Microsoft & Big Data @ NRF13

Retailers today, face growing challenges extracting business value from their data: First, the relentless growth of data continues, due to the proliferation of new devices and sensors, and rapidly declining hardware cost. More retailers now store terabytes and even petabytes of data. Second, data complexity is increasing as retailers store both structured data in relational format and unstructured data.

Microsoft’s vision is to provide business insights to all users from any data, including insights previously hidden in unstructured data. Microsoft provides a range of solutions to help customers address big data challenges. Our family of data warehouse solutions from Microsoft® SQL Server, SQL Server Fast Track Data Warehouse, Business Data Warehouse and SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse offer a robust and scalable platform for storing and analyzing data in a traditional data warehouse. Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) offers customers: Enterprise-class performance that handles massive volumes to over 600 TB.  

In addition to our traditional capabilities mentioned above, Microsoft is embracing Apache Hadoop as part of an end to end roadmap to deliver on our vision of providing business insights to all users by activating new types of data of any size.

HDInsight is Microsoft’s new Hadoop-based service, built on the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP). HDInsight will enable customers to gain business insights from structured and unstructured data of virtually any size and activate new types of data irrespective of its location. Rich insights from Hadoop can be combined seamlessly with the Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) platform to give customers the ability to enrich their models with publicly available data and services using familiar tools like Office and SharePoint.

At NRF we are showcasing partner solutions that build on our Big Data platform and enable retailers to deliver better customer experiences through Right Product, Right Price, Right Time and Right Place. Some of the Solutions being showcased in Booth 1005 at NRF include:

Retail Insight will be showcasing their on shelf availability solution. Retailers invest enormous sums in stores, product distribution/ranging and customer marketing, but ultimately the end game is to have the right products, at the right price, in the right place at the right time. Regardless of the root cause for OOS, products that are not on the shelf cannot be bought by the customer. Working with some of the largest retailers in the world, Retail Insight software is able to provide almost real time insight into product availability by taking a retailers EPOS data feed and returning alerts and scores to stores for intervention and revenue capture. For those retailers that can deliver intra-day feeds they can maintain higher levels of item availability matched to valuable customer traffic thus improving satisfaction, growing loyalty and life time value.

Digital Folio’s Retail IntelligenceTM Data API is the next-generation competitive intelligence network, powered by the crowd, that delivers real-time visibility to retail dynamic pricing data, inventory levels, channel availability, and zip-level local intelligence. Already consisting of over 5+ billion retail pricing data points, and thousands more generated every hour, the data is also publicly accessible through Windows Azure DataMarket and via Microsoft’s Excel add-in. Visit www.retailapi.com for more information and tour of sample data.

Esri’s Geospatial Analytics Solution enables Retailers to select store locations based on sales data as well as demographic data. Demographic analysis is the basis for many business functions: customer service, site analysis, and marketing. Understanding your customers and their socioeconomic and purchasing behavior is essential to making good business decisions.

In addition, also, swing by our Big !deas session on Monday for a discussion around Big Data in Retail and how Right Product, Right Price and Right Time impacts customer experience: