IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Platforms and Technologies

Modern retailers face a complex array of internal and external pressures that are driving them to invest in digital technologies at an increasing rate to meet threats head on and to take advantage of new opportunities. Customers expect to be able to shop and transact with a retailer anytime, anywhere, and across multiple customer touch points, with minimal friction throughout the entire customer journey. To deliver this, retailers need to operate efficiently and securely, innovate continually, and become more agile and resilient. IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Platforms and Technologies research advisory service delivers research, analysis, and insights addressing best practices, use cases, and trends in retail infrastructure and technologies that support the ever-evolving needs of omni-channel digital business.

This IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Platforms and Technologies service delivers fresh analysis, deep and comprehensive data insights, and data-driven research and consulting through ongoing research and interactions with the retailers, technology vendors, services providers, and other industry participants and experts. Robust market data collection and secondary research complement our research approach. The IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Platforms and Technologies service offers consolidated worldwide perspectives as well as deeper regional views. IDC Retail Insights analysts develop comprehensive and fresh analyses of this data to deliver actionable recommendations. The relevance and timeliness of our research is further enhanced by the participation of IDC Retail Insights clients and subscribers in the focus and prioritization of our research.

Throughout the year, this service will address the following topics:

• Next-generation digital infrastructure technologies to meet new imperatives of retail
• Strategies and best practices for future-ready infrastructure including cloud, edge, mobility, security, networks, platforms, data management, governance, IoT, and AI/GenAI technologies
• Retail IT spend trends
• Cloud and edge strategies, trends, and adoption in the retail industry
• Network infrastructure transformation trends and best practices
• Emerging mobile technology trends and use cases
• Omni-channel security challenges, including cybersecurity, payment fraud, and loss prevention
• The impact of emerging technologies on digital infrastructure
• Data integration/data platform emerging trends and adoption levels and impacts for AI/GenAI initiatives
• Omni-channel retail platform adoption and best practices

Our research addresses the following issues that are critical to your success:

1. What are the implications of digital business for today's retailers and their technology infrastructure?
2. How should retailers refocus retail IT spending to better support emerging digital initiatives that rely on technologies such as AI/GenAI and IoT?
3. How can retailers determine the right balance of cloud and edge to best enable new digital initiatives?
4. Which advanced cybersecurity technologies should retailers deploy to better address the rapidly evolving threat landscape?
5. What are the emerging and enabling retail technologies (such as 5G, mobile, biometrics, and IoT) that retailers need to watch?
6. How does next-generation network infrastructure improve business performance and resilience, enabling rapid innovation and continual adaptation to business needs for retailers?
7. How should retailers improve their data integration/management strategies to best leverage the benefits of AI/GenAI initiatives?
8. What is the importance of truly integrated retail platforms in enabling new digital initiatives?

The IDC Retail Insights: Worldwide Retail Platforms and Technologies service is targeted to senior IT, business, and technology executives across the retail industry. Worldwide and regional leaders and executives in the technology vendor community will find value in the research and analysis of leading retail technologies. Service providers will find it valuable to take advantage of this service's ongoing focus on the deployment of these technologies. Retailers that are trying to embrace digital infrastructure for their enterprises will find that this service is a critical resource for research and analysis on retail technologies.