The Cloud is the Future for Retail

On May 11, 2011, RetailWire posted a BrainTrust Query entitled, The Napster Moment. 

The discussion was titled such because it refers to the effect Napster had on the recording industry.  Napster, for better or worse (better, I say) forever changed how consumers receive their music.  It should have been a moment of enlightenment for the recording industry.  Consumers said that we would no longer accept having to buy the whole album (complete with b-sides and tracks that should have remained on the cutting room floor).  We wanted to buy just the song we wanted.  And, we wanted to do it over the web.  Whiel teh recording industry could have grabbed the bull by the horns, they didn’t.  They fought the trend and have lost greatly because of it.  Apple finally made them capitulate and they were forced to do it on Apple’s terms.  If they had just embraced the Napster moment, they could maintained control of the distribution model and had their own iTunes stores.

The discussion went on to question what other industries have suffered or will suffer from the Napster Moment, especially in retail.  I commented, and you can see my comment here:  http://www.retailwire.com/discussions/sngl_discussion.cfm/15245.

But, as I read my own comment a few days later, I realized that it was less about the Napster moment as it was about the CLOUD.  What is the cloud?  Well, for one, its the grey stuff that has seemed to linger over the Philly area for way too long this month.  But, in technology terms, the cloud is just another name for a hosted application.  This is nothing new.  It started way back at the beginning with big mainframes hosting the app and users having dumb terminals to access it.  This matured into the ASP (Application Service Provider) model of the mid-90s and is now called the cloud.  Essentially, with the cloud, you put your app (or rent an app like Salesforce CRM) on someone else’s server and you pay for the storage, processing, and bandwidth.

For retail, this is the future.  You want to get the data center out of the store?  Put it in the cloud.  Why should you have a POS controller in each store.  That’s ridiculous.  The controller should be accessible from anywhere.  Put it in the cloud.  Now, you have one controller and all of your stores can access it.

How about the DVR/NVR.  Get rid of it.  Put it in the cloud.  Stream those camera feeds to the web and store them there.  Your storage is infinite and limited only by your pocketbook.  I truly believe this is the future.  No, its not practical today unless you only have a couple of cameras.  The bandwidth requirement is too much.  But, the time is rapidly approaching when you won’t think twice about the cloud.  It will be the de-facto standard for implementing new applications and solutions.

You use the cloud today.  Ever use Gmail?  Google Docs?  That’s the cloud.  Salesforce.com?  Cloud.  Whether its a public cloud (like Amazon, Microsoft, Google), or a private cloud where you host your own app in your own data center), the concept is the same.

We at Agilence see it.  The cloud is here.  And, come June 13, we will give it to you in a way that is easy to swallow, infinitely scalable, ultra secure, and inexpensive.  Even better, it will give you new control and flexibility.  And it will all run in the palm of your hand!