Here at 10th Magnitude, the holidays are officially over: we’ve replaced all the holiday cookies with our usual healthy snacks (well, almost—we’re still suckers for donuts), and you can duck out for lunch without being mowed down by shoppers.
But the craziness of the holiday season this year, with Hanukkah early and Thanksgiving late (or “Thanksgivingukkuh” as it was dubbed), meant many retailers had to prepare for the holiday rush well before black Friday. I think getting ready for the holiday season in advance is actually a good idea; and as I was avoiding those crazed shoppers, I spent some time thinking about how the cloud can help retailers with the holiday spikes in traffic.
Just for starters, retailers could save a great deal of money if they only paid for the IT they actually use all year instead of paying all year for the extra server capacity needed for during the holiday season. I did a few guest blog posts about cloud and retail and the opportunities for improvements this coming year. Check them out:
- Cloud is 2013’s Holiday Doorbuster: Smooth Your Holiday Cost Spikes with Technology
- Building the Omnichannel: From Marketing Vision to Technical Reality
And let me know what you think. What are some other seasonal challenges we can solve using cloud?
