a field guide to retail it operations · and virtual shopping carts, retail cios and other...

A FIELD GUIDETO RETAIL

IT OPERATIONS

Unifying global infrastructure management tohelp global retailers compete in the digital age.

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Retail just isn’t what it used to be. The mom-and-pop shops of yesteryear have given way to multifaceted global enterprises with expansive geographicfootprints, complex supply chains, and new technologies to meet the demands of a hypercompetitive market.

On the surface, things may seem how they always have been to end consumers. But beyond the checkout lanes and virtual shopping carts, retail CIOs and other administrators face an increasingly complicated, dynamic technology landscape and rapidly changing consumer demands.

Today’s retail IT environment features more endpoints, networks, and systems to monitor than ever before, but fewer resources to help and less time to dedicate to individual departments or functions. Meanwhile, theshift in consumer expectations toward the ability to shop anytime, from anywhere—in a store, online, on mobile devices or over the phone—is producing additional technology challenges.

Retailers are racing to upgrade existing technologies, adopt emerging platforms like augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), and deploy new solutions to meet customers’ demands and capture some of the estimated $1.8 trillion in online and web-influenced retail sales¹.

To remain competitive and ahead of industry trends, retailers must find ways to offer omnichannel availability, intelligently collect and analyze massive amounts of data, and manage the farthest reaches of the enterprise to maintain both the health of their business and their relationships with customers. But most monitoring systems and analytics tools on the market aren’t equipped either to handle the breadth and depth of the modern retail infrastructure or provide a unified experience for managing a sprawling operation.

This guide will give you the information you need to assemble a holistic IT approach that delivers greater visibility, deeper insights, and proactive, preventivemeasures to keep your retail business running at peak performance.



Spreading IT resources too thin In the past decade retailers have begun migrating to a hybrid IT approach, with on-premises and cloud-based platforms converging to form an intricate, extensiveweb of intertwined global systems and processes that stretch IT resources to their limits. Many of the most common line-of-business applications like customer loyalty programs, point-of-sale (PoS) systems, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms are not integrated, making it difficult to gain a centralized view for prioritizing systems management or generating operational intelligence in support of network uptime, security and fraud monitoring, and customer experience management.

System and data disconnects—along with supplier issues and other factors—already contribute more than $250 billion in losses from overstock or out-of-stock each yearbecause companies lack a system for tracking and sharing this information².

Worse, IT teams can lose as much as an additional 40% of their productivity each day due simply to switching tasks and having to toggle among various systems, significantly

reducing the time they can dedicate toward higher value activities or resolving profit-killing inefficiencies³.

Spreading IT resources so thinly can create additional visibility and coverage gaps that put the businesses at risk of interruptions or downtime, missing out on key market opportunities, or failing to protect sensitive data from unauthorized access that leads directly to losing sales and customers’ confidence.

Hosting business-critical applications-- HR systems, inventory management, and business intelligence—on popular cloud computing platforms can ease some of the burden by offloading core infrastructuremanagement, but comes at the expense of ceding control over other infrastructure components that lead to new blind spots for problems to arise. measures to keep your retail business running at peak performance.

¹ Miller, Abbe. “15 stats to explain why omni-channel is more than just a buzzword.” Netsphere Strategies. May 28, 2014.² “Retailers suffer the high cost of overstocks and out-of-stocks.” RetailWire.com. February, 2015.³ “The High Cost of Multitasking: 40% of Productivity Lost by Task Switching.” Wrike.com. September 24, 2015.



toggle among various systemslost due to switching tasks and

of productivity40%

seek out a competitor after apoor shopping experience

of customers90%

Up to $100Kin monthly penalties for fallingout of PCI compliance

stocking or out-of-stock

billion+$250 in annual losses due to over

in lost sales & productivityfrom PoS outage

per minute$4,700

of Inefficient IT ManagementTHE COST



The high cost of system silos and visibility gaps. Some retailers have pursued a robust, multi-layered IT monitoring and management solution to streamline their operations, assert greater control over the business, and gain an advantage over less progressive competitors.But this approach has typically been the domain of large organizations with deep pockets and a willingness to spend big.

