InterSystems IRIS Data Platform Simplifying Digital Transformation for Retail Organizations

Thanks to the efforts of digital leaders like Amazon and Apple, retail customers are more technologically savvy than ever before. Customers demand seamless, personalized, and enjoyable experiences spanning all touchpoints — whether they are shopping online, on their phones, or in stores — and their expectations are increasing every day.

Retailers that fail to deliver an exceptional experience spanning all interactions and channels quickly see their competitors surpass them. Therefore, the critical IT initiatives in retail today are no longer about just controlling costs and “doing more with less.” IT must now become a strategic partner with the line of business to deliver innovative digital services that increase revenue, meet and exceed customer expectations, and help businesses create and extend competitive advantage.

These requirements are significantly increasing the pressure on IT departments to master a range of technologies and skills, including application integration, business process orchestration, relational and NoSQL databases, big-data analytics, real-time analytics, and even natural language processing technologies for working with text and social media.

With such a wide range of technical requirements, it is no surprise that the lack of IT skills and funding are reported to be the top barriers impeding IT success in retail, according to the research firm Gartner.

But what if all of the capabilities needed by retail IT teams to enable digital transformation were available in a single, fully functional data platform that was easy to install, use, and support? And what if that platform also provided a dramatically lower cost of ownership than stitching together different point solutions?

InterSystems IRIS Data Platform™ provides a full suite of functionality that retailers and their technology providers need to meet myriad business goals — all in one comprehensive data platform. It provides application integration (e.g., enterprise service bus) capabilities; real-time orchestration, monitoring and alerting development capabilities; a high-performance multi-model database that persists all messages and supports simultaneous transactional and analytic workloads at scale; a high-performance big-data analytics engine; and natural language processing capabilities for inferring meaning and sentiment from text — all tightly integrated and accessed via a single, intuitive application development environment. With its full complement of capabilities, it is a one-of-a-kind technology for enabling digital transformation in the retail industry.

InterSystems IRIS enables retail organizations to:

• Integrate disparate applications rapidly across an entire extended ecosystem
• Create seamless composite business processes that incorporate real-time, event-driven analytics
• Expose relevant business processes and data to internal and external audiences with role-based interfaces and security
• Monitor, alert, and report on activities, process flows, and key performance indicators in real time
• Create a deep understanding of each customer
• Personalize customer interactions across all channels

InterSystems IRIS provides all of these capabilities while providing a consistent development and maintenance experience.

InterSystems is the engine behind the world’s most important applications. In healthcare, finance, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems is the power behind what matters. Founded in 1978, InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 80 countries.