Retail Technology Innovation:Are you Proactive or Reactive?

A Nexvu White Paper

Introduction

The importance of innovation as a core competency for retailers has been elevated by an increasingly dy-namic and technology-driven consumer market. As a result, retailers are aggressively exploring the de-ployment of new and innovative technologies and applications to ensure the most intuitive and satisfy-ing user experience at all points of sale and service. Fluid customer expectations and behaviors, evolving delivery channels, and emerging points of customer interaction contribute to the pace and demand for rapid implementation of these initiatives.

Unfortunately, today’s monitoring tools and systems, where they exist at all, cripple these initiatives by providing little to no insight on how well these dis-persed and business-critical assets are performing.

Nexvu establishes a new standard for man-agement of the modern technology environ-ment by providing complete visibility into the health, utilization, and performance of every store IT asset simultaneously and in real-time. This unprecedented capability not only ensures an exceptional customer experience, it greatly enhances the return on investment (ROI) that retailers require from in-store hardware and IT ini-tiatives.

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Problem Statement

To enable new approaches to customer acquisition and retention, many retailers have implemented leading-edge point-of-sale systems and other customer-facing technologies and applications. These assets are increasingly becoming the focus of key competitive strategies and brand differentiation.

This rapid and sometimes unplanned growth of new devices and applications across geographically di-verse locations has resulted in a new set of challenges for both IT and business. Some of these include:

• Decentralization of IT asset management, monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintenance (a major departure from the historical focus on the data center)

• Lack of complete visibility into the store IT infrastructure due to the sometimes jumbled and layered assortment of technologies and point solutions developed over time

• Troubleshooting tools that lack the depth and breadth to deal with the many generations of technologies deployed in a store

• Troubleshooting tools that provide limited access into store infrastructure, take up too much bandwidth for practical use, and have limited forensic capabilities

• Lack of appropriate usage and performance metrics to measure store performance and ROI on store-level IT in-vestments

• Suboptimal placement and utilization of shopping aides due to a lack of reliable and timely information on usage and performance metrics

In essence, retailers seeking to leverage new technol-ogy initiatives are faced with both technical and management challenges that can result in loss of revenue caused by unexpected implementation de-lays, adverse impact on customer experience, in-creased maintenance costs, and prolonged downtime.

It has become imperative to put comprehensive monitoring and assessment tools in place at the retail store itself. This maximizes revenue generation and minimizes maintenance and troubleshooting costs while providing detailed metrics to ensure consis-tency and repeatability of the customer experience.

The Hidden Cost of Last-Generation IT Asset Monitoring Tools

IT measurement and monitoring has traditionally been restricted to the area where most assets are physically located—the data center. This approach reflects the limitations of last-generation monitoring tools that are not capable of addressing the growing proliferation of IT assets at multiple, geographically dispersed locations. The situation is further frustrated by device and application incompatibility and limita-tions due to bandwidth availability.

Consequently, IT personnel are invariably forced to visit the retail sites during system downtimes and pe-riods of application performance degradation. Once on site, the IT team encounters further difficulties due to the lack of:

• Visibility in the IT setup

• Access to up-to-date documentation

• Data from and about the violating devices/applications at the time of a threshold breach or unexpected behavior

• Established, meaningful baseline performance metrics.

Last-generation monitoring solutions do not provide sufficient visibility or actionable, quality information at the store level to support efficient and proactive IT asset management in the modern retail environment.

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ROI of Best-in-Class Practices

According to Aberdeen Group’s The APM Lifecycle Report (Feb 2010), Best-in-Class organizations that deploy tools to proactively manage the end-user experience:

• Are twice as likely to improve their brand reputation

• Are 75% more likely to improve employee productivity

• Proactively identify faults 82% of the time

• Experience a 30% decrease in end user complaints

• Experience 71% improvement in mean time to repair.

The Nexvu Solution

Nexvu is a ground-up reinvention of device and ap-plication monitoring methodology for IT asset man-agement. With a single deployment per store, Nexvu provides real-time health, utilization, and perform-ance reports on each and every IT asset—without adding any overhead or agents to the store IT infra-structure.

With scalability to cover virtually unlimited stores or assets within your business, Nexvu provides an easy-to-deploy and cost-effective solution that addresses the challenges posed by the modern, highly distrib-uted and e-commerce dependent retail environment.

