The Record - Issue 19: Winter 2020

142 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om F E ATUR E “Covid-19 has changed what people shop for, and where and how they shop. In response, we’re seeing industry-leading brands double down on their efforts to understand their customers (as humans, not as a cookie), decide what actions to take for each one, and serve them in the most delightful way. As one of the most comprehensive enterprise customer data platforms, Amperity makes understanding consumers a reality for Michaels, Lucky Brand and dozens more of the largest and most loved retail and CPG brands. It does this by leveraging powerful Microsoft services such as Azure Blob Storage for storing a complete historical and predicted view of every customer, Azure Compute to run patented machine learning-based models aimed at accurately resolving individual identities, and others. Many of our customers also use databases and audiences created in Amperity in services like Azure Synapse Analytics for various data warehousing use cases and Microsoft Power BI for data visualisation.“ Retail leaders like US-based supermarket chain Kroger have shown by controlling their digital and store commerce assets, they can rapidly predict and respond to customer expectations. But for most mainstream retailers, experience innovation takes months of effort and millions of dollars due to legacy system constraints. This slow execution means lost revenue as digital-savvy competitors take their most valuable customers. The OneView Headless Retail Framework gives retailers the control and agility to transform their store services and extend into digital from a single commerce platform. With a unified store and digital commerce stack, all retailers can now rapidly build and test their most valuable customer experiences without disrupting their legacy footprint until they are ready. OneView also extends the comprehensive Microsoft Azure offerings with seamless reach into the Microsoft ecosystem of tools and applications, enabling retail developers to augment their apps with Microsoft products to deliver the most robust and resilient experiences to customers. “Retail and CPG companies are under unprecedented pressure to find ways to fulfil on-demand e-commerce orders profitably and at scale, and are fast discovering that automating fulfilment close to where their customers are located is the only way to do it. Fabric’s purpose-built micro-fulfilment solution leverages cloud technology to enable retailers to fundamentally transform their business in the post-pandemic world. Fabric Micro-Fulfilment can decrease overall fulfilment costs by 70 per cent when compared with a dark store, while providing the on-demand and same-day services that consumers require. In addition, it preserves the critically important in-store experience. Fabric’s proprietary solution enables cloud-like elasticity for retailers, giving them total flexibility to build custom solutions based on their unique inventory level, desired reach, and operating and capital expenditure requirements. This unique elastic topology is designed to fit in small and challenging urban locations and enables retailers to expand and flex as their needs change.” Yoni Friedman Director of DataGrid and partnerships at Amperity Abhijit Killedarm Chief technology officer at OneView Commerce Steve Hornyak Chief commercial officer at Fabric