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New Hughes Video Series Provides Insights on Retail Industry’s Most Pressing IT Priorities

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Unified Commerce and Faster Networks among CIOs’ Top Concerns, According to Boston Retail Partners Survey


Germantown, MD., March 31, 2015—A recent survey of U.S. retailers by Boston Retail Partners (BRP) indicates that improving payment security, unified commerce and faster networks are some of their top IT priorities in 2015. Hughes Network Systems, LLC (HUGHES) today brought that research to life with a series of videos featuring BRP Principal, Ken Morris, explaining the most important implications of this market shift for retailers.

Hughes, the world’s leading provider of broadband satellite solutions and a leading provider of managed network services, was a gold sponsor of BRP’s POS/Customer Engagement Benchmarking Survey.

One Version of the Truth

The quest for unified commerce was a surprising revelation from the survey. Retailers are increasingly seeking “one version of the truth” when it comes to understanding and influencing customers’ shopping behaviors. Unified commerce helps retailers provide a seamless customer experience regardless of where the customers are or what channel they use—in-store, on the web or on their mobile phones.

“Over the next three to four years there will be a 663% increase in the number of retailers who are going to move to this one version of the truth,” Morris said, adding that retailers are moving to the cloud to achieve their unified communications objectives. “There’s a movement afoot...to create a thinner, lean POS by moving to the cloud. It’s easier to protect one source than trying to secure a thousand and one store locations where you’re trying to protect customer information and payment information.”

A new trend toward order management is also pushing POS to the cloud. “Order management is the new point-of-sale. In other words, order management is just a point-of-sale transaction adjudicated rapidly... We’re seeing a movement of order management vendors adding a POS front end to their solutions.”

The Network is Key to Real-time Retailing

Real-time retailing is another key trend in the future of retail. Just as the banking industry learned that it can reinvent the banking experience using faster, experience-enhancing technologies (ATMs connected by a network), retailers are increasingly seeking to deliver real-time retailing as a new way to engage the customer.

The research revealed that faster, more secure networking is a key technology enabling real-time retailing and other sweeping trends in retail. “This move to real-time retail has tremendous payback. The future is this sort of ‘Amazon experience’ at the store level...When you’re standing in front of me, I have customer Wi-Fi in the store. I identify who you are. You opt in because you like my brand. I immediately know what’s in your closet. I know what you’ve looked at online. And I can present to you what you’re most likely to buy at a price you’re most likely to spend...With that comes the need for increased bandwidth,” Morris added.

Hughes sponsored the survey and produced this unique video series to help retailers better understand the need for a highly reliable, high-performance network to support these important retail trends. HughesONTM is a suite of cloud-friendly network and digital media managed services from Hughes, designed for the unique needs of distributed enterprises, such as retail. Hughes can help retailers implement cost-effective solutions addressing their security, unified commerce, and real-time retailing initiatives by providing the underlying WAN and in-store network needed for today’s fast moving market.