Extreme Cloud IQ for Retail

Retail: A Dynamic and Constantly Evolving Space

The retail industry is constantly evolving. At a macro level, traditional brick and mortar retailers are reshaping their physical store footprints to reduce operational overhead and deliver personalized customer experiences. Meanwhile, several native digital retail platforms are expanding into physical retail spaces. At the same time, digital transformation has drove the need to connect a heightened number of users, devices, applications, and IoT things in store environments. These changes have increased complexity, and with it, the demands of an organization’s networking solution and their supporting IT staff. How do retailers adapt to their business’ growing needs? Why the Cloud and Why ExtremeCloud: Cloud-based networking technologies fit the unique challenges of retail businesses and their environments. ExtremeCloud IQ leverages 4ths generation cloud heritage, delivering retailers with a F.A.S.T solution. • Flexibility: right-sized for skills, scale, and business objectives • Agility: speed and continuous delivery of new features and capabilities • Security: proven protection in the most risk-sensitive environments • Technology: access to best of breed technologies in the world

Why ExtremeCloud IQ: Business Benefits

Centralized Management

A retailer’s network solution is responsible for supporting potentially hundreds to thousands of locations across the business footprint, but the organization cannot guarantee or afford onsite IT resources at each property. With ExtremeCloud IQ retailers can offload the need for dedicated IT resources with centralized network visibility and management for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN. Ultimately, cloud-based management from ExtremeCloud IQ reduces upfront business costs, automates deployments and centralizes support to ease IT burden and operational expenditure—so the network can easily grow with business demand without burdening the budget that could otherwise fuel retail innovation.

Deployment Flexibility

With cloud, retailers can achieve operational excellence with access to simple, seamless deployment and configuration options. Organizations can seamlessly operate across and move between public cloud, private cloud, and/or on-premise cloud deployment options. With ExtremeCloud IQ, retailers also have access to a cloud agnostic platform, with dedicated non-AWS deployment options. ExtremeCloud IQ offers the unique ability to seamlessly and securely move its access points, switches, and routers within or between any of its cloud management deployment options. This is achieved without a drop in network uptime, providing unrivaled flexibility to meet current and future business needs—a competitive advantage and requirement for retailers who continuously revamp their physical business footprints and who must maintain operational uptime—especially during critical hours of the day and periods of the shopping year.

Actionable Insights

ExtremeCloud IQ equips retailers with comprehensive built in intelligence, delivering actionable insights for superior performance, troubleshooting, and remediation—all from a central platform. The network is even smarter and more efficient when leveraging Extreme’s machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, even as the business’ capacity needs and density increases. With more and more users and IoT devices accessing retail IT networks, it’s never been more important to have complete visibility of these connections and their activities.

Enhanced Shopping Experiences

All of the business use cases fuels enhanced, forward-thinking shopping experiences for retailers. With centralized management and flexible deployment options, retail IT teams can offload the resource-heavy administrative tasks of manually managing the network and maintaining business uptime, to instead focus on more innovative and personalized shopper engagements. Actionable insights and customized retail dashboards deliver the information retailers care about the most around customer behaviors and preferences. Understanding these trends further enables customer-focused strategies and programs.

Why ExtremeCloud IQ: Technology Benefits

Technical Dashboards

IT dashboards deliver network quality information related to network health and performance, application usage and response times, as well as the ability to program specific IT alerts surrounding network events or updates.

Client 360

With Client 360, retailers have access to a machine learning-based tool with client-comparative analytics for performance and optimization, focused around individual clients on a retailer's network. Client 360 intelligently organizes rich datasets pertaining to client operation, health, and performance—all presented in a simple and informative way for retail IT teams. Retailers can use analytics gathered within Client 360 to quickly identify problems, resolve network errors, and optimize performance for clients for all their online locations, whether it’s an in-store shopper on the public Wi-Fi or a PoS device.

Network 360

Available for public, private, and on-premise cloud deployment options, Network 360 leverages Extreme’s cloud architecture and native machine learning to collect, process, and analyze vast amounts of network and client generated data, condensing it down to consumable and actionable insights for IT in a single view. This functionality alone is enormously valuable for retailers and their many sites, as it efficiently delivers real-time and historical network health metrics from a single view, cutting down time spent on network troubleshooting and helping ensure network uptime. Key performance indicators can be aggregated by day, week, or month, and includes device health, client health, Wi-Fi health, network health, services availability, applications, and of course security.

Network Health and Comparative Analytics

As cited above, retailers can track network health by monitoring key usage and performance indicators across their many properties with adjusted reporting windows. On the client side, retailers can collect, process, and analyze vast amounts of client experience data and distill these into consumable, actionable insights. Retailers can also access comparative analytics, which anonymously correlates network performance metrics against other Extreme customer Wi-Fi deployments, so IT staff can recognize and address issues proactively before they impact the experience for employees, guests, etc. Comparative analytics leverages an anonymous network data pool available in the cloud to let network administrators compare the performance of their own network with the averaged performance of other deployments.