Europe's Consumers Embracing Online Retail

British Computer Society (BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT) has highlighted a new report from Forrester Research predicting Europe’s consumers will shun the high street in favour of online over the next few years.

The research firm also predicts security challenges to e-commerce providers, given the annual growth rates and marks UK to be one of the countries leading the way.

Read the BCS News Flash here: http://www.bcs.org/content/conWebDoc/50111

In a recent blog entry, I outlined how Prolifics was able to help a High Street Retail Giant refresh their e-Commerce website using IBM technology. If you missed it, you can read the story here: Prolifics UK Helps High Street Retail Giant Refresh their e-Commerce Website.

Craig Murphy is a Senior Consultant with 13 years experience in the IT industry working with top-tier consulting companies. Throughout his career, he has performed multiple key roles in development & solution architecture, project delivery management and technical sales. His current focus is on Solution Architecture and Application Infrastructure Development for IBM's large Retail Customers. Craig holds a Degree in Computer Science & Information Systems from Rhodes University; is a Certified IBM Professional holding 13 IBM certifications and he is a Professional Member of BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT, making him a world-class resource to his customers, colleagues, and company.

Prolifics UK integrates Retailer’s B2B e-Commerce Platform with Blazing Fast Search Engine

Business Challenge:
A UK High Street Retail Giant not only sells its goods to the general public but also to other companies, including UK franchises, international franchises and many smaller overseas customers who stock their products as part of their range.

Our hugely successful Retail Customer decided to grow the B2B arm of their business. In order to do so, they needed to not only expand their existing B2B e-Commerce system capacity but also to find a way to speed up the searching and indexing of their products on the system so that they could more quickly and accurately be made available to their Customers using the website.

Solution:
As part of the Apache Lucene project, Apache has developed Solr, which it describes as “a popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform”. Major features include “powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, near real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search.” The Solr solution is “highly reliable, scalable and fault tolerant, providing distributed indexing, replication and load-balanced querying, automated failover and recovery, centralized configuration and more.” And is claimed to power the search and navigation features of “many of the world's largest internet sites.”

Prolifics in partnership with IBM, assisted this High Street Retail Giant in successfully expanding their B2B e-Commerce solution by providing deep product expertise which enabled the Customer to grow their WebSphere Commerce infrastructure. Prolifics also architected and developed the infrastructure solution for the implementation of Apache's "Solr" Search & Indexing application to run on WebSphere Application Server and its integration with the Customer’s B2B e-Commerce platform . This Retail Customer is now armed with a flexible and blazing fast e-Commerce website to offer its new and existing B2B customers.

(Quoted reference: Apache website. Learn more about Apache Solr here: http://lucene.apache.org/solr/)

To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Craig Murphy is a Senior Consultant with 13 years experience in the IT industry working with top-tier consulting companies. Throughout his career, he has performed multiple key roles in development & solution architecture, project delivery management and technical sales. His current focus is on Solution Architecture and Application Infrastructure Development for IBM's large Retail Customers. Craig holds a Degree in Computer Science & Information Systems from Rhodes University; is a Certified IBM Professional holding 13 IBM certifications and he is a Professional Member of BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT, making him a world-class resource to his customers, colleagues, and company.

Prolifics UK Helps High Street Retail Giant Refresh their e-Commerce Website

Business Challenge:
IBM believes E-commerce is “no longer simply about selling online, it's about delivering a consistent shopping experience across all customer touchpoints, including mobile, social and in-store”. In 2010, a UK High Street Retail Giant made the decision to relaunch its e-commerce platform. Their existing transactional web site, developed in the early 2000s needed to be totally re-engineered, so they embarked on a journey to find the right solution.

Solution:
IBM’s WebSphere Commerce suite is at the heart of the new web site. IBM describes their WebSphere Commerce suite as allowing Customers to “deliver a seamless, cross-channel shopping experience through contextually relevant content, marketing and promotions, while extending their brand across all digital and physical customer touchpoints.” The product does so by providing “a powerful customer interaction platform for cross-channel commerce”, providing “easy-to-use tools for business users to create and manage precision marketing campaigns, promotions, catalogue and merchandising across all sales channels, allowing them to centrally manage a cross-channel strategy.” WebSphere Commerce is further described as “a single, unified platform which offers the ability to do business directly with consumers (B2C), with businesses (B2B), indirectly through channel partners (indirect business models), or all of these simultaneously” and “a customisable, scalable and high availability solution built to leverage open standards.”

Prolifics in partnership with IBM, assisted this High Street Retail Giant successfully implement their WebSphere Commerce solution by providing deep product expertise to ensure a stable and scalable application infrastructure for the Customer’s new flexible, e-Commerce platform. This new platform puts this Retail Customer ahead of its competition and enables their cross-channel selling strategy.

(Quoted reference: IBM website. Learn more about IBM WebSphere Commerce here: http://www-142.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/websphere-commerce/)

To learn more about Prolifics, visit www.prolifics.com.

Craig Murphy is a Senior Consultant with 13 years experience in the IT industry working with top-tier consulting companies. Throughout his career, he has performed multiple key roles in development & solution architecture, project delivery management and technical sales. His current focus is on Solution Architecture and Application Infrastructure Development for IBM's large Retail Customers. Craig holds a Degree in Computer Science & Information Systems from Rhodes University; is a Certified IBM Professional holding 13 IBM certifications and he is a Professional Member of BCS - The Chartered Institute for IT, making him a world-class resource to his customers, colleagues, and company.