I spent a couple of hours on Wednesday at the Retail Technology Expo at Earls Court 2 and had a couple of interesting meetings. The first was with Global Bay Mobile Technologies, which has been supplying mobile solutions to the retail sector for the past six years. Its customers include Coach, Timberland and shoe-maker Crocs, plus one or two major High St. retailers it is not allowed to name.

Global Bay offers both b2b solutions for things like inventory management, and consumer-facing ones for apps. Everything it does is based on its GB Mobile platform, which integrates with the retailer’s back-end systems. Global Bay MD Justin Coward told me that this is where 80 per cent of the work takes place; once this is done, it’s relatively easy to run a variety of solutions off it.

Currently, the company is engaged in putting its solutions on handheld devices that a lot of us are familiar with, like the iPod touch, replacing the bulky handheld devices that retailers are familiar with using for inventory management. Apart from the smaller form factor, one of the beauties of using such devices, Coward explained, is that the temporary staff who supplement the regular workforce in store over the Christmas period are largely familiar with them, so need less training.

But the most interesting thing the company showed me was its iPad kiosk, which replaces a standard kiosk at about a third of the cost and, of course, with a much smaller footprint. The iPad kiosk also runs off the GB Mobile platform, and is populated remotely via a website, so a retailer can use it to promote several offers on the same day, perhaps varying the offer by day-part.  And it can be deployed very rapidly. Global Bay launched the solution in January and already has two live deployments in the US. I put it to Coward that the barriers to entry to providing such a solution must be quite low, but he argued that actually, the years of investment in the GB Mobile platform is what makes the solution unique. I can see it appealing to a lot of retailers.

The second meeting was with Panintelligence. The company has developed a business intelligence (BI) dashboard software solution that it sells to various verticals, including several retail clients. In essence, it crunches a lot of data and presents it in an easy-to-understand way through charts, graphs and a traffic light system that shows if a given value for any particular KPI is OK, great, or in need of attention. It can measure whatever it’s asked to measure; the example demoed to me was average basket spend per store. Now, the company is taking it mobile.

Mike Cripps, deputy managing director, showed me the app on an iPad, but as it’s designed in HTML5, he told me it could easily be ported to tablets on other platforms, plus of course, iPhones and other smartphones. Panintelligence is calling it Pervasive BI; I suggested it was an example of the appification of BI. Whatever you call it, Cripps says he thinks it’s going to be very popular with all sorts of enterprises. In the retail sector, it means that a regional manager carrying out a store visit doesn’t have to fire up his laptop to see how the store is performing, he can check it out on his iPad or his phone before he enters the store. “It opens up BI to everyone management wants to access it,” Cripps told me. He has a point, and I’m sure a lot of enterprises, in the retail sector and elsewhere, are getting very excited about the ablity of smarpthones and tablets to not only engage with their customers, but also, to transform the way they run their business.

David Murphy
Editor