While many organizations might believe the cost of a comprehensive IT management platform is prohibitive, the cost to a business of not using one is often much greater.For example, every minute of PoS downtime costs retailers an average of $4,700 per minute⁴ in lost sales and diminished productivity.

In fact, approximately half of retail customers will avoid a retail brand in the future if they’ve had to wait more than five minutes for their shopping experience⁵, and nearly 90% will do business with a competitor following a poorin-store or online shopping experience, often the result of a system outage⁶.

Beyond mere inconvenience to customers, network interruptions can also put the business at risk of falling out of PCI compliance, which can carry monthlypenalties of up to $100,000, along with potential civil lawsuits and further damages⁷.

All told, the lack of a single source of truth—a unified, real-time snapshot of the entire business—can adversely impact every facet of a retail operation, often with catastrophic results. It’s imperative thatretailers seek opportunities to centralize the management, maintenance, monitoring, automation, configuration and control of their environment, enabling them to focus on business growth and not just playing catch-up.

⁴ “The Importance of Retail Failover and OOBM.” Westbase Technology. August 4, 2015.⁵ “The High Cost of Internet Downtime for Retailers.” Comm-Works.com. March 9, 2016.⁶ “5 stats every ecommerce business should know.” Gigya, Inc.⁷ “PCI noncompliant consequences.” FocusonPCI.com



Must-have features for managingyour IT environment. The holy grail for retail IT leaders is an infrastructure that actually adds value to the business instead of just adding cost. The ideal solution should enable IT staff to be more proactive in managing a business’s infrastructure, freeing time and resources to dedicate to product and service innovation, responding to new market challenges, and optimizing the customer experience. To accomplish these objectives, an infrastructure management platform should provide a cohesive, integrated experience that enables:

Proactive Monitoring to manage any device or endpoint, maintain configurations, and mitigate security risks regardless of business unit, application, or location.

Custom dashboarding and reporting to visualize the availability, health, and performance of services and infrastructure and compare them with established key performance indicators (KPIs).

Asset management to map how IT assets are participating in the delivery of business-critical IT services, manage capacity, and simplify procurement, upgrade, warranty, support and end-of-life decisions for all assets using a consistent governance framework.

Automate IT operations for consistent application of policies across the enterprise and eliminate time-consuming manual tasks. Remotely control access to systems and devices through a centrally managed credentialing system, simplifying security for any networked device and streamlining identity management in cases of employee churn.

Interoperability with alerting, identity and authentication, and incident management platforms for a seamless environment with complete end-to-end visibility across the enterprise.



Hybrid IT for Enterprise Retail. OpsRamp is changing the IT game for retailers by providing all the tools, dashboards and insights they need to actually serve the business and manage a dynamic and distributed IT supply chain.

Availability + PerformanceMonitor and track any IT element in your hybrid environment with application and infrastructure monitoring, service maps, dashboards and historical data.

Asset + Capacity ManagementDynamically discover and manage all assets, and then optimize them according to business demands. Then, make decisions on procurement, inventory, service contracts and budgets.

Policy-Based Configuration Build standardized configuration and patch management processes that reduce future headaches, mitigate risk and maximize agility.

Policy-Based Automation Relieve your team from the drudgery of routine IT maintenance tasks and enable consistent execution at scale.

Remote Management Centralize the management of your IT environment across a global footprint with secure remote consoles, a built-in credentials store and audit recordings.

With the OpsRamp IT Management Cloud, IT pros have a single platform for managing all aspects of their IT environment. OpsRamp centralizes discovery, monitoring, troubleshooting, maintenance, compliance and reporting in one place for greater business agility, operational visibility across systems and applications, and a seamless omni-channel customer experience.



OpsRamp enables IT to manage more workloads with less work. Our cloud platform creates a central hub that all IT teams - from operations to service management and everyone in between - use to manage today’s complex hybrid computing environment.

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a field guide to retail it operations · and virtual shopping carts, retail cios and other...

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