A surprising majority of US retailers – including the likes of L.L.Bean and Orvis – are integrating public cloud services into their core business practices around apps and other technologies as the benefits “significantly outweigh the risks”.
According to the study by Forrester, 67% of retailers now believe that moving to the cloud will allow them shift budgets away from application maintenance towards new areas of innovation. Within this, cloud is becoming the preferred place to modernize core business apps, with firms running B2B or B2C commerce software on cloud platforms doubling since 2014 to 24%. In the same period, mobile apps in the cloud grew to 27% and ERP grew to 26%.
The core of where the cloud can play a role is in mobile sites and applications for the bulk of retailers surveyed, but it is also strong in enterprise relationship management (ERP), e- and m-commerce platform operations and increasingly in web content and experience platform operation.
The study also finds that two in five marketers surveyed for the recent Forrester Wave evaluating enterprise marketing software suites believed they could rely exclusively on the cloud for marketing technology.
