Each new year brings new opportunities and difficulties, however, 2020 was extraordinary. The pandemic greatly disturbed retail organizations because of social distancing requirements and in-place orders. Retail is 31% of the world’s GDP and that data is the demand signal for the world. In this blog we would be discussing how Microsoft Azure is Helping to Reinvent Retail and navigating the future of retailers.
Why Retailers Are Migrating to Microsoft Azure Cloud? Retailers are developing more close, unique experiences for clients online and in stores. For all this, they need a flexible infrastructure platform that can offer powerful data services – and as a result, they are turning towards Microsoft Azure. With Microsoft Azure, retailers can scale up or scale down depending on the holiday season or peak season without having to always run the constant level of infrastructure. All these capabilities don’t exist on-premises or it may ask for huge investment and managerial activities, unlike Microsoft cloud for retail.
Is Azure good for small businesses? As per the CNBC report, Microsoft Azure offers cloud services to more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies. However, it offers world-class cloud capabilities that are tailored for SMB at an affordable price.
AppSource – Microsoft’s Suite of Retail Focused Applications
Microsoft Azure has partnered with various organizations that are developing amazing retail and apps for packaged goods to help stores grow their business by offering the best customer experience. These applications can be accessed via the Microsoft AppSource application store.
AppSource Applications Include –
- Neal Analytics SKU Assortment Optimization – It helps to ensure that products are on the right shelves in every store
- Flintfox RMx – It provides milliseconds response to price changes of goods and thus helping retailers to control pricing strategy and promotions.
- AFS Technologies – It provides an app that helps in-store staff comply with store promotions in order to improve shelf performance and retail operations.
Is it The Right Time to Review Your Cloud Spend ?
Deep Personalization
For retailers, it is very important to build a personal relationship with their customers. Microsoft is dedicatedly helping a major retailer migrate to the cloud and working towards promoting Azure’s ability to gather data and enable retailers to anticipate their customers’ interests and offering them personalized service across their retail channels. Hyper-personalization is challenging for huge retailers who may have inventories numbering in thousands, with a great many new items delivered every week. Microsoft is offering Azure as the solution to these retailers that will guarantee their brand stays applicable to their clients and that their promotions are more focused on, subsequently expanding deals. Microsoft is likewise vigorously elevating Azure’s capacity to customize client service delivery. As a result, a large number of organizations have migrate to Microsoft Azure for Retail. Also Read – It’s high time to take DevSecOps Seriously. And here’s whyResponsive Store
With Synchronized Shopping, web visitors can save the details of items they liked on their cell phone and get reminder alarms at whatever point they stroll past a store where that item is accessible. It’s a great deal like, ‘check thing is coming up’. Microsoft is working with retailers on these innovations such as synchronized shopping and smart shelves to give a better user experience.
Microsoft EDGE is the Internet of Things, with digital shelf shows responding to your shopping preferences (recorded on your cell phone) to give customized data relating your inclinations to the item close by.
Accenture’s ai.RETAIL solution is completely incorporated on Microsoft Cloud for Retail to quickly convey profitable growth in challenges by utilizing leading AI-controlled algorithms.
Security
Cybersecurity is a major threat these days. Retailers are also failing to securely transmit and store their customers’ and employees’ data. Being a trusted security provider to almost 95% of the fortune companies, Microsoft is extending its service to retailers as well. Azure centralizes client control of safety, compliance, and protection in its Trust Center which is loaded with assets and tools for Azure clients. It additionally coordinates with Active Directory, empowering retailers to utilize the natural progressive framework to set client authorizations and control information access. For application engineers, Azure DevOps Services gives an approach to building applications with security and compliance policies. In case you are looking for Azure DevOps Engineers, we can help you find it within your budget and meet your skill requirements. Information resilience is additionally basic for retailers who can lose a huge number of dollars in a matter of seconds should their organizations go down. Microsoft Azure offers amazing business continuity and data recovery (BCDR) integrations for expanded peace of mind.“TCS is leveraging Microsoft Cloud for Retail to streamline and transform its customer’s business using TCS Algo Retail™ suite,” – Shankar Narayanan, President, and Global Head – Retail, Consumer Goods, Travel, Transportation and Hospitality, TCS.
Advanced Analytics
In order to offer better customer service, data analytics plays a major role. Creating personalized offers, serving customers, detecting cyber threats, forecasting trends, fine-tuning the supply chain and all these types of things depend on data analytics. Azure has boosted the retail business by offering some really amazing tools to turn the raw data into actionable insights.
Azure advanced analytics works on several modeling techniques to empower predictive processing and automate decision-making with ML. It also offers analytics software and services that are agile, secure, and can be accessed on several channels.
To help figure out which products customers need, Walgreens was looking for an infrastructure that could store and analyze the vast amount of data on an everyday basis. In a quarter of a year, Walgreens had the option to move its whole on-premises data warehouse for inventory management into Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. Subsequent to moving to Azure Synapse Analytics, Walgreens has drastically improved certain parts of activities, brought down its absolute expense of proprietorship, and modernized business cycles and decision making.
Read more: Benefits of Cloud Computing in Healthcare
Stages of Digital Retail Maturity
Cloud adoption is an impetus for digital transformation across the retail business. Digital Transformation of a business not only requires basic project planning but also needs to have several programs to create a horizon of change. Retailers can plan these horizons to the development/maturity levels of the retail cloud maturity model. Utilizing this model additionally permits your business to get ready for planned changes in manageable stages in the following pictures.
Connected Retail – Migrate and modernize technology solutions to lessen functional overhead and empower innovations.
Analytics-driven Retail – Align to a data model, unlatch modern analytics while further improving data administration.
Intelligent Retail – Deliver intelligent retail encounters that integrate AI and ML into custom applications and Microsoft retail cloud contributions.
Also Read – Why Azure is perfect for cloud-bound financial services? Retail and e-Commerce Using Cosmos DB
Azure eCommerce architecture includes the following components:
- Azure Cosmos DB – It stores the products and the session state.
- Azure Web App – It is used to host the e-commerce web application.
- Azure Storage – It stores static product images and other static contents.
- Azure Cognitive Search – It is used to search capability over all the products.
Hire Top Rated Cloud Professionals for Your Retail Project
Cloud adoption has spurred the demand of cloud experts. PeoplActive can help you kickstart your growth story with top-tier cloud talents across the world. Being specialized in global cloud recruiting and staffing, we have a wide talent pool for top-tier candidates and well understanding of the market. We have been applauded by our clients for delivering the perfect match candidates meeting their project requirements. 9 out of 10 clients get their hiring requirements fulfilled on the first day of job requisition.
This was just a glimpse of how Microsoft azure retail solution has helped retailers to manage their business and boost productivity. We hope you found the blog useful and informative.
Kartik Donga 
