Open Retail Initiative: Intel Creates a New Smart Retail Ecosystem

"The purpose of the retail industry adopting innovative technologies is to make profits. In order to achieve profitability, retailers must reduce the total cost of ownership, or TCO, of adopting or deploying a solution. The core purpose of our project is exactly this, to help retailers reduce the TCO of adopting new solutions and to help our partners reduce costs during development." Ms. Stacey Shulman, Chief Innovation Officer for Retail, Banking, Hospitality and Education Industries of Intel's Internet of Things Group, explained to EEWorld reporters the significance of the Intel Open Retail Initiative in a media interview at the recent Intel Open Retail Initiative Partner Summit.

Recently, the Intel Open Retail Initiative Partner Summit was held in Beijing. At the meeting, Intel introduced the Intel Open Retail Initiative (ORI) and announced that JD.com and VMWare have officially joined the initiative as early partners. The Intel Open Retail Initiative aims to lead the industry to build an innovative retail store integration platform to resolve the many challenges currently facing the retail industry, transform the retail experience, and work with ecosystem partners to move towards a new future for the retail industry.

Stacey Shulman, Chief Innovation Officer for Retail, Banking, Hospitality and Education at Intel IoT Division, introduced ORI

No company can do it alone

"We have found that there is a lot of innovation in the retail industry. The speed and quantity of change are now geometric. Therefore, Intel became the first company in the industry to establish the Open Retail Initiative (ORI) earlier this year. Starting today, we will officially announce and implement ORI in China." Ms. Stacey Shulman first announced the decision.

"In the retail industry, we have conversations with more than 500 companies around the world. These companies cover different retail industries, including companies that provide technical support for the retail industry. The common problem for retailers is how to keep up with current technological innovations and enable physical stores to continue to evolve. The questions raised by the technology community are very similar, which is how to keep up with current technological innovations and help solutions continue to evolve." Ms. Stacey Shulman raised the problems currently faced by retail industry participants.

Ms. Stacey Shulman later gave the answer: "Our answer to this question is that no company can do it alone. About two years ago, Intel started such a milestone. We created what was then called the "Responsive Retail Platform" in the Internet of Things. We hoped to develop it into a complete product, but soon found that it was impossible for a single company to truly build an Internet of Things platform that supports the retail industry. Not only us, but the 500 companies we talked to basically had similar views, and a large proportion of them were building their own IoT platforms and came to similar conclusions."

To this end, Intel launched the Intel Open Retail Initiative (ORI). The Intel Open Retail Initiative is an open source initiative focused on the retail industry. The initiative is committed to gathering industry forces to jointly build an innovative retail store integration platform, connect the data of different devices in smart stores, integrate different scenarios of retail applications, and provide users with data analysis and remote operation capabilities, so as to solve the challenges faced by retail platforms at different levels, such as integration, simplification and innovation.

JD.com: The changes brought by EdgeX are obvious

Currently, with the support of Intel's Open Retail Initiative, JD.com has launched a unified retail IoT platform for offline stores - JD Starlink Retail IoT Platform. The platform was developed using Intel's edge computing technology and EdgeX, aiming to connect offline retail terminals and applications to achieve full-link digitalization of the business. The Starlink platform can effectively improve the efficiency of device intervention and management, and provides rich and unified application access specifications and application management, effectively improving the speed of application development and promotion; in addition, the Starlink platform's multi-dimensional data collection, automatic data flow and algorithm intelligent analysis can also provide offline basic data to better achieve data interoperability. JD Starlink Retail IoT Platform can also provide equipment raw data filtering, pre-processing capabilities, and data flow channels to achieve multi-dimensional data interoperability such as stores, equipment, and marketing, assist store marketing decisions, and extend offline data based on JD's human, goods, and field data to break the current situation of offline data islands.

Luo Miao, head of JD Retail Technology Operations Platform

Luo Miao, head of JD Retail Technology Operation Platform, said: "JD Starlink Retail IoT Platform is the first step we have taken after joining the Open Retail Initiative. The platform combines JD's capabilities in AI algorithms with Intel's advantages in edge intelligent gateways to provide the retail industry with a secure, reliable, high-precision, cost-controlled, and easy-to-deploy store digitalization solution. This is a very important step for the digital transformation of the retail industry."

After talking about the application of the new solution and the changes compared with the previous ones, Mr. Luo Miao said: "In the stores where we cooperate with EdgeX, such as JD Home and JD 3C Store, in addition to the increase in turnover, there is also a reduction in costs. For example, if the terminal is deployed independently, the requirements are still relatively high. For example, the camera is relatively expensive, and may cost two thousand yuan each. When deployed in combination with the EdgeX platform, we can use a very cheap solution to combine it, and a single one can cost only seven or eight hundred yuan, which can reduce a lot of costs. Second, based on EdgeX, the combination of algorithms we have made on edge computing can make heat maps and customer flow statistics very accurate. What kind of changes will this bring? For offline stores, traffic is uncontrollable, but it is very particular about which area the flow of people stays in, how the shelves are placed, and what products are displayed. High-precision data support is very useful to help stores manage their own inventory and improve their purchase conversion. We have been very fully confirmed in JD stores, which is why we will continue to expand the scale of cooperation with EdgeX in the future."

VMware and Intel share the same vision of openness, diversity and symbiosis

VMware joined the Open Retail Initiative in January 2019. During this period, Intel and VMware have worked closely together to jointly promote the Open Retail Initiative and accelerate industry collaboration to create a new open, interoperable IoT digital foundation for the retail industry.

In May this year, VMware IoT launched a commercial EdgeX support plan based on VMware Pulse. The plan can provide end-to-end software support for the entire spectrum of IoT components, including open source software, which will better support and help customers develop in the field of IoT. Customers who deploy any combination of Pulse IoT Center, EdgeX Foundry, Photon OS or Liota will receive VMware's professional support for Pulse IoT Center and these free open source software.

Ren Daoyuan, General Manager of VMware China R&D Center

Ren Daoyuan, general manager of VMware China R&D Center, said: "VMware China R&D Center will work closely with Intel RBHE and marketing departments to jointly organize open retail initiative promotion activities, build the EdgeX China community, jointly analyze the pain points and solutions of the retail industry, and explore feasible solutions for EdgeX Distribution."

Ren Daoyuan talked about ROI and said: "Today we are talking about further cooperation on new software platforms, in EdgeX and the general retail industry. Our software cooperation organization is called the Open Innovation Network, which coincides with Intel's Open Retail Initiative in spirit. With an open, diverse and symbiotic mindset, we build a community and ecosystem with our partners. In cooperation, in EdgeX cloud computing, it is not just general retail, but also other industries such as smart manufacturing. In fact, we can innovate in the new generation of software technologies for the Internet of Things and edge computing, and provide more value to customers."

Stacey Shulman, Chief Innovation Officer for Retail, Banking, Hospitality and Education at Intel's Internet of Things Division, said: "We are pleased to see partners like JD.com and VMware join the Open Retail Initiative and work with Intel to break through the transformation of smart retail. Currently, Intel is connecting applications and data in the retail industry through the Open Retail Initiative to better promote the integration of the retail industry chain, thereby resolving industry pain points and building a stronger ecosystem for smart retail."