Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Retail gets a makeover thanks to data-driven insights, edge computing, and revamped user experiences

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer vertical industry disruption solutions interview explores how intelligence, edge computing, and a rethinking of the user experience come together to give retailers a business-boosting makeover.

We’ll now learn how Deloitte and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) are helping traditional retailers -- as well as hospitality organizations and restaurants -- provide a more consistent, convenient, and contiguous user experience across their businesses.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help to define the new digitally enhanced retail experience are Kalyan Garimella, IoT Manager at Deloitte Consulting, and Jeff Carlat, Senior Director of Technology Solutions at HPE. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Jeff, what are the top trends now driving the amazing changes in retail?

Carlat
Carlat: First off, I want to clear the air. Retail is not dead. Everywhere I go I hear that the retailer is dead, no more brick and mortar. It's a fallacy. There is a retail apocalypse out there, but quite honestly 85 to 90 percent of purchases still go through the brick-and-mortar retailer.

The retail apocalypse does apply to brick-and-mortar stores that are failing to transform to fully embrace the digitalization  expected by consumers today. We are here to do something about it.

Gardner: Kalyan, user experiences have always been important. You can go back to Selfridges in London more than 100 years ago. People understand the importance of user experience. What's different now in the digital age? 

Garimella: Unfortunately, if you think about it, going back for the past four decades, retailers have relied on brand names and the strength of the merchandise to attract more customers. They never really differentiated themselves from the experiences that they were creating versus what their competitors were creating.

With the advent of changing customer demographics -- with Millennials, Gen Ys, Gen Xs coming into the picture -- retailers now need to produce a more customized shopping experience. They need to give shoppers a reason to escape their online retail channels, to come to brick-and-mortar shops and make more purchases there. It’s high time we give that to them -- and make them come back to the stores.

Gardner: There are still things in the physical world that need to remain in the physical world, right, Jeff?

Virtual-real hybrid

Carlat: Exactly right! Take me, for example. We recently bought a new house and I wanted to get a nice La-Z-Boy chair. I’m the kind of guy who’s not going to just push a button on a computer or a handheld to buy a new chair. I’m going to want to go sit in it. I want to know is this right for me, and so I go to a traditional brick-and-mortar outlet.
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Yes, I may do my research [online]. I may actually end up [online] doing my purchase and having it shipped directly to my home. But while I’m at the store, I want to have an experience -- an immersive experience -- that's going to help suggest to me, “Oh what's the perfect side table that should go with that? What’s the complementary piece of art that actually matches the fabric?”

I want the capability to know what that chair will look like in my own decor, via virtually imposing that chair into my environment. That's where the world is going. Those are the demands of the new retail environment, and they will separate those that continue to thrive in the retail environment from those that suffer and decline.

Gardner: And, of course, the people in that physical environment might actually know quite a bit about the purchase that you could gain from. They have been doing this for some time. There is the interaction of a consultancy effect when you are in a sales environment.

Garimella
Garimella: People are always going to be a key asset no matter where we do it and in whichever industry. If we can complement the existing user knowledge that exists in the retail stores with the intelligence, or analytics and data that go along with it -- that's a powerful combo. We want to provide that. 

That's why we are talking about helping brick and mortars attract more customers -- not just by increasing the customer experience and optimizing your digital store operations -- by combining data and insights, and not relying only on opinions.

Gardner: Is that what we mean by cross-channel experiences, Jeff?

Easy as 1-2-3

Carlat: We, together with Deloitte, are delivering in early 2018 the Connected Consumer for Retail offering. It’s definitely a cross-channel experience. This takes the cross-channel experience and enhances it for the brick-and-mortar environment.

The Connected Consumer for Retail offering is based on three core principles. Principle number one is providing that enhanced customer experience, that immersive experience, which ultimately increases revenues and basket sizes for retailers.
The Connected Consumer for Retail offering takes the cross-channel experience and enhances it for the brick-and-mortar environment.

The second principle is based on optimizing in-store operations. How do you ensure that you have the right amount of stock -- not overstocking and not under-stocking? How do you reduce the amount of a lost inventory? This Connected Consumer offering will help shrink and reduce the cost structures in a brick-and-mortar environment.

