In this special industry report, insideBIGDATA Guide to Retail, the goal is directed toward line of business leaders in conjunction with enterprise technologists with a focus on the above opportunities for retailers and how Dell can help them get started. The guide also will serve as a resource for retailers that are farther along the big data path and have more advanced technology requirements. This guide provides a high-level view of how the retail industry has been influenced by big data technologies.
Retail generates a flood of complex structured and unstructured data. There is a vast number of sources of this data, but for a short-list we can consider the following:
- Point-of-sale (POS) devices
- Websites
- Mobile commerce solutions
- Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook
- Customer loyalty programs
- Video surveillance systems with video analytics that record store traffic patterns, employee-customer interactions, and customer-merchandise interactions (such as the dwell time around an end cap)
- UPC and RFID readers
- Employee devices, including PCs, smartphones and other handheld devices
- Sensors: Near Field Communication (NFC) and Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) on customer smartphones, real-time location systems (RTLS), Wi-Fi and GPS—electronic asset protection at the point of sale (POS) and point of exit, bar codes and application specific sensors.
Connecting these individual pieces of data is what the future of retail looks like. In fact, online companies like Amazon are already heavily invested in finding the connecting points—the company’s product recommendations are a result of big data analysis, and Walmart and other large retailers are busy putting in place similar big data tools. But big data depends on the collection and transfer of data, including initial analysis or analytics, and then the ability to deploy solutions based on big data business intelligence.
The guide includes the following big data retail topics:
- Big Data for Retail – An Overview
- How Big Data is Being Used in Retail
- 360-Degree View of the Customer
- Retail Gains with Distributed Systems
- Big Data Solutions for Retail
- The Future of Big Data and Retail
- Case Studies: including using Hadoop for a Recommendation Engine
The insideBIGDATA Guide to Retail is available for download in PDF from the insideBIGDATA White Paper Library, courtesy of Dell and Intel.
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