Verizon: Mobile, cloud among leading holiday retail IT trends

New York – Cloud-based e-commerce, mobile apps and mobile wallets are among the most important IT trends affecting retailers as they enter the 2013 holiday shopping season.



Verizon Communications, Inc. has compiled a list of the biggest IT trends for this year’s holiday season. Following are highlights:



Cloud-based e-commerce: Retailers are now spending more on cloud services to implement e-commerce point-of-sale and online purchasing applications which are both aimed at enhancing the customer experience. In addition, the cloud’s flexible usage model responds well to varying seasonal demand and it provides safe storage for large volumes of critical data.



Mobile apps: Retailers are providing both customers and associates with mobile apps to ease and extend activities such as checkout, marketing, and providing access to product data. In addition, data generated by mobile apps can help retailers improve the accuracy and depth of analytics.



Mobile wallets: Growing mobile wallet options are encouraging retailers to integrate more special offers for consumers, which is helping to fuel spending across this digital channel while attracting new retailers to sign on.



Intelligent networking: More bandwidth and faster speeds are in high demand by retailers for optimizing video content, offering omni-channel selling and delivering the mobile shopping experiences that consumers have come to expect. Intelligent networking allows retailers to mobilize applications and keep business processes running smoothly, transport high volumes of data across their organizations, and provide secure access on any mobile device to bring sales associates out to the showroom floor.



Preparing for the unexpected: Business continuity and disaster recovery planning and implementation are now topping the priority lists of retailer’s business concerns. Network back-up solutions for quickly re-opening branch and store locations have become popular. As the holiday shopping season kicks off, nobody wants to get caught with shuttered store locations and flooded data centers.



Security: Data breaches can be harmful to a retailer’s customers and can also be damaging to a company’s brand, especially during the shopping season when customers are spending large sums of money and are emotionally charged.



Pop-up stores: Retailers are continuing to leverage pop-up stores to temporarily create a market presence in locations such as malls, street fairs or events. Pop-up stores can be especially appealing to customers in a hurry looking for quick access to specific items and brands.