And finally, as Kalyan mentioned, the third key principle is around driving new insights from the in-store analytics. That data and intelligence is derived from the customers -- coming through video-location analytics and all kinds of integration into social networks. You can know so much more about the customer, and then give that customer a personalized experience that brings them back and increases brand loyalty.

Gardner: I suppose it’s important to connect all of the dots across an entire shopping ecosystem process – from research to purchase to installation to service. Is that what we need?

Garimella: Absolutely, and that is what we refer to as an omni-channel experience, or a unified commerce experience. Our customers these days expect a seamless continuous shopping experience -- be it online or in a store. If you can create that consistent behavior and shopping experience, that is a powerful channel to attract even more customers. 

There are many retail concepts very much in demand right now, such as online delivery or pickup at the store. Or you can order in-store and have delivery to your house. Or you can order in one store and pick up in other stores, if the inventory is not currently available in the initial store.

So whatever channel they choose, you can provide value in each of those steps back to the customer – and in doing so you are attracting loyalty, you are building the brand. And that is a powerful medium.
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Gardner: And the more interactions, the more data, the more feedback, the more analysis, and the better the experience. It can all tie together.

Let’s talk about how the technology accomplishes that. You mentioned a new retail initiative at HPE in partnership with Deloitte. What are fundamental technology underpinnings that allow this to happen?

Solid foundations for success

Garimella: The Connected Consumer for Retail begins at the infrastructure level -- solutions around HPE Aruba, HPE Edgeline Systems portfolio, and other converged infrastructure systems. For location-based analysis, we are using the wireless LAN from Aruba and their Meridian App Platform for mobile. From a security layer, we are using Niara and ClearPass, but we are also working with a set of third-party vendors for radio-frequency identification (RFID) and for video analytics. So it amounts to an ecosystem of the right partners to solve the right business problem for each of those retailers.

Gardner: And, of course, it has to be integrated properly, and that is where Deloitte comes in. How does that come together into an actual solution?

Carlat: This is the beauty of working with a group like Deloitte. They bring together the consultative and advisory capabilities, along with the technical integration needed. Deloitte brings the ability to help the customer figure out how to get started on this journey. 

First off, the methodology helps a customer think big about what they can do, then helps them actually build a business plan internally to drive change and get the right business approvals to start changing. Then they proceed to solution execution that starts small – and builds a proof of concept.
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In as little as eight weeks, we can deliver the value that can then be extrapolated across all of the retail sites. That’s what projects the true savings. That is the proper scale: To think big where you can, then start small, and lastly, scale fast across all of the sites.

Gardner: Kalyan, any more to offer on the importance of proper integration at a solutions level?

Garimella: Internet of Things (IoT) is such a complex ecosystem of technologies that you need subject matter experts from each of the technologies -- such as RFID, Bluetooth beacons, Wi-Fi, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), your core enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, the customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and the list goes on. 

That’s where we come in, with the right people, and with the vast resources that we have. That’s deep industry expertise. We come and we look at the problems, create the customer journey for our clients, and then create the right level of systems integration that can help achieve the business objective. 

Gardner: Let’s look at some examples. What are some of the ways that retailers are doing things right to improve on that all-important user experience?

Carlat: As a consumer, I know what I like -- and I know what I do not like. I have seen overly aggressive advertising, pushiness that repels me as much as waiting in a long line at a retail brick-and-mortar. There needs to be a correct balance, if you will, of suggestive selling, cross-selling, and upselling. But you have to have the right learning, the right analytics, to be right more times than you are wrong. It means providing a value versus becoming a pest. 

This new offering allows that balance to be made. Other best practices would be providing point notifications to issue a discount that would get me as a consumer over the buying hump, to say, “You know, that is a good deal. I cannot pass this up.” Then as a seller, I can naturally dovetail into increasing the basket size, cross-sell, and upsell.

Gardner: How can the brick-and-mortar company better extend itself beyond the threshold of the physical building into the lifestyle, the experience, and the needs of the consumer? 

