Today we continue to look at emerging trends in Data storage. Retail companies are increasingly relying on data access services rather than databases. This lets them decouple their business layer from the data access and persistence layer. In this domain, they can quickly implement new business requirements, seasonal campaigns and recommendation algorithms. While traditionally these data access and database services have been hosted right out of the relational stores, companies have started adopting big data.  Moreover the data access services to big data are also no longer necessarily with the retail companies as consolidators and even database offerings have improved to take advantage of this emerging trend. MongoDB is one such data services provider that powers the customer facing companies in a comprehensive way. We take a look at this big picture.
Customer facing companies have comparmentalized the handling of user data from channels, stores, mobile devices, website and contact center.  The channels include marketplace such as online retail companies. The stores include point of sale registers and kiosks. The mobile devices include smartphone and tablets. The website includes a variety of landing pages for customers. The contact center includes customer support options. Furthermore, when users login, they do so with the logins from their social engineering applications and are not necessarily bound to the accounts of a specific store.
MongoDB enables this integration with social engineering applications with application servers while also enabling data and service integration for the said user data inflow with APIs for data and services. Web servers may also be made available for any siloed or sweeping data access. At the heart of their store, they can categorize data based on merchandising, content, inventory, customer, channel, sales and fulfilment, insight and social. Out of these merchanding, inventory, customer and insight are the most heavily used for peak holiday sales season.  The supply chain management system and data warehouse require data flows from this backend. The former is used by suppliers for and necessary for the smooth operation of data access and persistence for holiday shopping. The latter is used to power analytics. The merchandising, inventory, customer and insight information management systems enable critical business workflows in the areas of market/offer, sell/fulfill and insight. The market/offer functions includes guide, offer, semantic search, recommend, rule based decisions, pricing and coupons. The sell/fulfill include orders, payments, fraud detection, fulfilment and business rules.  The insight involves session capture and activity monitoring. We review some of these in detail in the next few posts.
Courtesy: MongoDB.