The world of retail is ever-evolving; existential threats like direct-to-consumer disruption and rapidly changing customer tastes have only made the industry more inhospitable in recent years. In order to stay competitive in this environment, businesses have to move quickly and maintain robust digital strategies. According to Deloitte’s 2020 Retail Industry Outlook, one factor critical to retailers’ success – now and in the future – is embracing “technology and automation to better leverage growth.” Stronger digital strategies allow businesses to bolster e-commerce, expand payment technologies, and make use of AI and machine learning to better cater to customer preferences.
So, now more than ever, retailers need reliable, best-in-class solutions that support these digital transformations. Industry leaders look to Atlassian tools like Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket to support their technical teams. And in turn, these technical teams help their employers innovate and deliver value to customers. In particular, our retail customers turn to Data Center to give them the reliability and performance that they need. Here are a few reasons innovative retailers are choosing Atlassian Data Center products:
Round-the-clock support for fast-moving teams
Velocity is hugely important in the retail industry; increased speed-to-market can provide a critical competitive advantage. And with the rising importance of e-commerce as well as customers’ growing desire for instant gratification through speedy delivery or in-store pickup, retail teams need tools that are steadfastly reliable and always available.
In this day and age, any downtime for tools that support mission-critical processes, like communication with stores and warehouse management, could mean loss of revenue or new business opportunities.
Features like zero-downtime upgrades for Jira Software and Jira Service Desk and read-only mode in Confluence help ensure the reliability and availability of the Atlassian product suite. With the superior level of availability that Atlassian Data Center products provide, teams can move with the speed of the industry.
Tools that grow with the teams that use them
When retailers expand globally, high-performing tools are crucial to the success of large, distributed teams. Whether team growth is happening internally or through third party vendors, CDN support for Data Center products allows admins to accelerate the experience for geographically distributed users and reduce peak load on primary application instances, boosting performance all around.
Even for teams that expand locally or regionally, performance is critical; retailers in particular need productivity tools that move as fast as they do. Atlassian’s Data Center products offer features that ensure exceptional performance, like Jira Software’s custom fields optimizer. With this feature, admins can scan for the custom fields that are affecting performance and remove their global context with one click, ensuring their Jira instance runs smoothly. Data Center makes it easy to improve performance and to deliver dependable tools to teams of all sizes and in any location.
Deployment options for diverse needs
In the highly competitive retail industry, minimizing costs and maximizing flexibility can offer a huge leg up. That’s why we support different options for deploying Data Center editions of Atlassian products. Data Center products can be run in a clustered and non-clustered environment, teams can choose to take advantage of enterprise features out of the box or set up a clustered environment that meets their organization’s specific needs.
Many businesses – retailers included – are also turning to IaaS providers to reduce their internal infrastructure. According to Gartner, IaaS is forecasted to grow 24 percent year-over-year. For those looking to reduce administrative time and costs, and improve administration at scale, we offer support for Kubernetes (K8). Our Helm Charts help you easily deploy your Data Center products on a K8 cluster on a cloud provider of your choice.
Industry-leading retailers like Walmart Labs are already looking to Atlassian’s Data Center products to power their teams with reliable, flexible, and highly performant tools. To learn what Atlassian Data Center can do for retail businesses, get in touch with our Enterprise Sales Team.