With over 20 million smart labels deployed to date, SES-imagotag expects to reach 50 million connected labels by the end of the year and intends to continue to grow its retail IoT platform up to 500 million connected devices in 5 years, providing its customers with unprecedented amounts of instore real-time data.
Smart ESL at the core of retail’s digital revolution
O2O (offline to online) convergence is driving a massive wave of digital transformation in global retail. E-commerce giants Amazon, Alibaba and JD.com have made numerous investments in brick & mortar retailers, showing to the world that the future of retail is omni-channel. Physical stores will remain at the core of omni-channel commerce but they need to leverage digital technologies to increase efficiency and improve shopper experience. The Internet of Things (IoT) will completely revitalize these undervalued physical assets and transform them into highly automated, data-driven, ultra-efficient connected and interactive environments. The combination of ultra-low power IoT communication infrastructure, smart digital labels, sensors, computer vision, Artificial Intelligence and big data analytics will be the core enabler of this revolution. Smart retail labels will be the backbone technology of store digitalization. The number of connected retail labels will explode from 300m today to several billion units over the next decade, becoming the next generation of pervasive displays.
VUSION’s aim is to provide the next generation retailer and in-store experience creating a real-time digital view of the shelf and shoppers and a digital clone of the store. It’ is also the fusion of hardware and software to create a holistic solution and make connected labels a gateway to cloud-based store automation and shopper engagement applications. The VUSION Retail IoT Cloud platform offers retailers a unique set of features to improve efficiency and enhance the in-store customer experience, through its advanced big data, consumer engagement, intelligent shelf and data analytics capabilities.
VUSION aims at providing a unified in-store IoT open infrastructure to enable:
- Ultra-low-power connectivity with all wireless devices and sensors in stores
- API / Cloud based collaboration between retailers, brands and partners, sharing the instore IoT-collected data (shelf data, shopper data, …).
World’s largest Retail IoT deployment
SES-imagotag has installed over 160 million ESLs in 16,000 stores to date, 50% of all ESLs worldwide. This includes 50 million NFC-ready interactive labels. While most legacy installations are on-premise, limiting the ability to leverage digital displays for new use cases beyond pure pricing automation (geolocation, advertising, shelf monitoring, NFC connectivity, pricing intelligence…), the new installed base is moving rapidly to the cloud. In May 2018, SES-imagotag reached over 20 million cloud-connected labels, with this number expected to rise to 50 million by the end of 2018, representing the largest Retail IoT deployment worldwide.
This considerable connected ESL installed base will open a large potential market for SES-imagotag’s retail applications and those of its partner ecosystem (such as Microsoft, SAP, Panasonic, Wirecard, Dassault System, Diebold Nixdorf, Telefonica…) in merchandizing, supply chain optimization, digital marketing, data analytics.
SES-imagotag’s target is to reach over half a billion (500,000,000) connected smart ESLs in 5 years on the VUSION Retail IoT Cloud.