Cegid, an international enterprise management and vertical software vendor specializing in merchandise management and point-of-sale solutions for specialty retailers - including Quiksilver, Ted Baker and Devanlay Lacoste - is launching its retail management solution, Yourcegid Retail, now available, on-demand, via the cloud.
The all-inclusive, monthly subscription based software (Software as a Service (SaaS)), will allow retailers to quickly adopt retail IT best-practices and processes without the need for such large upfront IT investment costs that are typically associated with so many IT implementations today.
This says Cegid, makes the new ‘fast fix’ solution ideally suited to many small to medium sized retailers, who are looking for all the advanced functionality, but simply can’t afford to dedicate a lot of time and resources on continual maintenance and upgrades. The new best-in-class proven retail SaaS solution is being showcased at the 2013 NRF show on January 14-15, in New York, Expo Level 3, on booth 2533.
“We’re finding an increasing number of smaller retailers wanting help growing their businesses, without necessarily being able to front heavy, long term investments into IT infrastructure,” says Tania Oakey, Marketing Director for Retail at Cegid. “Smaller retailers in particular just need to concentrate on their core activities of buying and selling.”
The Yourcegid Retail web-based solution includes a range of tools to assist with point-of-sales, merchandise and inventory management, customer loyalty, business reporting and analytics.
“Many retailers are put off by the perceived scale and upfront costs of a big IT implementation and are concerned that benefits often take too long to materialize,” says Oakey. “Yet the flip side of not having any retail systems in place and using nothing but basic spreadsheets to manage thousands of products is far from ideal. So we’re seeing more and more retailers looking for a packaged, scalable solution that’s not too complex. They want something based on a fixed price that grows with the business and offers absolute security.”
Cegid has been offering SaaS solutions for several years in Europe, to both larger and smaller retailers, including successful deployments at ASICS sportswear and Louis Pion watches. Cegid has a strong foundation in SaaS in other industries too, notably in manufacturing, finance and public sector IT.
Research by IDC predicts that by 2015, one of every seven dollars spent on packaged software will be through the cloud or SaaS model. Representing a rapid annual growth rate of 27.6% - over four times the projected growth for the worldwide IT market as a whole, at just 6.7% - the accelerated growth in cloud adoption is partly attributed to the popularity of mobile devices, especially in retail.
Cegid will be showcasing at NRF its range of Omnichannel and mobile POS solutions running on multiple devices, including tablets and smart phones, which are increasingly being used for processing transactions, or checking for inventory across multiple channels.
