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Wandering around the exhibition area at Dell Technologies World in Vegas, I stumbled across a small stand demonstrating intelligent retail technology.

The stand demonstrated a few things, edge gateways, edge servers and a CCTV analytics app.

Speaking to Imran Ansani, Global Retail Product and Supply Chain Leader at Dell, he explained that Dell had placed CCTV cameras all over the vast exhibition hall. A few of these cameras were focused on his small retail stand and connected to the server running the retail behavioural analytics.

Imran explained that the solution collected and analysed data at the Edge and also sent data to the cloud. So that data from multiple edge locations can be aggregated.

The application itself gave a glimpse into how data and edge technologies will shape retail in the future. Shoppers’ movements around a store are tracked, their reactions and shopping behaviours are recorded. It can capture very detailed and specific information. Such as what they are carrying, what items they stopped at, how long they stopped etc., are all logged and recorded.

The net effect is that retail layout can be adapted in real-time to maximise the chance of putting the correct offers and products in front of the right customers at the right time.

Under-utilised retail space can be identified and adapted within stores. It is even possible to spot the behaviour and movement of potential thieves to identify them based on their store movement.

There has been a lot of talk at this event about Edge, near Edge, Smart Edge, Core, Distributed Core, so it was nice to see it in action.

It’s all about data gravity, and edge technology enables an organisation to collect and analyse more data at the place it is created.

Written by Melina Hwang Invited by Dell to attend Dell Technologies World 2022

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