Customized consumer choices

Garimella: You are talking about bringing the retailer into the houses of the customers. That is where the successful online retailers have been. We are working with our brick-and-mortar clients to create similar experiences. 

Some of the options to do that would be having a digital voice assistant included on your retailer or shopping app. You could add items to a wish list; you could look up those items and determine if they are close by and where is the retailer nearest to my house. Maybe I could go and check those out instead of waiting for a couple of days for them to be delivered.
We are talking about bringing the retailer into the houses of the customers. That is where the successful online retailers have been.

So those are some of the experiences that we are trying to create -- not just inside the brick-and-mortar store, but outside as well. 

Gardner: Jeff, tell us a bit more about the Connected Consumer for Retail. Where can we find out more information?

Carlat: We are rolling out this offering in Q1 2018. It is being delivered consultatively initially through Deloitte as the lead. We are happy to come in and do demos, as well as deliver proofs of concept. We are actually happy to help build a business model and conduct workshops to understand what is the best path for retailers to begin adopting the on-ramp to this digital transformation. 

The easiest way to get to us is via our websites at either HPE or at Deloitte. We have business leads in all regions, all parts of the world.

Gardner: We have talked mostly about brick-and-mortar retailers, but this applies to hospitality organizations, restaurants, and other consumer services. How should they too be thinking about the user experience and extending it to a life cycle and a lifestyle?

From pain to gain

Garimella: Wherever there’s a possibility of converting a pain point in a customer journey into an engagement point, I think IoT can definitely help. We are calling this the Connected Consumer for Retail for a reason. The same concepts and the same technologies that we have developed for the retail solution can be extended to hospitality, or travel, or food services, et cetera, et cetera.

For example, based on location and proximity of a user, you can create -- using the location-based services – improved experiences that cater to individuals in hospitality and hotels by giving them the right offers at the right time, thereby increasing the basket size in their respective industries.

Gardner: It seems that across these vertical industries we are at the threshold of something that had never been possible before.

Carlat: This is the beginning of a new era for retail. What is clear to me is those retailers that choose to adopt change are going to be the winners -- and more importantly those that do not choose to change are going to be the losers.
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Garimella: I think Jeff hit it right on. Retail is changing and changing fast, and other industries will follow in the same suit as well. If you do not put enough emphasis on customer engagement, while also optimizing your operations, you are at risk.

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

How VMware, HPE, and Telefonica together bring managed cloud services to a global audience

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer optimized cloud design interview explores how a triumvirate of VMware, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Telefonica together bring managed cloud services to global audiences. 

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. 

Learn how Telefonica’s vision for delivering flexible cloud services capabilities to Latin American and European markets has proven so successful. Here to explain how they developed the right recipe for rapid delivery of agile Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS) deployments is Joe Baguley, Vice President and CTO of VMware EMEA, and Antonio Oriol Barat, Head of Cloud IT Infrastructure Services at Telefonica. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.


Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What challenges are mobile and telecom operators now facing as they transition to becoming managed service providers?

Oriol Barat: The main challenge we face at this moment is to help customers navigate in a multi-cloud environment. We now have local platforms, some legacy, some virtualized platforms, hyperscale public cloud providers, and data communications networks. We want to help our customers manage these in a secure way.

Gardner: How have your cloud services evolved? How have partnerships allowed you to enter new markets to quickly provide services?

Oriol Barat
Oriol Barat: We have had to transition from being a hosting provider with data centers in many countries. Our movement to cloud was a natural evolution of those hosting services. As a telecommunications company (telco), our main business is shared networks, and the network is a shared asset between many customers. So when we thought about the hosting business, we similarly wanted to be able to have shared assets. VMware, with its virtualization technology, came as a natural partner to help us evolve our hosting services.

Gardner: Joe, it’s as if you designed the VMware stack with customers such as Telefonica in mind.

Baguley: You could say that, yes. The vision has always been for us at VMware to develop what was originally called the software-defined data center (SDDC). Now, with multi-cloud, for me, it’s an operating system (OS) for clouds.

