When benchmarking retail technology investment plans, we found that retailers around the world plan to:

  • Maintain interest in SaaS for agility — and exploit PaaS for differentiation. Retailers will invest in SaaS to manage application load variability, such as holiday shopping. But retailers will also invest in PaaS and cloud microservices management frameworks. They do this to deliver differentiating applications and extensions. The mesh offerings from platforms such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services are examples.
  • Avoid the risk of complacency about security and privacy. GDPR and similar regional initiatives mean that retail technology investments focus on customer permission and privacy.
  • Continue to invest in people, automation, and robotics. Retailers do not plan to replace people with automation. They plan to invest in people and in automation. They plan to increase productivity, using automation to relieve humans of dull repetitive work.

Follow this link to compare your technology investment plans with those of nearly 2,500 global respondents to Forrester Analytics’ Business Technographics® surveys, including more than 250 in retail.

Retailers have asked me for years when PoS, eCommerce, and OMS will converge. They would like to use common payment services across channels. And they would like to use common price and promotion services. New cloud and microservices capabilities make this possible. Please let me know how you are exploiting cloud capabilities to reinforce or redefine your retail brand or USP. Look out for more data on retail technology investment.