Broadcasting live from IBM Pulse in Las Vegas, theCUBE co-hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante took the opportunity to talk to the thought leaders, the executives, analysts and the customers at the event, shedding light on the current issues in the tech industry. Furrier confessed he loved having analysts in theCUBE, because of their often “in-your-face” attitude.

One such analyst, Leslie Hand, currently a Research Director with IDC, agreed to sit down with SiliconANGLE’s CEO and Wikibon’s Co-founder and Chief Analyst, debating the overlapping sector of tech and retail and the implications it has for IBM in particular, and the future of the business in general.

“You cover retail and IBM has been covering the retail business ever since it was founded,” noted Furrier. “Now, more than ever, retail is smoking hot. Please talk about the consumerization of IT, the consumerization of the consumer and how it changes everything.”

“We’ve come so much further down the path towards the Minority Report vision of not even needing retail anymore,” joked Hand. “IBM has been doing business with retailers over a long period of time. Half of the retails in the US use IBM’s POS as their foundation.”

“The customers’ expectations are changing too,” stated Furrier. “They now have QR codes, Amazon is talking about drones delivering packages, there’s rumors about just-in-time delivery, Sunday delivery and so on.”

Reshaping retail

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“How is IBM leveraging their footprint?” Furrier asked. “What do they need to do to be successful with the cloud powering the edge of the network – to be smarter, faster and more personalized?”

“They need to become more nimble and more agile, thinking about the customers as the center of their world. It’s no longer a product-driven organization, therefore they need to make investments to do more personalized, contextualized interactions with each and every customer,” replied Hand. “They need to deliver from each and every employee within their organization more value that’s nimble and agile.”

If you are operating in a world where the complexity of what you have to deliver (in order to do business and to enable this rich and engaging customer experience) has radically changed, then you have to know how to deliver that.

• The race against Amazon

“Where do you stand on ‘Amazon as a retailer’?” asked Vellante. “Are they the gold standard of the industry that everyone is trying to chase?”

Hand is adamant that the race “is definitely not over. Everybody thinks of Amazon as something they need to chase. Every retailer has to consider Amazon as the formidable competitor.”

However, in Hand’s opinion, “there’s not yet a foregone conclusion that Amazon is going to persist to be better. There’s lots of projections about how fast they are going to grow and how they are going to chase Wal-Mart in terms of billions of dollars of sales, and how they are going to achieve that by 2020.”

“There’s a whole lot of room around delivering a rich, engaging experience that combines both physical and digital,” thinks Hand. “There is huge value in the physical store. Customers like to shop. Sometimes it’s about buying something you need, other times is touching and exploring, and talking to real people.”

Omni-channel : servicing retailers

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Vellante wanted to talk next about “Omni-channel”, a term that Hand is credited with coining. “What is Omni-channel to you and what is the root of that term?”

“Omni-channel describes the retailer’s drive towards serving the customer anytime, anywhere, any way,” explained Hand.

“What a retailer has to do from a technology perspective in an Omni-channel world, is:

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• do more integration around all of the things they do across channels
• make better use of their assets, creating richer experiences.”

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“How many is Omni?” pressed on Vellante.

“As we described it right now, Omni-channel is four channels:

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1. Physical store
2. Online
3. Mobile
4. Catalogue

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All of that is coming together, becoming one, and that’s the whole point of Omni – it’s one,” explained Hand.

• Where cloud fits the new retail vision

“How does cloud play into this whole thing?” asked Vellante.

“In order for the retailer to be as agile and nimble and to serve up the set of services that are in fact Omni-channel, they need to figure out ways to drive cost out of the business, ways to consistently engage the customers, etc.,” Hand replied.

Traditionally they ran one set of systems inside the store and another online, and on the back-end, from a business model perspective, they had separate people running separate parts of the business. “That is not sustainable, long-term,” warned Hand.

“What’s the role of Big Data?” asked Furrier. “How do you vector it out of the retail, how do you frame it and what is your advice to your clients?”

“The first thing a retailer will say to you is ‘I have always had Big Data‘. The problem is, they have never utilized it,” pointed out Hand. “When we’re talking about Big Data, we’re not talking about how much data we can store, but about ways to leveraging this data better, as well as leveraging other types of data, serving up a better customer experience.”

“It’s all about the integration, bringing these disparate bits of data together and applying decision processors against them to actually automate and make your decisions more actionable,” concluded Hand.