Decathlon And Microsoft Cooperate With Intelligent Cloud Azure Technology To Promote Digital Spanformation

In November 16th, Sports retailer Decathlon United Microsoft Held "Hackers loose" activities, and announced the use of Microsoft Intelligent Cloud Azure technology and customized solutions. Push The digital spanformation of Decathlon's business in China and the global market.

This is Decathlon An important step in the layout of "future retail". Microsoft, as Decathlon's global partner, will use intelligent cloud Azure and a series of digital solutions to promote Decathlon's digital spanformation in China and the global market.

To this end, the eight partners in Microsoft's local ecosystem will focus on industrial 4 intelligent production, digital marketing, smart retailing, online offline inventory management, and store electronic map interaction, intelligent treadmill development and other projects. Decathlon Six kinds of customized technology applications have been developed.

Decathlon entered China in 2003. After many years of development, it has acquired mature offline buying and business operation experience. It integrates design, production, logistics and retail as one, has 100% self brand, and sells products with high cost performance.

At present, Decathlon has 275 entity stores in China, but its online sales share is less than 15%. Decathlon China chief operating officer and Olivier Menard, President of retail digital spanformation, said in an interview that China's retail market Compared with western countries, there is obvious trend of digital shopping, but to achieve such a spanformation, the challenge comes from the two-tier spanformation under the online and offline.

On line, Decathlon currently has only one Tmall flagship store besides its own official website. And for traditional retailers who specializes in supply chain and mall marketing, On-line The shopping scene means more convenient mobile ways and more efficient content touches, which are hard to accomplish by one's own efforts.

Online, intelligent applications and experience upgrading have become the new trend of new retail. Mobile payment, no checkout and shopping experience with new technologies have become the focus of development. At present, Decathlon can achieve self service checkout in RFID based on 44 stores in China, but Olivier Menard says that the cancellation of the receiving line is the concept of Decathlon's future retail.

For Decathlon, experiential buying of massive SKU and over 70 sports related products is its biggest advantage. Decathlon provides a variety of sports options, which is a long tail business mode. Therefore, the digital linkage and inventory management in different areas of the store become an urgent demand for digital spanformation.

Microsoft's 2B business and smart cloud can solve these problems. Alain Crozier, senior vice president of Microsoft Corp, said in an interview that Microsoft, as a platform and productivity company, provides customers with innovative technologies and solutions, and at the same time, uses partner ecosystem to achieve efficient application.

For example, a technology company named cloud plus provides a small program to display the pattern of stores, which can display the relevant sports and discount zones in different regions, and also choose the starting and stopping positions for line prediction, so as to achieve interactive electronic maps.

Interestingly, Alain Crozier emphasizes that Microsoft is completely neutral to its own service providers, will not engage in the industry that customers are engaged in, Decathlon is a retailer, but Microsoft is not just providing technology and service platform such as Azure. That is to say, everything and every data Decathlon does is Decathlon instead of Microsoft.

This is closely related to the strategic focus of Microsoft's 2B business and the input of Azure. Although cloud services have been dominated by Amazon's AWS in the past, the market share of Azure continues to improve and continues to encroach on AWS's advantages.

As the most extensive public cloud service currently, Microsoft Azure intelligent cloud has 54 Azure areas in the world, serving over 140 national and regional markets, and 95% global Fortune 500 companies are their customers. In China, the Microsoft Azure cloud service, operated by century Internet, was officially launched in 2014 and adopted the same platform and technology framework as Microsoft global Microsoft Azure technology.

For Microsoft, the 2B gene and the developer ecosystem have always been the core. In this hacker's Pine activities, eight companies, such as Bo Yan technology, cloud plus technology, product view, no work, Hui Ke, Jing Quan, Guo Shuang technology and micro Ruisi, have participated in the design of Decathlon's digital spanformation program. They are all partners of Microsoft in China's domestic ecosystem.

Olivier Menard indicates that Decathlon We are trying to innovate in cloud computing, big data and Internet of things. Based on Microsoft's cloud technology and partners' understanding of localization and technological advantages, he has high expectations for Decathlon's digital development in China's sports market.