solution.
Agility
The definition of business agility that cloud proponents identify covers several areas.
Easier and faster deployment than using traditional licensed software on-premise. Jewelry retailer Ice.com, when it moved to the cloud, remarked The migration of a new application alone would have taken twice as much time if wed needed to buy the hardware and then install server software.
The ability to enter new markets quickly. Knowing your customers is the first outcome youll get from retail analytics, and it often helps you identify new customer profiles that can lead to previously un-addressed opportunity.
A reduction in complexity at the on-premises data centre. The cloud simplifies daily operations and allows retailers to focus on their core business rather than building infrastructure.
The growth in employee productivity resulting from having access to the cloud anytime, anywhere, and the ability for employees to collaborate in new ways.
The subscription nature of cloud services makes it easy to scale up (or down) as needed. UK-based florist Arena Flowers, has to accommodate a 2000 percent increase in order volume around Valentines day with orders jumping from 2,500 orders on a typical day to more than 50,000. The cloud eliminates capacity problems and saved 30 percent in storage cost by moving to the cloud.
Being agile also requires you be able to adapt quickly to changes in the electronic landscape. Cloud providers are already preparing for the Internet of Things (IoT). Today, more than 100 devices are connecting to the Internet every second. By 2020 Cisco estimates connections will grow to greater than 250 per second. Morgan Stanley estimates the Internet will be loaded with 75 billion devices by the end of the decade.
However, Gartner points out that the data generated by all those devices will only be of value if the terabyte torrent of data it generates can be collected, analyzed and interpreted. As IoT grows, the compute power and sophisticated software needed to give you information suited for making business decisions becomes even more complex and more costly if youre trying to accommodate it without the help of a cloud provider.
Conclusion
The only discerning conclusion one can make about the wisdom of moving to the cloud is this: The cloud offers a lightweight approach thats agile, affordable and gives you the flexibility to respond to the changing landscape as it develops.