One of the main Business Suite 7 priorities is detailing for existing customers how they can more readily access new functionality (this version has 150 defined improvements) without disturbing current operations, thus taking more effective advantage of their maintenance and upgrade agreements.   Business Suite 7 does require use of SAP's NetWeaver architecture. IBM's global business services unit has been identified as a enterprise launch partner in helping companies with implementation and upgrade requirements.

The RetailCENTRIC view.  The further SAP moves toward embracing risk-limiting functionality upgrades to its retail applications, the easier it will be for current SAP-deployed retailers to consider taking advantage of these new features.  We definitely see value in the UI and workflow improvements that embed more analytic detail inside current functions like trade area analysis or assortment planning.  We also like the improved connectivity between these often disconnected processes. A couple of other important takeaways:

Business Objects is key to SAP's successful move toward retail's need for Universal Intelligence.  Both Business Objects (pre-merger) and SAP have steadily increased the demand and business intelligence capabilities of their products.  SAP's continuing quest to be known for both transactional AND analytic software leadership is strengthened the more they blend dashboarding, alerting, and reporting functionality into the retail application core.  This cohesion between predictive demand intelligence and reactive business intelligence is a critical lynchpin in retailer's plans to understand and act on the changed consumer landscape.

SAP is making it easier to upgrade old or deploy new functionality.  This helps retail CIOs make the case to stakeholders that they can get some new features faster, without risking current deployed applications.  All good news, presuming the retailers are enabled for NetWeaver today.  This is very similar to the problem that Oracle has with new functionality deliverables that require its foundational R13 release.  But SAP is farther along the NetWeaver path with retailers, and this helps these clients see potentially faster benefits from Business Suite 7 enhancements.  SAP and other enterprise vendors including Aldata and Epicor will need to stay focused on this "quick path to upgrades" mindset if they are to stave off threats from smaller, web-based, and often less expensive vendors who now can more easily integrate into legacy applications and data sets.

While there remains intense competitive and market pressures, SAP does continue to globally execute against a powerful yet elegantly simplistic industry strategy .  There are many recent customer references, however we especially like the story coming out of Home Depot Canada, where their ability to methodically deploy some of SAP Retail's latest intelligence, planning, and execution capabilities is showing some impressive early benefits.  Also impressive is SAP's support of Reliance's rediculous retail growth strategy inside India.  

We hope SAP continues to advance this trend of making upgrades and new deployments easier on retailers, while perhaps not ignoring the advice from these same retailer clients and prospects on how to go even further toward improving the vendor-retailer relationship.   Given SAP's pretty public role as one of the market makers in retail, we expect they will.

We're finally here.  With much sweat and effort I am very pleased to announce the formal "coming out party" of our new advisory and consultancy firm, RetailCENTRIC, and the availability of our new online home.

 I Doubt You Wandered Here By Accident...

If you're reading this introduction it's probably because I called or e-mailed you and said "hey, we're up, come take a look".  This site is not attempting to be Perez Hilton or Drudge Report and drive millions a day to it articles or reports.  As I previously had live in the market that is industry reseach and technology analysis, I derived a mission for RetailCENTRIC that is very, very straightforward - make our offering better, faster, and cheaper - much cheaper.

Many of you know about my management and analyst roles as retail industry leader at both AMR Research and at IDC's Global Retail Insights.  You also know my style and philosophy for providing pragmatic, CIO-based commentary on market, technology and industry actions.  RetailCENTRIC's launch today allows me to expand that unique voice and push my message faster, broader, harder and even more passionately - certainly more than the structure or bureaucracy allows my friends at the traditional research firms.

Forrest Gump was right. "Shrimpin' is TOUGH"

Here's the "no kidding" quote of the day:  "Having the idea to start your own business is much easier than actually starting it!"

