In this piece, Ian Waters, director, solutions marketing, ThousandEyes, tells RetailTechNews that with 18% of UK retail sales coming from e-commerce, it might seem that the ‘digitisation’ of the retail sector has been solely confined to the online experience. However, when Amazon launched its cashier-free convenience store this year in the U.S., Amazon Go, many analysts and retailers described it as ‘the store of the future’. This isn’t confined to America either, as Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, Tesco, is now trialling a similar shopping experience and planning a roll out in the near future.

The truth is that whether it is in-store or online, the digital transformation of the sector is a reality that is affecting retailers profoundly. Consumers have heightened expectations of what retailers can provide, demanding instantaneous, fully coordinated and hyper-personalised shopping experiences in an omni-channel way. Due to this situation, digital transformation is a major issue affecting retailers currently.

‘Retail digital transformation’ is the omni-channel integration of digital technologies for the in-store customer experience. The reason why it matters so much today is because it seeks to deliver a seamless customer experience that could begin across any channel – for example, an e-commerce website or mobile app that helps a consumer find items in a physical store. This signposting to consumers happens with the assistance of IoT location beacons, and then transitions to a mobile device, digital point of sale checkout, or even to a sales associate roving around in-store with a digital checkout device.

A key part of this overall, omni-channel experience is how products are actually delivered. Today’s customers not only wish to browse and buy products online, but they also want to interact with the physical store, such as arranging an in-store ‘click and collect’ pick-up or another flexible delivery option. UK supermarket Asda has pioneered this approach, by opening a tower that operates like an automated parcel vending machine, which can manage as many as 500 parcels at a time, as well as offering a product returns service.

What all of these various innovations in customer experience points to is how crucial speed, responsiveness, and reliability are to digitisation. Given that the UK has the third largest e-commerce market in the world, failure to provide all three of these key aspects can put retailers at a distinct competitive disadvantage in a highly contested market.

Yet, underpinning this entire experience is a complex IT infrastructure and network. The vast majority of retailers rely on infrastructure and networks that are actually out of the direct control of their own IT teams. These third-party service providers play an integral role in every digital retail experience, delivering services ranging from internet and branch connectivity, to content delivery (CDN), security (DDoS Mitigation), or software and infrastructure-as-a-Service (SaaS & IaaS). On top of this, the backend of a modern web app normally has numerous third-party components, accessed via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), all of which have to function for the experience to be successful. If any part of this jigsaw fails, for whatever reason, potential customers, both in-store and online, could lose access to specific websites and integrated services.

As digitisation continues at a breakneck pace, this infrastructure grows more and more intricate, which means that, in too many cases, retail operations are blind to their own digital supply chain that stretches across the internet, meaning if there is an outage, they may not be able to quickly understand where, or how, it has happened. Meanwhile, another issue that has also been bubbling under the surface for retailers is the fact that, increasingly, their digitised operations are also based across a number of different cloud platforms, a trend referred to as ‘multi-cloud’. According to a recent Gartner report, they predict that a strategy comprising multiple IaaS and PaaS providers will become the common approach for 80% of enterprises by 2019, up from less than 10% in 2015. In the age of cloud services, traditional approaches to gaining visibility over your entire IT operations are no longer fit for purpose.

This is why, for the retail industry, 'network intelligence’ already plays such a crucial role, enabling retailers to see where something goes wrong, such as an outage, and to act quickly to deal with it. It refers to a modern approach to managing today’s ever-expanding IT network. It provides end-to-end visibility across all of a retailer’s networks and connected devices, on which they rely heavily.

Network intelligence leverages a unique dataset that captures network topologies, dependencies, and behavior from an unmatched distribution of vantage points that exist throughout the internet, within the retailer’s organisation, and on end-user devices, in addition to collective data gathered from other internet-centric organisations. Innovative algorithms are then employed to sort through this global dataset and surface issues via an intuitive interface that enables retailers to manage every network like it's their own. What this all adds up to is that network intelligence arms every retailer, and their IT support, with an accurate, up-to-the-moment understanding of what’s happening in the network, both inside and outside of their companies.

As IT infrastructure gets more and more complex, as the march towards digitisation jumps, and the ‘shop of the future’ grows ever more a reality, retailers must empower themselves to manage any potential IT outages. Thanks to the advancement in network monitoring and intelligence, help is at hand to face up to this challenge, both now, and in the future.