Microsoft Azure Dives Deeper Into Retail with Kroger

… selling digital-advertising space to the various brands in the store. In addition, Kroger is looking to sell an Azure-powered commercial RaaS solution – developed jointly with Microsoft and which will offer such capabilities as collecting insights into customer behavior, improving employee productivity and drive hyper-personalization of the in-store customer experience – to other retailers.

Future commercial products will include Scan, Bag, Go, a sensor network, Virtual Storage Manager, and connectors linking in the in-store environment with corporate systems point-of-sale devices and inventory management. The first of the RaaS product offerings, including EDGE Shelf, personalized ads and guided shopping, will be on display in Microsoft’s booth at the NRF 2019 show next week in New York City.

Pund-IT’s King said he expects to see cloud providers continuing to pursue business partnerships like the one between Microsoft and Kroger, in part because despite the attention, online sales account for only about 10 percent of all retail sales. There are still a lot of people going into stores to make purchases, which means it is a wide-open market for cloud providers, he said.

“There’s still a lot of money being spent in grocery stores,” King said.

And a lot is being spent with cloud service providers. According to analysts with the Synergy Research Group, spending on cloud infrastructure services grew 45 percent in the third quarter of 2018, with providers like Microsoft, Google and Alibaba seeing gains. AWS was able to keep its dominant position with 34 percent market share.