Whoever arrogantly said "Moving online is no big deal..." was lying,  a web consultant, or both.  Yes, getting up a simple blog is easy, searching Wikipedia is straightforward , but providing a full fledged content management system that mirrors the big firms but works to add new capabilities without the overhead is not simple.  As IT projects go, my web project would get a D.  This has taken twice as long as I thought... however I'm pleased with the current result and since our entire business is centered on this site, you can expect many iterative changes going forward.  Today on the site you can find new content and lots of background data, including detail on our site, business model, and objectives, including our launch press release.  Suffice to say what excites us the most is that we're now officially unleashed - without corporate overhead, bureaucracy or client conflicts.  This gives me wide berth to cover areas that have been under-discussed in recent months.

Expect a Few Glitches

While we're excited about many of our new online analyst firm features, including RSS feeds, comments, social bookmarking, embedded media, and universal search, we are still fine-tuning - so perhaps consider this version .98 of our siste.  So if some URLs act wierd or you see things a bit out of place (especially resulting page links for outside use),  you've been warned.  Give us a few more weeks.  We are working through all of it.

Some New Ideas and What's Coming Up

The broad freedom that RetailCENTRIC provides us allows us to examine retail IT and advanced technology from new angles.  In the editing pipeline right now is some intriguing research based on the messaging of Retail's Renaissance, including a whole series on "advertising anarchy" and its impact on retail promotions, the global race to new payment technologies, custom private label, true on-demand inventory, and some conceptual future think on the next generation of demand optimization and retail business intelligence.

You'll see today we have published some initial alerts and you can expect to see many more on a frequent, round-the-clock basis.  My initial favorite involves the results of some very informal and off-the-record discussions with retail CIOs on the state of IT vendor relations, gathered at NRF in New York and from conversations around the country.   Also look for some upcoming detailed takes on issues surrounding grocery IT, retail self-service, offshoring, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

In our premium research section, we have been working for some time to structure strong initial research and perspective that  IT leaders can use to guide their planning efforts in this crazed environment, and we'll have a few more exciting reports coming shortly.  Our research plan models after the (6) focal points of our Retail Renaissance strategy, the summary of which we will be posting shortly.

Our Sign is Back Up - Let the Briefings Resume

I am sure I can speak for many of my analyst friends when I say we all have a love/hate relationship with vendor briefings.  We tend to love the insight, proactive thinking (usually), and energy...but hate the repeativeness of the process. The RetailCENTRIC model will be to quickly identify those vendors and briefings where real action is happening, and turn that around to our clients and readership.  If you are a vendor and want to get on our briefings calendar, send an email to briefings@retailcentric.com and in your message give a quick summary of your briefing objective and intended message.  It bears mentioning here as always - a briefing does not equal an alert or report.  We only publish what we think would be of value to our client base and our extensive growing network.

Welcoming Your Comments - Cautiously.

We are today introducing the ability to provide feedback and commentary on each article or alert we post.  We are (however naively) going with the "whoever you are" approach which doesn't require user registration or validation, though you must provide an email-address.  If this approach gets abused or we start seeing unadulterated vendor spam, then we'll change the policy quick.  We will in some cases not allow comments on articles, and probably never will on formal reports, but we'll see what works and what doesn't work.  So participate if you would like.  Oh, and the best commenter we see before the end of the month (where contact information is provided in full) will receive some of the cool, new RetailCENTRIC schwag...including this new embroidered hat:

On the business side, we have worked to make having a formal client relationship with RetailCENTRIC as drop-dead simple and inexpensive as possible.  Our services agreement, with pricing, is online for all to review.  If you want further details, contact me directly or send a note to sales@retailcentric.com.

Some New Faces Shortly....

For those thinking that this is a "one man shop", think again.  I am pleased that so many have reached out with the idea of working with me and RetailCENTRIC.  I have held off until we could get the business launched, but I am truly excited about the quality and caliber of people who may be joining our team.  I am grateful for your interest in RetailCENTRIC, and whether you are a paying client, retailer, or just a casual reader, we hope you get some actionable value out of our efforts.

