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DIGITAL MARKETING
Why Infrastructure is Crucial to Accelerating Canadian Retail’s Post-COVID Digital Transformation BY ANDREW EPPICH
M
any of the retailers that persevered during COVID learned how to conduct business online but many still overlook the digital infrastructure the apps powering their online sales need to perform their best. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the Canadian retail industry’s digital transformation as consumers quickly pivoted to touchless or digital shopping. This shift in consumer behaviour was so sudden it left even established retailers scrambling to accommodate the surge in demand, while forcing many small businesses to close entirely. Members of the C-suite likely regarded these events as a lesson for their industry: Invest in digital sales tools or risk going out of business. According to Equinix’s recent Global Tech Trends study, nearly half — 46 percent — of digital executives in Canada have accelerated their digital transformation plans in response to the pandemic. That’s hardly the wrong course of action, but they would be equally well advised to consider the lesson their IT teams took away from what happened: successful digital transformation, and meeting the customer demands now driving it, requires digital infrastructure capable of quickly interconnecting existing and emerging technologies. It’s an investment too few Canadian retailers have made: If your company is trying to accelerate its digital transformation, investing in a flexible, vendor-neutral network architecture is as crucial as adopting a reliable online sales platform. At Equinix, we believe retailers benefit best from digital transformation by organizing their tools into three categories: digital infrastructure, which includes cloud access and business intelligence; digital exchange, which helps ensure the resilience of their supply chain and digital ecosystem; and digital edge, which uses analytics to optimize the user experience. The anatomy of digital infrastructure transformation In the post-COVID world, a retailer’s digital transformation goals shouldn’t be to simply facilitate sales online — it should be to provide a seamless experience capable of following users across multiple channels. Imagine, for example, the user who researches an item they’re thinking of purchasing on their work computer during an afternoon break, reading reviews on their mobile device later that evening, then finally placing an order for the device on their tablet before bed. ❱ DMN.CA
NOVEMBER 2021
