Retailers of the world are, quite rightly, focusing on some major events taking place in November – most notably Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In any ordinary year these are make or break moments for sales but this year – after the turbulence of recent times and in the backdrop against a global cost of living squeeze – how retailers perform in the latter part of 2022 will be a real indicator of whether they’re thriving, or just surviving.
But this is not the only retail event of note taking place. We’re now only a few weeks away from VMware Explore Europe where exploring what is happening in the global retail sector will be a major focus. This year’s event is taking place over 7th – 10th November at the Fira Gran Via, Barcelona, Spain.
Looking at the here and now isn’t enough
As successful retailers have demonstrated in the recent months and years, simply looking at the here and now isn’t enough. As well as managing changing consumer expectations, adopting improved technology and catering for huge evolutions in global trends, retailers are still expected to deliver exceptional service and offer the products people want at a fair price. This is exactly why we’re kicking off this year’s event with a customer panel on how disruption is forcing retailers to digitally transform their business.
Taking place on Monday 7, this session is being hosted by Ed Durbin, Sr.director industry solutions – Retail, VMware and Ryan Wehner, industry director, retail & CPG, EMEA, VMware and will include a brief overview to VMware’s approach to unique industry challenges and a series of fireside chats with leaders from a few major retailers depicting compelling technology journeys and experiences. See the session: “Retail Customer Panel: The Future of Retail is Now… Are you Ready? [IND2772EUR]”.
Five focus areas
This year’s event has five distinct focus areas designed to offer enough scope to cover, analyze, question and condense some of the most important areas retailers are faced with today. The first of which is ‘Accelerate Cloud Transformation’.
This track is specifically focused on how retailers can modernize infrastructure, operating models and applications and there are some excellent sessions to bring this to life. Not least the session taking place on Tuesday 8, ‘How Google Cloud VMware Engine Accelerates Your Cloud Journey: Everything You Need to Know’. This breakout session will take a deep dive into how retailers can best migrate legacy IT solutions and traditional monolithic business-critical apps to a new, cloud native world in a way that delivers elasticity, managed services and pay-as-you-go models to your IT resource, at the same time, accelerating the journey to the cloud.
Another area that is of critical importance to retail today is the workforce. Today, frontline workers rely heavily on digital tools to complete the task or operation at hand but this same group has unique technology requirements compared to desk-based employees. It’s why one of this year’s event tracks is ‘Secure and Empower the Hybrid Workforce’.
The ‘not-to-be-missed’ session here is ‘On the Front Lines: Grow Your Business & Improve DEX for Frontline Workers’. This session will outline how Workspace ONE can help optimize device deployments, grow the business and attract and retain skilled workers.
Retail is facing many challenges that require serverless computing and cloud native architecture. ‘Going cloud native’, a shift in the way an organization can design, build, and deploy technology, is a key element in an organization’s drive to achieve scale and growth which is why ‘Build and Operate a Cloud Native Platform’ is another important track this year.
There are many sessions here, depending on where you are in your cloud journey. It’s definitely worth checking out our content catalog so you can identify and catch the session(s) that are right for you. Indeed, the cloud is such a prevalent part of retail today that we have a second track on it – Connect and Secure Clouds and Apps. For retailers, the cloud can do much more than reduce the cost of computing and data storage. To maximize value from the cloud, retailers need to prioritize workflows that can best benefit from it. This means embracing edge computing.
Retail is a leading sector when it comes to adoption of edge use cases, given the need to constantly innovate and improve the shopper experience. Edge Computing is a rapidly growing trend, helping businesses deploy more advanced video surveillance, computer vision and IoT solutions. Edge computing brings the compute to the data, avoiding data gravity and sovereignty issues of moving video and transactions to the cloud. This session
Building the Blocks to the Edge with VMware ECS and Lenovo ThinkEdge Compute [VIB4000EUR] is all about it.
Finally, the last of our tracks is Expand Your Horizons. This is designed to highlight and showcase new perspectives that will inform and inspire innovation from one part of the retail ecosystem to another. We have an excellent session here, ‘Retail Transformation: How look to Future-proof their Business in an Era of Disruption’, which is taking place on Wednesday 9 November.
Join us at VMware Explore 2022
As well as all of this, you’ll be able to hear from a veritable who’s who of speakers from the world of technology and business including; Kelsey Hightower, best selling author, DevOps guru & principal engineer with Google, Pravin Patel, distinguished engineer, Lenovo and Heiko Onnebrink, principal architect, Wipro amongst others. You will, of course, also get to hear from the most influential people in VMware too, including both Raghu Raghuram, CEO and Sumit Dhawan, president.
We’d love for you to join us and we’re sure there’ll be something in here for you – wherever you are and whatever your IT project requirements. To save your seat and get access to all the content from the 2022 VMware Explore, please visit our content catalog where everything is at your fingertips or check out our retail curated agenda.
