Retail Among Top 3 sectors Adopting Industry Cloud

Retail is among the top sectors to adopt Industry Cloud. Today’s business world is continuously being disrupted – through evolution of new-age technologies, the global pandemic and the resultant lockdown, the list is endless. In such a scenario, no business model can remain standard, no process can remain constant. Businesses must re-imagine their operating model, look for better solutions to their problems and keep on evolving and innovating.

Businesses are increasingly integrating new-age technologies in their existing IT infrastructure to make their process seamless and customer targeting effective. This has given rise to a lot of interesting business models such as Insurance Tech, Finance Tech, Education Tech, Marketing Automation, etc. Every function of a business is being reimagined to enhance efficiency and ROI.

However, as technology is disrupting existing industries and creating a lot of innovative sectors, the business processes are getting more sophisticated and complex. Now, ‘One solution fits all industries’ kind of strategy is proving to be ineffective and businesses are compelled to look for solutions that are custom made for their respective industries. Technology solutions providers have gazed this opportunity, and started to customized their solutions as per the requirements of different industries. The rise of industry-specific cloud is one such solution.

What is industry-specific cloud?

Industry clouds are collections of cloud services, tools, and applications optimized for the most important use cases in a specific industry. APIs, common data models and workflows, and other components are available to customize capabilities. Industry cloud solutions from major public cloud providers such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle offer a variety of software and services, including industry-specific applications.

Creating industry-focused, standalone applications using pre-defined business models from an intelligent suite, and a scalable API framework with advanced services allow businesses to innovate quickly and accelerate their transition into an intelligent enterprise.

Industry-specific cloud not only provides the partner ecosystem with new monetization opportunities but also empowers domain experts to understand customers’ businesses and challenges better and offer innovative new solutions.

Let us look at how different industries are transforming themselves by embracing the industry-specific cloud solutions-

Retail – As customers’ behavior, taste and preferences constantly keep evolving, the retail industry is expected to innovate at a lightening pace. Since customer data, inventory management, supply chain and distribution network form intrinsic parts of this industry, retail needs solutions that bring together data from disparate sources. Retail needs to uniquely connect experiences across the end-to-end shopper journey, using a set of capabilities that deliver more relevant personalized experiences. Retail needs to optimise operations for sustained profitability and industry Cloud is a good option in this direction.

Using the industry-specific cloud solutions, retail sector can build more targeted and relevant customer recommendations and notifications, expand their fulfillment options, simplify payment processing and benefit from comprehensive fraud protection.

Financial Services – The financial services industry has always been very conservative when it comes to implementing new solutions. However, due to the paradigm shift from physical to digital, now this trend is even more accelerated by the global pandemic. The industry must create digital solutions to stay relevant for their customers. Hence, major cloud services providers are offering customized solutions such as unique templates, API’s, multi-layered security and compliance coverage to deliver differentiated customer experiences, improve employee collaboration and productivity, manage risk and modernize core systems. Using these capabilities, financial services institutions such as banks can create a comprehensive view of their customers with greater insight and detailed plan of action, embed digital collaboration into their process workflows, and enhance insights to help reduce fraud.

Healthcare – The healthcare industry places a greater emphasis on improving patient’s experience, at the same time ensuring highest level of data security, protection and privacy. Further, the COVID – 19 pandemic has put the global healthcare system to test and highlighted some critical gaps.

The healthcare industry needs cloud solutions that offer them capabilities to deliver automation and efficiency on high value work flows, and since they work with huge volume of data in terms of patients’ history – not only structured but also unstructured - they need deep data analysis capabilities to turn insights into actions while maintaining stringent guidelines for data protection and security.

With technology evolving so quickly, businesses need to be adaptable and scalable to stay ahead of the curve. Industry-specific cloud solutions empower businesses to overcome their challenges by embracing flexible and specialised industry solutions to support their growth and strategic transformation initiatives.

By Shrikant Navelkar, Director, Clover Infotech

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