[1]The cloud and mobile were among the hot topics on the CIO Retail Summit [2] agenda in Scottsdale last week, with Phil Shelley, chief technology officer of Illinois-based Sears Holdings [3], kicking off the topic with the risks and rewards of public vs private Cloud Computing.
Among his many comments:
- SAS is a real competitor to IT;
- If using open source, cost benefits can be big (40%-70% less);
- If you have a lot of credit card information, why would you want it to be outside (ie. in a public cloud)?
- Private clouds are going to force retailers to compete;
- 77% of companies will use internal cloud computing by the end of 2012.
[4]Marci Troutman, CEO and founder of SiteMinis [5], Atlanta, Georgia, teamed up with Kevin Conway, global director of consumer brands, Savvis [6], Town & Country, Missouri, to discuss Mobile in the Cloud. They discussed working with such clients as Home Depot [7] and Target [8]; whether or not IT must be involved when launching campaigns; private vs public clouds and other details.
It’s a topic of which all retailers should at least be aware.