Baguley
We’re bringing together storage, networking and compute into one OS that can run both on-premises and off-premises. You could be running on-premises the same OS as someone like Telefonica is running for their public cloud -- meaning that you have a common operating environment, a common infrastructure.

So, yes, entirely, it was built as part of this vision that everyone runs this OS to build his or her clouds.

Gardner: To have a core, common infrastructure -- yet have the ability to adapt on top of that for localized markets -- is the best of all worlds.

Baguley: That’s entirely it. Like someone said, “If all of the clouds are running the same OS, what’s the differentiation?” Well, the differentiation is, you want to go with the biggest player in Latin America. You want to go with the player that has the best direct connections: The guys that can give you service levels maybe that the cloud providers can’t give. They can give you over-the-top services that other cloud providers don’t provide. They can give you an integrated solution for your business that includes the cloud -- and other enterprise services.

It’s about providing the tools for cloud providers to build differentiated powerful clouds for their customers.
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Gardner: Antonio, please, for those of our listeners and readers that aren’t that familiar with Telefonica, tell us about the breadth and depth of your company.

Oriol Barat: Telefonica is one of the top 10 global telco providers in the world. We are in 21 countries. We have fixed and mobile data services, and now we are in the process of digital transformation, where we have our focus in four areas: cloud, security, Internet of Things (IoT), and big data.

We used to think that our core business was in communications. Now we see what we call a new core of our business at the intersection of data communications, cloud, and security. We think this is really the foundation, the platform, of all the services that come on top.

Gardner: And, of course, we would all like to start with brand-new infrastructure when we enter markets. But as you know, we have to deal with what is already in place, too. When it came time for you to come up with the right combination of vendors, the right combination of technologies, to produce your new managed services capabilities, why did you choose HPE and VMware to create this full solution?

Sharing requires trust

Oriol Barat: VMware was our natural choice with its virtualization technologies to start providing shared IT platforms -- even before cloud, as a word, was invented. We launched “virtual hosting” in 2007. That was 10 years ago, and since then we have been evolving from this virtual hosting that had no portal but was a shared platform for customers, to the cloud services that we have today.

The hardware part is important; we have to have reliable and powerful technology. For us, it’s very important to provide trust to the customers. Trust, because what they are running in their data centers is similar to what we have in our data centers. Having VMware and HPE as partners provides this trust to the customers so that they will move the applications, and they know it will work fine.

Gardner: HPE is very fond of its Synergy platform, with composable infrastructure. How did that help you and VMware pull together the full solution for Telefonica, Joe?
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Baguley: We have been on this journey together, as Antonio mentioned, since 2007 -- since before cloud was a thing. We don’t have a test environment that’s as big as Telefonica’s production environment -- and neither does HPE. What we have been doing is working together -- and like any of these journeys, there have been missteps along the way. We stumbled occasionally, but it’s been good to work together as a partnership.

As we have grown, we have also both understood how the requirements of the market are changing and evolving. Ten years ago providing a combined cloud platform on a composable infrastructure was unheard of -- and people wouldn’t believe you could do it. But that’s what we have evolved together, with the work that we have done with companies such as Telefonica.

The need for something like HPE Synergy and the Gen10 stack -- where there are these very configurable stacks that you can put together -- has literally grown out of the work that we have done together, along with what we have done in our management stack, with the networking, compute, and storage.

Gardner: The combination of composable infrastructure and SDDC makes for a pretty strong tag team.

Baguley: Yes, definitely. It gives you that flexibility and the agility that a cloud provider needs to then meet the agility requirements of their customers, definitely.

Gardner: When it comes to bringing more end users into the clouds for your managed services providers, one of the important things is for end users to move into that cloud with as much ease as possible. Because VMware is a de facto standard in many markets with its vSphere Hypervisor, how does that help you, being a VMware stack, create that ease of joining these clouds?

Seamless migrations

Oriol Barat: Having the same technology in the customer data center and in our cloud makes things a lot easier. In the first place, in terms of confidence, the customer can be confident that it’s going to work well when it is in place. The other thing is that VMware is providing us with the tools that make these migrations easier.

