MILAN, Italy, April 27, 2017 – IDC Retail Insights today announced the availability of a new IDC MarketScape report to provide end users with guidance on evaluating a retail omni-channel commerce platform solution for the retail industry. The new study, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail Omni-Channel Commerce Platform 2017 Vendor Assessment (Document #US41453016), evaluates worldwide IT vendors that provide a retail omni-channel commerce platform solution for the retail industry. Twelve vendors were included and evaluated in this study — Aptos, Diebold Nixdorf, Fujitsu, IBM, Infor, Magento, Microsoft, NCR, Oracle, Oracle NetSuite, Salesforce, and SAP Hybris.

"Retail is fundamentally changing. To execute current and future customer journeys, retailers need a new unified customer experience architecture that will provide a seamless composition of customer services leveraging information, processes, and channels consistently," said Ivano Ortis, vice president, IDC Retail, Manufacturing, and Financial Insights, IDC Europe. "The separation of front-end from back-end systems becomes a limitation of traditional retail IT architectures. So, the retail omni-channel commerce platform — based on an artificial intelligence foundation — becomes the key enabler of both short-term omni-channel business goals and future innovation with the insights, speed, and business model agility required to lead retail in the next decade."

Based on this research, IDC provides a number of key recommendations, including:

• Budget — Allocate 30%-40% of the IT budget to commerce platform investments, rethinking front-end and back-end budget distinctions as they converge.
• Enterprise architecture — The enterprise architecture should include an open source integration layer built around the commerce platform to integrate back-end/legacy systems, data and analytics foundations, all available commerce and service channels, and business-to-business (B2B) commerce networks.
• Road map — Retailers in the platform design and initial development phase should assign the highest priority to the setup of order fulfillment and single commerce engine core capabilities.
• Omni-channel analytics — Data analytics foundations should be based on artificial intelligence and cognitive computing technologies, providing real-time gathering and analysis of data (with descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive functionalities) sourced from the four core capabilities, IoT devices, CRM applications, and other third parties' integrated applications.

IDC MarketScape criteria selection, weightings, and vendor scores represent well-researched IDC judgment about the market and specific vendors. IDC analysts tailor the range of standard characteristics by which vendors are measured through structured discussions, surveys, and interviews with market leaders, participants, and end users. Market weightings are based on user interviews, buyer surveys and the input of a review board of IDC experts in each market. IDC analysts base individual vendor scores, and ultimately vendor positions within the IDC MarketScape, on detailed surveys and interviews with the vendors, publicly available information, and end-user experiences in an effort to provide an accurate and consistent assessment of each vendor's characteristics, behavior, and capability.