Take Advantage of Best-in-Class Technology and Experience
Cisco is uniquely positioned to help your retail business develop a Lean Retail Architecture that lowers IT costs and increases business agility. The breadth and depth of Cisco's expertise, and the innovation and scale of its products, set the company apart from other network solution providers.
Breadth of offerings: Cisco provides WAN acceleration service for data, video, and Extensible Markup Language (XML) applications, load balancing of the data center server farm, and storage virtualization to improve storage efficiency in the data center by 30–70 percent. An exceptional range of data, voice, and mobility products from Cisco helps your retail business to achieve long-term IT efficiencies while providing you the tools for business innovation.
Depth of experience: Cisco and its partners bring substantial experience to developing network-centric architectures. You can also take advantage of the design and implementation guides that Cisco has developed for the data center, WAN acceleration, and the Lean Retail Architecture.
Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): By combining resources that have previously existed in silos, your business can reduce capital expenses through higher utilization of fewer data servers, simplify and automate administrative tasks, and lower operational expenses for energy (cooling and electricity) and floor space.
Greater agility: With a more flexible network architecture, IT staff can more quickly respond to changing business demands. In addition to facilitating rapid provisioning of application and infrastructure services from shared resources (whether data, computational, or network), a Lean Retail Architecture can also help you streamline operational procedures and maintain better control over those resources.
Improved resilience: With a more standardized, integrated infrastructure, IT staff can respond more efficiently to disruptions or attacks, increasing network availability and supporting business continuity. Rather than maintaining dispersed equipment and data, IT staff can apply policies and procedures across all connected resources so that applications and data are protected quickly and consistently.
Increased application performance: If the WAN is accelerated but server resources are lacking, application performance suffers. Load balancing the server farm improves application performance, unless the data cannot be accessed quickly from the storage system. Cisco offers WAN acceleration, load balancing, and storage virtualization, all of which are needed for consistent application performance.
Best practices: Cisco provides a set of best-practice guidelines including architectural principles, technical design, and blueprints. Together these provide the roadmap for evolving the Lean Retail Architecture and the data center. These principles and guidelines have been derived from real-world deployments with a variety of enterprise companies. The result is a proven, world-class data center architecture that removes the risk and uncertainty of "do-it-yourself" or piecemeal approaches.
Solid foundation: You can evolve your data center into a next-generation architecture with the utmost confidence, knowing that your vendor has vast experience. Cisco's success in other elements of network infrastructure—broadband networking, wireless, security, etc.—means you have access to an invaluable range of knowledge and expertise.
Global presence: With the increase in globalization, many retail companies are conducting business worldwide. Unlike the days when regional subsidiaries handled business internationally, now corporate data is consolidated from around the world. No matter where your data center is located, Cisco can offer world-class support and consulting expertise.
Cisco can help your enterprise to build a more dynamic, agile, and virtualized real-time infrastructure, at a cost and pace that align with your business needs. To help ensure your successful transition to a Lean Retail Architecture, Cisco also offers you best-practices principles, guidelines, and blueprints, which have been tested in labs and real-world deployments, to complement your current network investments and IT skills.