Gather Valuable Network And Application Intelli-gence At The Store Level

Nexvu inspects and analyzes every element of every communication on the store network and presents this data in an intuitive and user-friendly reporting and alerting format. IT and network managers can proactively utilize this information to learn about the behavior of applications and assets under various shopping conditions and preempt any disruptive is-sues across the infrastructure.

This visibility is also key for highly effective and effi-cient troubleshooting at the store level as well as for providing access to corporate IT staff to remote monitoring of all store-level devices and applications.

The Nexvu appliance gathers both short- and long-term data about the performance, health, and utili-zation of all the elements of the IT infrastructure. This helps to achieve the ultimate goal of high cus-tomer satisfaction and unequalled end-user experi-ence as measured by the Application Performance Index (APDEX)*.

Effective Asset Positioning In The Store

Nexvu offers real time analysis on the utilization and throughput of all the applications, kiosks, cash regis-ters, mobile devices, etc. in a retail location. These comprehensive utilization metrics enable store man-agers to reposition assets in frequently accessed areas to maximize throughput and revenue generation while minimizing customer wait times.

Develop Unique, Proprietary Insights About Cus-tomers And Store Operations

Nexvu offers the ability to track every URL accessed from store kiosks. This is useful for analyzing trends in consumer interest among products in inventory or identifying competitor sites most typically accessed by customers for product comparisons.

Ability To Accommodate Future Technologies

Nexvu is the only solution that has the ability to monitor multiple generations of new and innovative technologies, like digital signage, IP TV, VoIP, RFID, etc.—in both applications and devices—right out of the box. Nexvu will continue to deliver the same health, utilization and performance data for future generations without requiring any changes to its software or hardware.

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*The Apdex Alliance is a community of enterprises and vendors striv-ing to understand and improve application performance using the Apdex methodology. which links application performance to business objectives. (www.apdex.org)

Nexvu Key Features

Nexvu offers an unprecedented list of features that make it the IT asset monitoring solution of choice for some of largest retailers in the world:

• Agent-less and Passive MonitoringIdeal for a highly distributed store environment and places no additional burden on the network

• Low TouchOperates autonomously at the store level

• Future-Generation ReadyAgnostic to common multi-generational technology infra-structures and flexible enough to adapt to next generation technologies

• Operates on all IP and MAC addressable devicesEspecially important for retailers with POS systems that are non IP addressable

• Out-of-the-Box CompatibilityCapability to recognize and inspect over 3000+ protocols and 800 application signatures available out of the box. Easy to configure custom protocols.

• CustomizableSmart GroupsTM allow for customized monitoring and reporting

• Framework IntegrationIntegrates seamlessly with framework products like HP Openview, Solarwinds, BMC, Tivoli, etc.

• Smart-Phone-ReadyConsolidates regional, national, and global data at your fingertips on mobile devices including iPad and BlackBerry

• Rapid DeploymentCan be pre-configured for large-scale deployment automa-tion and ease

Simple Implementation, Rapid Deployment

Nexvu requires minimal implementation effort. The single appliance is simply connected to mirrored ports, SPANS, network taps, or hubs at the retail site and is then accessed via a web-based utility. The ap-pliance is pre-configured to deliver the data of pri-mary interest to various stake-holders.

At the NOC or corporate level, Nexvu can feed any and all data, reports, exceptions, and traps into a centralized system that might already be in place, or it can feed to its own command center and applica-tion server. The Nexvu application server provides a suite of highly interactive business intelligence and reporting dashboards.

Summary

Nexvu delivers an unmatched competitive advantage to global retailers by providing unprecedented visibil-ity into IT infrastructure.

• Ensures a best-in-class, consistent user experience

• Ensures high employee satisfaction and productivity

• Provides end-to-end visibility, in real time, from a single location across the entire organization

• Monitors and reports on the health, utilization and per-formance of every active IT asset within the store

• Enables store managers to make smart investment and lo-cating decisions based on accurate and timely information

• Identifies cost-reduction opportunities

• Standardizes store IT performance measurements across the entire retail chain

• Maximizes availability and usability of all assets by pro-actively minimizing downtime and time-to-repair

• Maximizes ROI on all IT investments.

For more information on the Retail Sentry or to schedule a demonstration, please visit:

www.nexvu.com

www.nexvu.com ! 1(877) 23-NEXVU! 1 (877) 236-3988