Baguley: At VMworld 2017, we announced VMware Hybrid Cloud Extension (HCX), which is our hybrid cloud connector. It allows customers to locally install software that connects at a Layer 2 [network] level, as well as right back to vSphere 5.0 in clouds. Those clouds now are IBM and VMware cloud native, but we are extending it to other service providers like Telefonica in 2018.
The important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud.

So a customer can truly feel that their connecting and migrations will be seamless. Things like vSphere vMotion across that gap are going to be possible, too. I think the important thing here is by going down this road, people can take some of the fear out of going to the cloud, because some of the fear is about getting locked in: “I am going to make decisions that I will regret in two years by converting my virtual machines (VMs) to run on another platform.” Right here, there isn’t that fear, there is just more choice, and Telefonica is very much part of that story of choice.

Gardner: It sounds like you have made things attractive for managed service providers in many markets. For example, they gain ease of migration from enterprises into the provider’s cloud. In the case of Telefonica, users gain support, services and integration, knowing that the venerable vendors like VMware and HPE are behind the underlying services.

Do you have any examples where you have been able to bring this total solution to a typical managed service provider account? How has it worked out for them?

Everyone’s doing it

Oriol Barat: We have use cases in all the vertical industries. Because cloud is a horizontal technology, it’s the foundation of everything. I would say that all companies of all verticals are in this process of transformation.

We have a lot of customers in retail that are moving their platforms to cloud. We have had, for example, US companies coming to Europe and deploying their SAP systems on top of our platforms.

For example in Spain, we have a very strong tourism industry with a lot of hotel chains that are also using our cloud services for their reservation systems and for more of their IT.

We have use cases in healthcare, of companies moving their medical systems to our clouds.

We have use cases of software vendors that are growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses and they need a flexible platform that can grow as their businesses grow.

A lot of people are using these platforms as disaster recovery (DR) for the platforms that they have on-premises.

I would say that all verticals are into this transformation.
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Gardner: It’s interesting, you mentioned being able to gain global reach from a specific home economy by putting data centers in place with a managed service provider model.

It’s also important for data sovereignty and compliance and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other issues for that to happen. It sounds like a very good market opportunity.

And that brings us to the last part of our discussion. What happens next? When we have proven technology in place, and we have cloud adoption, where would you like to be in 12 months?

Gaining the edge

Baguley: There has been a lot of talk at recent events, like HPE Discover, about intelligent edge developments. We are doing a lot at the edge, too. When you look at telcos, the edge is going to become something quite interesting.

What we are talking about is taking that same blend of storage, networking and compute, and running it on as small a device as possible. So think micro data centers, nano data centers. How far out can we push this cloud? How much can we distribute this cloud? How close to the point of need can we get our customers to execute their workloads, to do their artificial intelligence (AI), to do their data gathering, et cetera?

And working in partnership with someone who has a fantastic cloud and a fantastic network just means that a customer who is looking to build some kind of distributed edge-to-cloud core capability is something that Telefonica and VMware could probably do over the next 12 months. That could be really, really strong.

Gardner: Antonio?

Oriol Barat: In this transformation that all the enterprises are in, maybe we are in the 20 percent of execution range. So we still have 80 percent of the transformation ahead of us. The potential is huge.

Looking ahead with our services, for example, it’s very important that the network is also in transformation, leveraging the software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. These networks are going to be more flexible. We think that we are in a good position to put together cloud services with such network services -- with security, also with more software-defined capabilities, and create really flexible solutions for our customers.
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Baguley: One example that I would like to add is if you can imagine that maybe Real Madrid C.F. are playing at home next weekend ... It’s theoretical that Telefonica could have the bottom of those network base stations -- because of VMware Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), it’s no longer specific base station hardware, it’s x86 HPE servers in there. They can maybe turn around to a betting company and say, “Would you like to move your front-end web servers with running containers to run in the base station, in Real Madrid’s stadium, for the four hours in the afternoon of that match?” And suddenly they are the best performing website.

That’s the kind of out-there transformative ideas that are now possible due to new application infrastructures, new cloud infrastructures, edge, and technologies like the network all coming together. So those are the kind of things you are going to see from this kind of solutions approach going forward.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

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