Retailers gradually go to the "clouds"

About 75% of US retailers expect revenue from their online services to increase by 17% in 2015. Such expectations are based on the growth of cloud services and investments in the mobile sector, the report says eBay Enterprise. Data from the 2015 Retail Growth Outlook report is based on a survey of more than 1,000 ecommerce workers from retail companies with annual revenues from $ 3 to $ 250 million.

The results of the report show that the majority of Internet companies associate their own further growth with the development and subsequent introduction of cloud technologies. In particular, this year more than half of the polled US retailers are planning to switch to cloud hosting and services.

Ecommerce hosting goes to the clouds

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Cloud technologies really help to support the growth of e-commerce. 55% of retailers plan to transfer (and are already transferring) inventory, marketing programs and CRM to the cloud ecosystem.

26% of surveyed retailers want to switch to cloud services, but for now they refuse to do this for security reasons. This is due, in particular, to the lack of a sufficient number of IT professionals at some companies. Nevertheless, 26% of the largest retail companies with revenues of $ 50- $ 250 million consider transition to the cloudy environment vital for further development.

It is cloud services that help companies scale their capacities, if necessary. More and more entrepreneurs are switching to IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Joyent and Rackspace.

By the way, in February, eBay Enterprise signed an agreement with IBM, having agreed to transfer Magento to the IBM Cloud cloud environment.

Optimization for mobile devices is key

In addition to the transition to the "cloud", Internet companies consider it extremely important to optimize their sites and services for mobile devices. Now 54% of the largest ecommerce companies invest in relevant projects, plus 46% invest in the development of mobile applications. 51% of companies are developing mobile applications for Android OS, and another 50% - for iOS.

Clouds and Big Data

Many cloud services now provide the ability to process and analyze big data to identify relationships and factors that can be crucial for a business. For example, the same Azure service helps to find implicit patterns by analyzing huge amounts of data. At the same time, data from sensors and surveillance cameras in stores can be “tied” to such services in order to determine customer preferences at such points.

As a result, the system makes recommendations both to the company's management and to individual sellers. Individual enterprises are testing the so-called “movement paths” of the buyer, in order to determine the preferences of various categories of customers.

Now retailers are gradually increasing investments in technologies that allow analyzing the behavior of customers.

Outsourcing and cost savings

The transition to the "cloud", among other things, allows the company to save on the deployment of its own infrastructure of storage and data processing. Instead, ready-made solutions are used, which can be easily scaled, with an increase or decrease in their own needs.

A large number of large trade organizations have long been using the services of commercial virtual data centers. This solution allows to reduce capital and operating costs, with the simultaneous possibility of simply launching a new service.

At the same time, SaaS is a solution that allows analyzing the work of any enterprise at any stage of work.

Not only giants

According to many experts, cloud services should be used not only by large retailers, but also by smaller businesses that can easily improve their business processes, tracking the most efficient working methods. One of the applications of cloud services for small companies is video surveillance.

In this case, the company can simply connect the camera to the third-party "cloud", paying for access to its data. The video is analyzed on the fly, and not stored without benefit for the company.

In general , the future of cloud technologies in retail is seen by some experts as a rejection of their own data center using specialized cloud services offered by third-party companies. The number of customers on the Web is growing, and sales and loads are growing. As a result, companies need to be ready for optimization and scaling, while increasing the resiliency and reliability of their own services. And the best way to do this is to use cloud platforms.