Ivy Jan 25, 2014 No Comments
U.S. based global retail giant Walmart has just registered a new company ‘Wal-Mart India Private Ltd’ on the 15th January. News avidly followed by those in the retailing industry. Why?
India is a huge and lucrative multi-brand retail market, with just a few retail giants in the fray. When a whopper like Walmart, known for its historical use of pulling massive amounts of consumers information and analysing for online and offline tracking, enters India; this is sure big news for all.
The Walmart-India roadmap
In a well orchestrated strategy, Walmart has steadily being outsourcing its voluminous data management requirements to India since 2010. It has already established a dedicated Remote Services Management (RSM) facility in Gurgaon, a Walmart Labs outfit at Bangalore and continuing tie-ups for collaborating tools in retail applications with Wipro, Cognizant and Infosys.
The Walmart retailing strategy of data science and leveraging of analytics for intuitive growth, has been legendary. Yet, it is little known that much before Big Data became the buzzword, Walmart was already using Big Data ‘Big Time’, transferring its transactions per hour into a database that works with petabytes of information real time.
In 2012 Walmart made a move from an experiential 10-node Hadoop cluster to a 250-node Hadoop cluster integrating big data into the DNA of Walmart. Developing new tools and mobile big data solutions has been a part of the Walmart ecosystem. Acquisitions of Kosmix, a social media start-up and Inkuru, a predictive intelligence firm, accelerated Walmart’s ability to “work with big data directly and create impact faster than ever before”.
How social media analytics delivery of Kosmix supports Walmart? It has the ability to search and analyze connections in real-time data streams to deliver highly personalized insights to users, and add-on products like the ‘Social Genome.’ Whereas Inkuru accelerates the retail giant’s analytics capabilities, combining predictive intelligence, data analytics and a decision engine to both ‘influence’ and ‘predict’ customer interactions.
As on November 2013, Walmart possessed information on an estimated 145 million Americans, i.e. a 60 % of U.S. adults with the ability to deliver the next generation predictive analytics platform.
Will Walmart affect Indian retail management and policies?
Is Walmart’s aggressive data generation and analytics going to be a trend-setter in Indian retailing landscape, where customer data and analytics has already taken over customer behavior patterns? This is a foregone conclusion, if retail businesses are to maintain the competitive edge.
What it means for the IT /analytics industry
Intuitive multivariate data analysis for customer segmentation and targeting is already being deployed. The practice of consumers used as sensors of information for gainful insights, is long since here. However, in the race to be at the top of the retail ladder, Indian retail companies will be compelled to move away from siloed analysis to integrated real-time analytics solutions, to keep ahead of competition. Application of retail analytics product offerings from vendors will also see a rise.
Future takeaways
# Dedicated data science labs in retail
# Big Data compulsion for retail companies
# Development of in-house IT/analytics teams, as well as outsourcing of requirements to niche firms
# Unlimited horizons, for IT professionals developing core analytics tools in different functional areas
# More analytics jobs in retail
What we are likely to witness is increased hiring by retail organisations who will leverage more and more data for predictive and intuitive analytics, to keep up with the ‘Walmart’ competition.
So buckle up! It is time to get ready for that interview, to get into ‘Walmart’ styled retail analytics.
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