By Julien Navarro
You can’t overestimate the importance of IT in retailing. I know because my job is to oversee IT development at Aubert – one of the largest retailers in France. When you look at it, retailing is information driven nowadays. From online stores to point-of-sale systems, supply-chain management and big-data customer analytics—it’s all dependent on computing. And as we look five to 10 years into the future, we know this trend will continue as personalization is key in retailing. Through data, retailers must personalise experiences for their shoppers both in-store and online.
This, of course, requires masses of data to accomplish. A key part of my role is to ensure we have the compute power when we need it to deliver a great customer experience every time someone engages with Aubert, specifically online. We rely on the Dell XC appliance and Nutanix software package to deliver the performance we need. The beauty of this solution is that we simply add more compute nodes to a cluster when we need extra performance and the storage and network management remain simple.
The XC appliance has changed things tremendously for Aubert. Based on our calculations, web pages are currently served twice as fast. As such, I can say we are ready for the developments ahead. We can embrace data-driven retailing because our technology fully supports our long-term business objectives. Aubert can continue to sell products across multiple channels and improve the customer experience through personalisation. As for managing our growing IT stack, we don’t expect that to be a problem because the XC solution has actually boosted management efficiency by 30 percent.
The future of retailing? You’re looking at it.
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