After years of spending their IT dollars to help them cut costs, comply with Y2K requirements, and compete in a world of multiple ways to shop, retail companies are ready to re-invest in their number one channel their stores.
In fact, they must invest in their stores to continue cutting costs and increase revenue in a relentlessly competitive industry grappling with a dizzying number of products and customers who want more convenience, higher quality, and better service, but not necessarily higher prices.
Technology exists, however, for retailers to bring true business-altering capabilities to their stores. In fact, some retailers are already using technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID), digital media, transaction log polling (TLOG), and more to improve and update their stores.
These kinds of capabilities can truly transform the shopping experience and are just as important for efficient, cost-effective management of retail companies' processes fully across their businesses, from headquarters to the stores to the Web.
"Retailers must provide a much more dynamic environment for today's customers who expect to have the information and products they want at their fingertips. In a word, they need to Web-ify the store," said Pamela Klym, market manager for the retail industry for IBM Software Group. "In addition, they need to manage processes more at the store level to monitor, update, and act on sales and customer data, and learn about issues early for quick problem solving."
To do so, retailers need an IT infrastructure able to manage new capabilities along with existing systems. IBM's Store Integration Framework provides a structure for deploying customized combinations of middleware solutions, specialized applications from independent software vendors (ISVs), and industry-specific services to allow retailers to be more responsive to business opportunities and customer demands.
"Store Integration Framework is built on open standards for efficient integration with existing systems, multiple platforms, and ISV applications, yet it is configured specifically for retail store operations," said Jerri Traflet, a solutions executive for the IBM retail industry.
A key component of the Store Integration Framework is the IBM WebSphere Remote Server, which leverages the reliable infrastructure IBM delivers at the enterprise, but configures and sizes it specifically to meet the requirements of the store environment. It allows retail customers to extend and integrate their enterprise technology into their stores so they can fully manage retail operations as a single entity.
The IBM WebSphere Remote Server provides the infrastructure that enables retailers to respond as needed to remove cost from their businesses, increase employee productivity, and create a unique shopping experience for their customers based on new technologies. It is built from IBM's Middleware for Retail Solutions, which includes WebSphere, DB2, Tivoli, Lotus, and Rational components plus a J2EE-compliant application server, an assured message delivery component, a standard relational database management system, and management and monitoring agents.
