Cybera Blog

Congratulatulations to Captain D’s, America’s #1 fast-casual seafood leader, for hitting record-breaking system-wide average unit volumes four years in a row. In a market experiencing fierce competition from alternative dining formats such as UberEats, Google Express, Blue Apron and gourmet food trucks and plagued by flat or negative growth, it’s no small feat to achieve a system-wide same-store sales increases. How did they do it?

Cloud migration is no longer a tenuous proposition for the retail and restaurant sectors - it has emerged as a competitive business strategy. A Gartner study identified cloud migration as a strategic technology trend from 2015 through 2017. In fact, cloud migration might be the key to infusing your core business with the cash you need to grow revenues and gain market share.

Cybera released the results of its Retail Realities survey of retail professionals at Retail’s BIG Show or NRF 2017. The survey of more than 50 retail professionals found that many retailers lack the necessary IT staff at the store level to ensure proper solution implementation and security. Additional findings from the Retail Realities survey included...

Customer experience management or CXM is hard to do. It requires vision, a strategy, technology integration, good business models and above all a fully committed company culture. And while you’re busy doing all that, you can never lose sight of the end goal. If you want fully engaged customers, you’ve got to follow the rules.

McDonald’s is expanding a pilot program tested in Europe to more than 500 locations in North America. They are investing heavily is rewiring the guest experience by installing digital menu boards that feature entrees based on time-of day and kiosk self-serve ordering stations. In addition, they’re adding mobile payment to their smartphone app, which has been downloaded by 16 million people. One skeptical analyst said, “The reason people go to the store is not for the kiosk. It’s for the food.” But McDonald’s is betting on the entire user experience as the driver for repeat business and revenue growth.

The time-to-market advantages of software-defined wide-area-networks (SD-WAN) and the dramatic cost reduction realized by replacing MPLS networks with inexpensive broadband are becoming more widely known. What’s less understood is other significant network considerations, particularly when deploying SD-WAN at scale. In this multi-part blog on scaling SD-WAN, we share what we have learned from deploying SD-WAN to more than 60,000 sites.

While every sector is under attack, retail serves as a compelling example because it is characterized by a high number of distributed sites processing a high volume of transactions. Thus, retail finds itself in the crosshairs of the cybercriminal, incurring 2.7 times more attacks than the next leading industry, finance. Retail is a target-rich environment for security breaches because of the high ratio of payoff vs. effort. Each year millions of retail outlets process billions of transactions...

These days, restaurants are being hit from all sides. Discretionary income is down for many households and restaurant operators are forced to find new ways to earn the loyalty of the twenty-first century diner, and increasingly that means going digital to create an engaging, personalized experience from soup to nuts and beyond. Apps can allow diners to place orders, play games, pay the check and more right at the table, but this also opens the threat of an online security breach.

Current retail trends, specifically the steady increase in online revenue at the expense of brick-and-mortar revenue, might lead some of us to believe it’s an “online only” future. However, Scott Galloway, founder and CEO of L2, took a different stance. “Single-channel retail is dead, either online or brick-and-mortar. Only multi-channel retailers will survive.” To be absent from a channel is to be invisible to customers who prefer that channel. Far from being a dire picture of the future, this is actually good news for brick-and-mortar retailers…