The retail sector is one of the fastest-growing industry verticals due to the rising consumer purchasing power. In addition, with the advent of online retail, retailers are adopting more innovative technologies such as cloud computing, big data analytics, digital stores, and social networks.
Today’s customers demand continuous interaction with the retailers, whether in-store, on website, or on app. The continuous interaction between customers and retailers is totally dependent on the enterprise IT architecture, which makes them vast and complex. In consideration of this vast IT architecture, organizations are pushing their logistical speed to fight the competition. The streamlining of applications, cloud integration, big data integration, B2B integration, and others are key important activities to be performed to simplify the IT architecture while enhancing customers’ buying experience.
Furthermore, the retail sector has a big supply chain, starting from distributors and warehouses to end customers. Each product generates a significant amount of data, including promotions, pricing, purchase orders, invoices, product details, and shipment details. The data is further exchanged within the whole value chain. Hybrid integration platform enables retailers and the rest of the value chain to perform any action on this data by seamlessly integrating components on-premises and on cloud.
Furthermore, the vendors in a particular industry need a comprehensive cloud environment to offer their respective product and service portfolio to the customers. The consumer goods and retail industry is facing the challenge of managing instability and change in demand for various products due to high competition. Hybrid integration provides seamless integration of the multiple shopping channels and provides a unique shopping experience to the connected consumers. To achieve agility, retailers evolve their IT systems toward a flexible, event-driven IT infrastructure that allows different applications to share and analyze information in real time to determine the next best interaction with their customers. Companies such as IBM, MuleSoft, and Scribe Software are the major players in this vertical.