Creating the optimal retail store experience

Microsoft helps retailers answer both questions with a combination of key benefits:

• Centralized manageability. Microsoft’s system management capabilities are designed to lower life cycle costs by centralizing management, deployment, and monitoring of store solutions. Retailers can consolidate IT resources and expertise; proactively respond to system and security issues, minimizing the need for store visits; and more cost-effectively implement value-added solutions that create optimized experiences.


• Choice. The Microsoft platform is interoperable by design, and our rich solution partner ecosystem leverages that platform. This empowers retailers to either create or choose from available best-of-breed solutions to meet their current business needs, while laying the groundwork to take advantage of future opportunities in a timely, cost-effective manner. This platform can also easily interoperate with non-Microsoft and/or legacy solutions, thus enabling the option to get more value out of existing solutions.


• Empowerment. Microsoft-based solutions deliver relevant, real-time information to those who need it, anytime, anywhere, and on any device. In addition, Microsoft is a leader in consumer technology, so its consistent, easy-to-use interface is familiar to a large user base of both customers and store associates. This allows collaboration at multiple levels: within the store itself; between headquarters and stores; throughout the retail enterprise; and creating new opportunities by connecting to consumer devices. Being empowered means retailers can create consumer interactions that take place when, how, and where the customer wants them, thus enabling the optimized experiences that build loyalty.


• Commitment to standards. With the combination of these major benefits and a rich solution partner ecosystem, a connected store offers retailers a working solution today, while also laying the foundation to provide optimized experiences to customers and store associates when the retailer is ready to take on those initiatives. Most importantly, retailers can use the same platform running the corporate headquarters to simultaneously run the stores, making for easier integration within the enterprise. This path takes the retailer from their store today toward an environment with greater flexibility and business agility, creating opportunities for improvements in efficiency, customer satisfaction and profitability.