Retailers keep sales flowing by working with Flooid and SUSE

Flooid, a leading unified-commerce platform provider, and SUSE have nurtured a partnership that empower retailers to innovate and scale fast. The partnership aims to transfer real-time information seamlessly between data center, the cloud, the store estate, and tens of thousands of devices at the edge.

Retailers moving to the ‘store of the future’ require new levels of speed, flexibility and open innovation, without compromising on security or performance. In this hyper-connected world, their success depends upon transferring real-time information seamlessly from any customer point of interaction — a point of service in a store, a kiosk, online or even through an edge device or sensor — to a cloud service.

This partnership is a true collaboration in which each technology provider enhances the performance of the other. Flooid and its leading unified-commerce platform is helping top tier retail leaders to transform and innovate in the way they sell to customers across multiple retail verticals and channels. SUSE complements Flooid with open source capabilities bringing an additional layer of security and resilience across critical systems, ensuring near-zero vulnerabilities during periods of rapid digital transformation.

Retailers benefit from the partnership by being able to evolve the way they sell and serve the customer, faster, more securely, and with reduced cost and risk. Retailers can try new concepts and scale new capabilities such as walkin-walkout stores, artificial intelligence experiences, self-service models, and modern inventory techniques. The partnership provides retailers with a unified, adaptable commerce platform, and an open architecture that gives them the agility they need to try, test, and scale up new concepts.

The technology behind this partnership is a combination of Flooid’s omnichannel point-of-service (POS) technology and SUSE’s Linux operating system. Business-critical workloads move across cloud and resilient on-premise devices, while containerised applications maximise development agility including in edge use cases, which are of increasing interest to ambitious retailers.

One of the key challenges retailers face is the fast pace of evolving customer expectations. This requires new technical solutions, but to innovate at the necessary speed, retailers need a flexible core rather than a series of monolithic systems that operate in siloes. Merely going digital is not enough, as much of the customer experience differentiation takes place at the edge. Retailers must adopt an end-to-end infrastructure that can handle real-time transactions and insights from tens or hundreds of thousands of endpoints. Additionally, business-critical applications such as the POS platform or ERP need to remain operational around the clock.

Retailers must find a way to improve their operations while reducing costs and ensuring continuity of business. Flooid and SUSE enable retailers to meet these significant challenges.

SUSE and Flooid have been working together since 2008 to help retailers change the way they operate in line with industry trends. Our partnership is truly global, having worked together on projects for retail supermarket, convenience and fast moving consumer goods businesses in the UK, South Africa, Canada and the USA, as well as multiple specialty businesses in Europe.

Retailers can engage directly with the Flooid team knowing the SUSE team is in lock step with Flooid to provide open source-based infrastructure and enhanced security capabilities enabling the fluid transformation of operations and helping retailers “get to great”.

Reach out to the Flooid team at www.flooid.com for more information.