Intel’s new Retail Platform Integrates Disparate IoT and Cloud Technologies to Drive Holistic Business Insights
Intel has announced the Intel Data center Responsive Retail Platform (Intel Data center RRP), designed to enable relevant, frictionless experiences that will take retail to the next era of highly efficient and personalized shopping, and intelligently lead businesses into the future. The new horizontal platform fosters the creation of highly flexible, scalable and innovative solutions, bringing together retail hardware, software, APIs and sensors in a standardized way.
Quicker, Cost-Effective Platform for Retailers
With the retail IoT market projected to reach $35.64 billion by 20201, retailers are increasingly turning toward IoT solutions to drive operational efficiencies and create new and exciting customer experiences, both in the store and online. The Intel Responsive Retail Platform can be used across all types of retail businesses to integrate islands of technologies across their stores and uncover new business insights. Key features include:
- Real-time, automated actions for store employees, products and customers
- Ability to significantly reduce cost and time to deploy new store services
- Unified platform that eliminates islands of technology across brick and mortar and online stores
- Simplified onboarding process for deploying and maintaining new sensors for the store
Through a robust ecosystem, the Intel RRP can quickly and efficiently be scaled to fit the needs of the retailer. Additionally, the standardization enables the rapid development and deployment of new IoT services from a multitude of suppliers.
Building the Future of Responsive, Customer-Centric, Smart and Connected Retail Through IoT
Intel is collaborating with a diverse ecosystem of retailers to deploy the Intel RRP, including Avery Dennison*, ByReveal*, Honeywell*, Fujitsu*, JDA*, RetailNext*, SAP* and SATO*. Through these collaborations, Intel will transform the retail industry to drive new customer experiences, deliver real-time insights, and create a connected and unified view of retail across physical and digital environments. Through innovative use of RFID, video, radio and other sensors, the Intel Responsive Retail Platform will enable easy, holistic integration, help to deliver a 360-degree viewpoint of retail from the store floor through the supply chain, and deliver real-time, actionable insights.
Intel, along with its rich ecosystem of solution providers, is committed to building continued growth in retail. Designed to address the industry’s toughest challenges, Intel is developing a comprehensive end-to-end portfolio for the retail industry that incorporates the wide breadth of technology necessary for advanced computing, customer experience, resource deployment, communication and deep learning that has unmatched scalability and security spanning brick and mortar, cloud infrastructure, and data center. Intel is uniquely positioned to enable every segment of the smart and connected world – powering the majority of the world’s data centers, connecting hundreds of millions of IoT devices and fulfilling the promise of always-on, 5G connectivity, deep machine learning, and security and privacy.
Integrated Technologies in the Intel Responsive Retail Platform
- Intel-Based Retail Sensor: The Intel Responsive Retail Sensor is a multi-sensor product that enables data ingestion from numerous sources in the retail store in a simple, cost-effective manner. The sensor features an integrated RFID reader and antenna, which is designed to work in highly dense retail environments. Future versions will incorporate additional sensor technologies on the same device, to include video, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), all running on an IntelData center Atom Data center
- Intel-Based Gateway: The gateway finds, configures, controls and interacts with the Intel Responsive Retail Sensors over Ethernet without third-party middleware. Provided by HP* and based on IntelData center CoreData center i7 or IntelData center XeonData center processors, the gateway connects to the cloud via the internet using a wired network, wireless or 3G/LTE cellular network. Inventory location information can be processed at the gateway. Increasing the processing capacity at the gateway allows for scalable data ingestion from multiple sensors, data compression and filtering, and the capability to perform real-time analytics at the edge. Current Intel Core i7 processor-based models from HP include the Z3W72US#ABA and the Z3X11US#ABA.
- Cloud: The Intel RRP offers an open-source analytics platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for cloud applications. This cloud-based, horizontal platform features an integrated stack that reduces complexity and gives greater control to businesses. It runs on public cloud infrastructures (AWS*, Azure*) and can be extended and customized by solution providers.
Ecosystem Lineup and Availability
The Intel Responsive Retail Platform can be obtained from Arrow Intelligent Systems*, and current solution providers include Smartrac*, the Acuitas Digital Alliance* (British Telecom*, SATO Global Solution*, RetailNext and NexGen Packaging*), Tyco Retail Solutions*, Detego*, Insight/Bluemetal*, RIoT Insight* and Fujitsu/Globeranger*.
The current solution runs on an Intel Core i7 processor-based gateway, but as more use cases become available, Intel is enabling Intel Xeon processor-based gateways to ensure maximum efficiency.
The Intel Responsive Retail Platform will be available through Intel’s ecosystem and is available now.
