Zebra shows its stripes in IoT and wireless

Imran Akbar, vice-president & general manager, Enterprise Networks and Communications, Zebra Technologies, and Ryan Goh, vice-president and general manager, Zebra Technologies Asia-Pacific, talk IoT with Vanessa Ching and shares about how wireless is changing the game in retail.

Zebra, traditionally known as a printer company offering customers mobile computers, scanners, specialty printers and RFID, is much more than that.

“While we were a printer company, we started building our strategy around the Internet of Things (IoT) and when Motorola Solutions’ enterprise business was up for sale at that time we thought it was a good complement to our Enterprise Asset Intelligence (EAI) strategy. We think that this is the category that none of our competitors will come close as it takes years to build this category,” says Ryan Goh, vice-president and general manager, Zebra Technologies Asia-Pacific.

According to Zebra, there is a growing reliance on cloud computing and analytics. Research firm Gartner predicts that by 2017, 64% of organisations will be targeting enhanced customer experience as the primary goal of big data projects. Similarly, IDG’s 2014 Cloud Computing Survey shows that some 69% of enterprises currently have apps and/or infrastructure running in the cloud.

The Asia-Pacific region will lead the growth in IoT. Zebra cites that 80% of globally surveyed firms believe that IoT solutions will be the most strategic technology initiative in a decade and 70% of APAC firms have, or will have, an IOT solution in place, compared to 65% globally.

Meanwhile, the Cities in Motion Index Ranking reports that globally, the number of smart cities has increased by 10% from 2014-2015 with Asia-Pacific cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, Singapore, Melbourne and Hong Kong placed within the top 20 cities. Developing countries such as India and Indonesia are also developing their smart cities plan.

But with millions of connected devices, apps, assets, disparate technologies and different use cases providing not enough context on the customer profile, how does a retailer make sense of it?

Delivering EAI
Zebra’s IoT and wireless offerings, called EAI, is built off three mega trends that Zebra had identified — mobility, IoT and cloud — and through three categories — ‘sense, analyse and act’.

On sense, Goh elaborates, citing the example of a retail environment: “Imagine you are a mall operator and you put up these wireless access points. Sensing is when customers enter a mall or retail outlet and they opt to sign into the store’s wireless network and the store detects this.”

“To me, IoT is really about data analytics. When you have your devices connected, it doesn’t end there. It’s the data that you collect and what you do with it.” — Ryan Goh, VP & General Manager, Zebra Technologies Asia-Pacific

On analyse and act, Goh says: “When people talk about IoT, it’s a term people use to describe connected devices. To me, IoT is really about data analytics. When you have your devices connected, it doesn’t end there. It’s the data that you collect and what you do with it. You analyse what type of customer profiles you have, where do they shop, and for how long do they stay in the mall.”

“This sort of data gives the operator and tenants some idea of the kind of promotions they can run to drive customers to their store. It gives them the ability to act upon information to complete the entire omni-channel capability or marketing strategy — be it offline, Internet, mobile or social media and other forms of target marketing. And the glue to Zebra’s EAI platform is the wireless.”

Wireless as IOT glue
Zebra completed the acquisition of Motorala Solutions’ enterprise business a year ago.

“Wireless is becoming a critical part of Zebra’s portfolio because it complements what we are doing in retail. We supply scanners and mobile computers to enable customer interaction and, therefore, the wireless fits in nicely to give retailers the information they need, both ways.”

“Within the retail customer, Zebra looks at three sub-segments. First is traditional IT — these are the people who run the networks and their budgets are getting leaner due to budgets moving from IT to BT (business transformation) but they are expected to do more with less. This is one set of customers who have traditionally bought wireless networks,” says Imran Akbar, vice-president & general manager, Enterprise Networks and Communications, Zebra Technologies.

“The second piece that we cater to the retailer is the store ops. Lastly, what has garnered the most attention in the past two years is the customer engagement side.”

On customer engagement, Akbar notes that, essentially, most of the big data projects are now run by the marketing department. He adds: “The major goal of all these big data projects is how we can better serve the customers. So essentially, the wireless LAN capabilities, features and functionalities are to help these three sets of customers, within a customer.”

Contextual interactions
For example, contextual interactions with a mall operator’s customers can help it to understand customers’ footfall, plan staffing based on peak hours, gain visibility on loyal customers and optimise the store layout.

The mall operator can also get a glimpse of its customers’ likes and dislikes when they are off the property via social listening through Open API Authentication interaction via the customers’ Facebook and Twitter usage, mall loyalty app or other channels, to put together a more comprehensive profile of the customer.

“With the ability to segment customers, EAI provides sharper, insightful customer segmentation. In the old days, retailers turn to wireless more for IT and store ops. But now it is opening up to customer engagement,” says Akbar.

“EAI is a way to enhance the customer experience and engage the customer in real time. It’s not pure vanilla customer engagement. It’s contextual engagement. So it’s not just ‘somebody’ entering the store, it’s Customer A entering the store. And here’s what Customer A’s history is and Customer A’s likes and dislikes.”

An edge for brick-and-mortar
Traditionally, any gathering of customer information would be through survey or feedback forms. Brick-and-mortar stores had no way of knowing their customers’ profiles or real-time shopping habits.

“I would say the only way to know the customer’s real-time activities is through the wireless aspect of the network,” says Akbar. “For example, in the US, when I go to Amazon.com, there is a whole rich history of what I have reserved, what I like or what I bought. Brick-and-mortar retailers had no visibility. What wireless is doing is providing them those capabilities, applications and use cases.”

“Retailers can now compete with the dotcoms, and not only compete, but they can now enable their own dotcom in an omnichannel-centric way.” — Imran Akbar, VP & General Manager, Enterprise Networks and Communications, Zebra Technologies

And this would provide more opportunities for the retailer to expand, strategise and innovate.

He points out: “Retailers can now compete with the dotcoms, and not only compete, but they can now enable their own dotcom in an omnichannel-centric way. They can now know when the customers come to the store and when the customers spend time on their website.

“This whole online-offline world is sort of blurring, so it’s this networked capability that’s really what’s leading into that ‘blurring’. It gives a lot of data to the retailers to interact with customers and therefore increase their revenue.”

Mobile marketing
Sitting within EAI, MPact is Zebra’s hybrid mobile marketing solution that provides indoor geo-locationing with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (BLE). It shows the person’s presence (when the person arrives and exits the building), zoning (when the person enters or exits various departments), and position (the actual location). The Wi-Fi layer provides a 3m-5m accuracy and is ideal for presence and zone (by department), while the Bluetooth smart layer provides a 1m accuracy and pinpoint location to enable the most personalised services.

ABI Research 2014 gives Zebra’s MPact a 10 out of 10 rating for hybrid approach, and being the first Wi-Fi access point vendor to also support BLE beacons.

“MPact essentially mixes both Wi-Fi and BLE to give you a hybrid technology to provide the basic information — which is the XY coordinate. It also has a very robust API framework so that it interacts with applications. For example, with a shopping list app, MPact can tell you which product is in which aisle.”

“The opportunities for brick-and-mortar are now exploding. They can now compete with the e-commerce guys. Zebra plays a big role in each of these cases. We feel very good about where we are headed and APAC business especially has seen tremendous growth,” adds Akbar.