I end then with a very simple yet appropriate quote from a long-time hero of mine, Lee Iacocca

"You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can't get them across, your ideas won't get you anywhere".

I have talked about the Next Generation Shopping Experience in retail presentations the last few years, with most of my thesis centering on dealing with the "convergence" between changing incumbent customer behaviors, handling an entirely new breeds of shoppers (think millenials) and optimizing new in-store and online touch points.  Even when we take into account varying global cultures, societal trends and economics, the priorities of what shoppers want from retailers seems pretty consistent worldwide.  To me, it always boils down to efficiency, flexibility, service and value. With that in mind, take a look at this YouTube video describing the shopping "modernization" efforts of one Chinese retailer:

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Is it just me, or does this seem to be the exact opposite of what is needed to make the retail buying experience better?  Even granting the novelty or entertainment factor, I can't conceive of an outcome where this "pilot test" improves shopping efficiency.  If this is real (and I can't confirm from anybody that it is), it begs for some quantification from store shoppers as to how this materially benefits their shopping trip.

I am posting this as a courtesy to those that have asked in recent months for the video link.  As we talk more about our market and technology strategy for Retail's Renaissance, we'll spend signficant time looking at the tremendous change that retailers will have to undergo to adapt to and stay ahead of the the shopping and buying patterns of the post-meltdown consumer, including both cross-channel selling technologies as well as the enterprise-level systems that will underpin this new level of retail execution.

And for those that want to start accusing us of "blog posting", give it a rest, its our first day.

What I found most interesting about these CIO conversations (when I wasn't waxing eloquent about the pending arrival of RetailCENTRIC) was just how many saw for me the opportunity speak even more candidly about the industry vendor community.  I guess their premise was that since I wasn't beholdened to them today as my clients as I had been in the past, I could be more honest.  I took a bit of offense to that, primarily because any good analyst will rail on a vendor or the vendor community if they deserve it, regardless of client status.  That said, I took away from those discussions that the RetailCENTRIC launch opportunity provided me a chance to pen a collective missive to the vendors, outlining much of what could be done to strengthen their compact with the retailer IT community.  As a former retail CIO myself, I have no problem being the aggregator and disseminator-of-record for this feedback, perhaps even lace in a bit of my own.  The messages from the CIOs I spoke with were broad in scope, but the key vendor-related takeaways included:

You'd better get proactive about new support and maintenance agreement strategies, because we are gunning against status-quo. This is not new news, but the aggression I heard was intense, probably driven by the combination of current retail economics and the fact that upgrade cycles are expanding and not justifying the annual expense.   It seems we are at a point where many retailers would just as soon take the risk of internal support, stop paying maintenance fees and deal the more expensive cost of upgrades when they need them.  Vendors shouldn't let that happen, and while we all know that the annuity revenue from maintenance and support contracts are what fuels consistent R&D, new features, etc., we are now at the equivalent of the "OK Corral" and the retailers are coming with not just weapons drawn but guns blazing.  New thinking from vendors on these agreements would be a really good thing. 

Dissuade your sales organization from offering us supposedly "one time only" quarter or year-end deals. Everybody understands the markets and the Street's expectations for quarter-by-quarter performance - we get it.  But the idea that a deal offered on May 30th isn't valid on June 1st is just insulting.   The vendor relationships we like best are those that make selling us solutions a component of a broader, strategic alignment on how to do create a better retail operation  While in many cases this problem stems form the aggression of specific sales individuals, it is incumbent that vendors avoid bringing their financial performance wants and needs to the feet of its clients through tightly time-constrained offers.

We still need more segment-specific functionality. This came most directly from grocery and apparel CIOs.  The grocers continue to look for better category management and assortment to space solutions that transparently integrate store-specific insight.  In apparel it's all about weaving the complexity of size, style and color variables with the need for designers, planners, and store managers to have more nimble, responsive planning and intelligence tools that minimize markdowns and maximize turns and margins.  Some noted specific vendors and products they liked (I'll mention those in a follow-up) and understood how difficult unique segment support can be.  But almost all stated that this becomes a major point of differentiation for those vendors that design, develop, and deploy segment-oriented yet enterprise-flexible technology.

