Retail and Hospitality

Long wait times. Out of stock challenges. Pricing inaccuracies. Dissatisfied customers. Operating in the physical world of retail can be tough. And more often than not, the retail associate takes the heat for painful situations like these given that they are on the front lines. Day after day the ass…

Hackers have been around for a long time, and they are becoming more sophisticated every day. With more information added to the cloud, data centers, and the network, companies are exposed to greater vulnerabilities, and an increased risk of attacks. As more customers turn to mobile payments, wearab…

Leading into 2020, picture a world where Millennials are the shoppers in store with THEIR kids, and Gen Z, your teenagers, the “partial attention generation”, is the new growth demographic for retailers. So the definition of consumers is changing: technology-driven shifts empower customers, guests a…

What an incredible Cisco Live event! During the week of June 25, 2017 over 28,000 people from all over the country traveled to Las Vegas, NV to take part in a superhero-themed Cisco Live. From CEO, Chuck Robbins, opening the show with surprise guest, CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, to Bryan Cranston closing…

On the heels of last month’s WannaCry cyberattack, a new ransomware attack shut down systems across Europe this week. The main focus of the attack appears to be in the Ukraine (including banks, telecom, electrical systems, the main city metros, and the airport), but it has now appeared in 65 countri…

These are certainly not easy times to be a retailer. Recently, our colleagues in Europe started to think about how to address many of today’s issues with “programmable retail,” the ability to write intentions and read the status of your business from the network. The weather, what a celebrity wore,…

Today we hear about “transforming the customer experience,” but for developers and IT staffers, what does this really mean? Join us in Las Vegas at Cisco Live on June 25-29, where you’ll learn how your store, hotel, and entertainment operation can use today’s digital technologies to deepen customer…

You want to create an amazing, customer-first shopping experience. You also want to empower your associates to do their best work. The two goals may be related, but they are separate. To accomplish them both together, you need the right customer, associate, and business data — together with the righ…

In my last blog post, we discussed how the Cisco SAFE methodology can help you to implement a reliable security solution for your store. This approach can help you define and address each threat to the retail branch with corresponding security capabilities, architectures, and designs – guiding you t…