Omnichannel retail race “putting immense pressure on IT depts”, Rackspace

UK retailers are looking to transform e-commerce and in-store business and IT strategies to remain competitive. But they are being held back from delivering on their plans by barriers including budget constraints (42%), a lack of IT/technical skills (27%), the availability of partners to support (20%), and legal and regulatory compliance (19%).

That’s a key takeaway from new research by Rackspace, involving 250 UK IT decision makers. The company also highlights a focus on innovation efforts on driving more traffic to websites (52%), handling more web traffic (44%) and integrating a faultless omnichannel experience (34%). Retailers are planning to adopt artificial intelligence (33%), chatbots (30%) and virtual and augmented reality (24%), to improve their e-commerce offering, as well as in-store experiences.

However, the three leading technologies set to be adopted over the next 12 months as part of an IT strategy are data analytics (48%), mobile applications (46%), cyber security (46%). These technologies also dominate UK retail IT department budgets for the year ahead, representing 13%, 13% and 12% respectively on average.

Lee James, EMEA CTO, Rackspace comments: “The growth and dominance of web and mobile channels has led to waning High Street footfall, and the race to transform both the in-store and online experience is putting immense pressure on IT departments. These factors are shifting IT strategies, further complicating the challenges decision makers face in delivering, designing and implementing new highly-secure, bespoke solutions.”