Mark Price

BrainTrust Query: Cloud Computing - Can Retailers Rise to the Challenge?

November 30, 2009

FROM RETAILWIRE:
The National Retail Federation's ARTS division has been working on a white paper on cloud computing for release in January 2010. The goal is to give both business and technical people in retail several perspectives of how this new technology model will affect them. Can retailers collaborate on common standards for critical retail applications?      [more...]

From a technology side, it is clear that cloud computing holds significant advantages for retailers. Not only does it expand the ability of retailers to deploy and manage their applications with very low total cost of ownership (TCO), but it also permits companies to quickly make changes that can appear across their entire store base. From a straight ROI standpoint, cloud computing would be hard to beat.

It is the culture issue that I believe will hinder retailers from deploying such a strategy in the near future. Retailers that are the most technology-forward have already deployed web architectures and are seeing the benefits of cloud-like computing. But for the rest of retailers, the "not invented here" syndrome combined with concerns about privacy will slow them down and keep them in old technology until that technology literally comes crashing down around them.

Most of the slower-to-implement companies face greater challenges internally than they do from competition or changes in customer behavior. Only when the culture adopts new values of innovation will such initiatives as "the cloud" be accepted.