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In a recent report published by IDC titled 'Driving DX Transformation in the Retail Ecosystem', increasing demand for cross-border ecommerce, high internet penetration, and smartphone adoption in the region are driving retailers to adopt digital technologies and invest in infrastructure upgrades.
In fact, retailers in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (or APeJ) are one of the most active in leveraging technology to improve customer experience and generate more sales. In turn, this creates a lot of partnership opportunities for services vendors to aid retailers in their digital journey - creating engaging customer experiences and unifying commerce by transforming core business processes.
According to the report, the retail industry in Asia/Pacific is at the forefront of digital transformation. The retailers plan to spend 47% of their digital budget on external vendors to drive digital transformation initiatives.
This transformation is multi-faceted, touching on operation, omni-channel, work source, data governance and so forth. To tap into these opportunities in the retail vertical, services providers should demonstrate deep understanding towards the vertical, and explicitly include the knowledge transfer component in their services engagement, for example providing digital training for retailer organizations' employees.
A majority of retailers plan to focus on building foundational capabilities to drive digital initiatives by improving their enterprise infrastructure and cybersecurity posture. For instance, IoT is the top technology solution that retailers are planning to source from external IT and business service vendors, followed by next-generation security.
With investments in DX technologies expected to double by 2019, retailers across Asia/Pacific are clearly prioritizing the improvement of their networks, cybersecurity, and datacenters to build foundational capabilities that further expand digital initiatives across their business ecosystems.
“With this trend, service providers and vendors need to adapt their offerings and integrate 3rd Platform technologies with core retail functions to help retailers in the journey to converge their digital and physical channels," said Rijo George Thomas, Senior Market Analyst of IDC's Asia/Pacific Business and IT Services Research, about the findings of the report.
“To capture the spend from this growing segment, retailers in Asia are transforming themselves through the use of innovation accelerators such as AI, augmented and virtual reality, robotics, and blockchain to name a few,” said Cathy Huang, Senior Research Manager for Services, IDC Asia/Pacific.
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