Power up your data—and your enterprise—with HTAP
In the era of instant gratification, waiting even 48 hours to receive a shipment can feel like a lifetime to online shoppers. These days, fulfillment expectations are at an all-time high, and brand loyalty is at an all-time low. Consumers have real-time insight into price changes. The path of least resistance is the one most buyers will choose.
Meanwhile, in an effort to better predict and accommodate these kinds of shopper demands, retailers have embraced technologies like personalized promotions and IOT-enabled devices—opening the door to an unprecedented amount of data that’s helping them make more informed, automated, and granular decisions.
Without insights, big data is nothing but a big mess
Big data has certainly played a role in helping retailers meet customer expectations of instant gratification. Using the power of data science, retailers have been cashing in on the ability to track shopper behavior, weather patterns, marketing campaign success, and inventory in real time. But because on-premises solutions that merge transactional and analytical data have historically been quite expensive and inaccessible for retailers, extrapolating insights from that data in real time has remained an obstacle.
Once collected, most transactional and analytical data sit in separate siloes, inhibiting agility, limiting business insights, and creating multiple versions of the truth for every item in the supply chain. Days, weeks, or months may pass before retailers are able to make decisions on the data that’s being written … and by that point, profits—and customers—have already been lost. But what if all that data could become even more powerful, and reside in a single location that’s always up to date? Through the supercomputing power of the cloud and modern HTAP technology, it can.
So what is HTAP, anyway?
Hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) databases combine online analytical processing (OLAP) and online transactional processing (OLTP) into one platform—stacking the once-segregated transactional and analytical data sets into one master database. In other words, technologies built on an HTAP platform, like Infor Converged Commerce, write and read business data at the same time—meaning that the all the data, reporting, and insights retailers need to make decisions are always available anytime, in real time, at the same time.
HTAP technology presents an overwhelming amount of opportunity for retailers to predict and prepare for the future of shopper demands. However, the current pace of retail and globalization simply does not allow for hesitation when it comes to embracing cutting-edge innovations in retail technology—which means that early adopters stand to gain the most. If retailers want to avoid playing a perpetual game of catchup, it’s imperative that they integrate HTAP technology into their business strategies now, before it’s too late.
Learn more about how to transform the retail enterprise with modern, cloud-based technology.
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