With Sainsburys recently announcing its cloud first approach, Andrew Bithell, Senior Account Manager at CTS, made the following comment on this crucial step forward and the importance it highlights that retailers should follow suit to maximise their customer’s experiences.

“In light of Sainsbury’s recent announcement that it would embrace cloud first, other retailers should look to follow suit. Having access to virtually unlimited computing power can help retailers unlock value, create new services, and reimagine business models to achieve their strategic objectives.

While retailers routinely capture all the data required to assess new business ideas, it is locked up in point solutions. In order to make sure retailers only adopt proven innovations, a smart, cloud-based model is needed that integrates cross-functional data assets with analytics and visualisation tools.

Combining cloud computing with the latest analytics tools completely transforms the innovation process by providing retailers with a way to quickly build intelligence that can be shared with both people and systems. With a single source of cross-functional data, retailers can use advanced analytical capabilities to explore the potential of an array of business ideas. They can even take advantage of pre-built analytics such as recommendation engines to support innovative customer experience. These enriched data sets can transform business understanding, uncover insights, add intelligence, visualise trends, group and segment customers – whatever a retailer requires to drive its unique business outcomes”.