We have to have better, more detailed information about the upgrade paths to your latest releases - and some incentives to move us forward.  This is different than the discussion about maintenance as it relates to retailer interest in moving to an improved software product release, say POS or merchandising, but can't see the resource or cost-effective path to get there.  Often this constraint is driven by a retailer's highly customized code base.  What retailers want is for vendors to provide just as much information about upgrade planning in new release announcements as they do the new features and functions themselves.  Its that simple.  If this happens aggressively it might help the related discussion about maintenance and support contracts.

Think outside the cabal-like relationships you have with global consulting firms (including your own). Embrace and/or certify more smart, small energetic firms with strong retail experience.  Many merchant CIOs I talked to were very complimentary about the skills and experiences of the major consultancies focused on retail.  Their issue wasn't with quality - it was with choice.  It would seem that software vendors who helped incent smaller, skilled firms to commit their own resources to learning their product portfolio would see additional market muscle from the existing relationships many of these firms have with retailers.  There is no question that this is tricky because it requires mutual commitment.  Retail CIOs simply want broader integration partner options.

Get over this long-standing idea that you can charge more simply for having science-based optimization.  I'm on board with this one.  I have written in my past analyst life numerous times about the value proposition of demand intelligence, but have said countless times that the two key reasons deployments have not moved faster have been because of challenges with usability and "premium pricing".  It is incumbent for vendors, even those who only sell only optimization products, to understand that embedded forecasting and analytics is simply expected now as base functionality, and market pricing will be driven more by differentiation in the total solution (including use of the optimization tools) rather than on how many demand algorithms you have or how many forecasts you can generate.

We are getting tired of the sales call that is 90% about bashing the other guy(s).  Many mentioned that this problem has diminished.  The bad news is it still happens.  There are some noted worst offenders and I promise if I keep hearing about them...I'll call them out.  I happen to think that a vendor who keeps advocating World War III with its competition rather than the virtues of its own products has something to hide.

Stop carrying on about new release features that haven't been field deployed. This is an easy one to target at the vendor marketing groups.  It's understand why one would want to talk about their cool new advanced planning capabilities in the version just announced, but what we really care about knowing is who might have gone ahead with installation of that new application and is in active operation.  Fine, we can be early adopters, but that's a different conversation.   The big software vendors are the primary offenders, but they also are pretty good at getting early adopters to talk about their recent experiences.  I think the message is to stop making it sound like everything you just announced is deployed.

Press forward with your strategic and financially-oriented business case justification and ROI marketing.  Ah, some good news.  I heard many times from CIOs about how they had worked with many of their vendors who had helped them define new and improved financial metrics to justify new IT investment, or were helping outline the top or bottom line financial improvements aligned to benefits from deployed new solutions in supply chain, planning, and store execution technology.  The more granular and personalized to the segment or specific retailer, the better.

We are tired of having to figure out realistic hardware and infrastructure requirements for software projects.  Give us some realistic planning guidelines.  I have to admit I am embellishing on this one a bit myself.  Many of my recent interactions with retail IT organizations have centered on this challenge - how many servers, what configuration, what about internet connectivity?  Can we host or must this be behind the firewall?   Vendors should always maintain an accurate plan for what foundational hardware and software capabilities are required to run their products.  Be conservative, lean toward "more is better", but don't wait for this conversation to be had weeks before deployment.

To the retail CIOs who contributed to these ideas, thank you.   I can't guarantee results but I'm hopeful.  Oh, and you owe me.

Comments are open for those who want to extend this conversation or address other vendor-related "challenges"  If there is even a hint of broad vendor bashing in the comments section, I'll turn it off.  Let me know at scott@retailcentric.com if there is more you would like to hear on this subject.