Today’s consumers expect a seamless and personalized shopping experience across all channels, whether online, mobile, or in-store. Depending on their preference, consumers order food via a mobile app and can pick it up, deliver it, or eat it in the restaurant. Ordering directly via a tablet or even a kiosk from the restaurant is more commonplace among fast food chains today. Omnichannel interaction and purchasing experiences such as these have become normal if not a bare minimum expectation.
The convenience and experience can be different each time based on any number of factors that the consumer considers to be important. Similar scenarios exist across the board in retail. For instance, many devices and technologies support interactive in-store and after-sales experiences in supermarkets and shopping centers. Everything from electronic shelving and promos to self-scanners, self-checkouts, walk-out technology, virtual try-on, product presentations, and much of the behind-the-scenes management of stock control, cold chain management, and surveillance involves digital infrastructure.
Technology is making things more convenient, enjoyable, and safer for consumers. However, it also puts retailers under increasing pressure to keep up with shifting consumer needs while saving on operating costs to meet margin goals. These trends present challenges for retailers and an excellent opportunity to leverage technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision to collect data and gain insight into customer behavior and store operations. Such intelligence enables them to make data-driven decisions that improve customer experiences, increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and drive revenue growth.
This intelligence also means retailers can adapt content and functionalities and create new use cases at the edge. To be of value and promptly meet customer experience demands, updates and enhancements must occur quickly and seamlessly across channels. From a device standpoint, this might seem unachievable as today’s edge is saturated with fixed-function siloed devices. Traditional embedded and edge devices with fixed functionalities may struggle to support increasing workloads and evolving demands.
To successfully personalize and evolve the customer experience across channels and at scale, retailers must ensure they work with a flexible architecture for building and deploying software. Containerization approaches are a great way to enable the efficient and scalable rollout of edge-device applications in a distributed computing environment. Containers allow retailers to easily update or add functionalities from their headquarters and deploy and scale across channels without needing onsite developer capabilities.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Edge Essentials is the ideal architecture for enterprises to deploy new use cases that evolve their business and customer experience faster and more affordably. AKS Edge Essentials is an unparalleled industry-first edge-to-cloud solution that includes cloud-like east-west computing and north-to-south cloud support via Kubernetes at the edge across both Linux and Windows, enabling existing and new applications with the backing from the edge nodes to the cloud.
The on-premises Kubernetes implementation orchestrates the running of containerized applications at scale on Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, Windows 11 IoT Enterprise, Windows Server IoT 2019, and Windows Server IoT 2022. It furthermore enables the deployment and management of containerized applications across various edge devices and environments, including virtual machines, IoT devices, and on-premises servers.
Arrow has collaborated with Microsoft, Lenovo, Intel, and Scalers AI to demonstrate the capabilities of AKS Edge Essentials in a retail environment. Together we have developed a cold chain monitoring, customer insights, and intelligent signage reference solution that can be the starting point for a range of other retail use cases. The reference design demonstrates how AKS Edge Essentials can quickly scale, deploy, and manage vision-based signage, customer insights, and cold chain retail monitoring with custom Linux and Windows-based containers using lightweight Kubernetes distribution.
If you want to learn more about how AKS Edge Essentials can revolutionize your edge computing infrastructure or would like to demo our reference solution design, please visit our website.
