VusionGroup revolutionizes retail, transforming physical stores into data-driven assets together with Microsoft Azure

The global retail industry faces growing pressure

Representing more than 20% of the world’s GDP, physical commerce is the world’s largest industry. Stores represent one sixth of the jobs on the planet, so how retail continues to perform as technology transforms the world will have a strong impact on economies. Not surprisingly, the industry is always under massive pressure – facing price wars, inflation, increases of costs and taxes – which makes sustaining profits over time challenging for retailers. Additionally, consumers continue to expect more from the companies they choose to spend their money on – omnichannel integration, sustainability, transparency, fair trade sourcing, social responsibility – the list goes on and on.

VusionGroup is the world leader in IoT & Data solutions for physical commerce, serving over 350 large retailer groups around the world in Europe, Asia, and North America.  The company’s goal is to reimagine retail and how customers experience it by inventing its own technologies that put business first, drive sustainability, and focus on people and performance.

VusionGroup’s technologies create a positive impact by enabling sustainable and human-centered commerce. “Our mission is to support retailers in their digital transformation to help them better manage and control their stores, making them ultra-connected and ultra-efficient, while enabling a truly omnichannel in-store shopping experience,” says Guillaume Portier, Executive Vice President, Global Partner Management at VusionGroup.

VusionGroup’s technology turns a physical store into a digital asset

By leveraging IoT, data, and generative AI, VusionGroup empowers retailers to reimagine their physical stores into efficient, intelligent, connected, and data-driven assets. The company unlocks higher economic performance, facilitates seamless collaboration across the value chain, enhances the shopping experience, creates better jobs, cultivates healthier communities, and significantly reduces waste and carbon emissions.

“Our solutions help retailers make their physical stores a digital asset,” says Portier. “There are over 20 million stores globally, which has a massive impact on society. Our mission is to invent technologies for physical stores, ensuring that they have a positive impact, and we are working to make stores more sustainable and human-centered.”

VusionGroup’s technology digitalizes stores from floor to ceiling to create a sustainable, hybrid model that’s driven by data in order to provide a better commerce experience – for consumers and associates – while also enhancing profitability. Retailers can turn physical stores into ultra-efficient local fulfillment centers of online orders, so they can identify the right store and product availability in real-time for every online order, leading to shortened delivery time and reduced carbon emissions.

These technologies allow retailers to control costs and improve inventory turnover with real-time visibility and actionable insights, enabling them to maximize on-shelf availability, using automatic monitoring, alerts, and re-orders. A smart, connected infrastructure runs the store seamlessly – from pricing, to inventory management, to merchandising – freeing frontline workers and retailers to focus on what’s next for their business and their customers.

“Our VusionCloud technology is designed to build a physical IoT layer from the cloud to the store,” adds Portier. “It‘s a combination of ultra-low power wireless infrastructure – an IoT infrastructure – where we drive key different kinds of IoT: labels, smart shelves, sensors, displays, plus data and high level software enablement such as cloud-computing, computer vision, AI, AR, and big data.”

With VusionGroup’s advanced retail technology, retailers can enhance brand and customer experiences while also being prepared for shifts in the economy and the flow of market trends by tackling excess inventory, higher costs, and lower margins with retail analytics and IoT solutions that provide actionable insights for real-time improvement.

For instance, VusionGroup recently launched EdgeSense™, a highly innovative digital shelf system to reinvent the shelf-edge. This unique innovation is the result of more than ten years of research and development in smart rails & labels by the Group’s tech labs and brings a completely renewed IoT experience for physical commerce. A harmonious blend of hardware and software, EdgeSense™ combines smart rails, battery-less digital displays with enhanced performance, new location-based services built on VusionOX and VusionCloud, while generating a substantial carbon footprint reduction compared to any existing electronic shelf label solution.

EdgeSense™ is already in the process of being deployed by Fortune 100 company Walmart across their US stores, which will help the retailer continue to be a competitive industry leader while maintaining accurate pricing for their customers and simplifying the jobs of their associates.

Microsoft Azure enables VusionGroup’s global vision to have global reach

VusionGroup started work with Microsoft a few years ago with a clear ambition: building the largest retail IoT cloud platform to power the physical commerce digitization. “Since its inception, this new platform has had massive success and strong adoption” comments Portier. “To date, we serve more than 17,000 stores already and we continuously monitor 81 million IoT devices that generate data and smart actionable actions at the floor, at the shelves. Microsoft Azure has been key in providing what we need to service our customers.”

Azure has global coverage, enabling VusionGroup’s teams to deploy its solutions in various regions around the world. This is key to improving performance and better serving users in different geographic locations. Additionally, Azure provides scalable cloud computing resources that can easily accommodate growing workloads. This is critical because VusionGroup’s cloud platform adoption is fast growing, and the company plans to soon manage up to one billion devices.

“VusionCloud guarantees up to 99.99% uptime,” explains Portier. “Uptime is a critical part of reliability, but another equally important consideration is disaster recovery. With VusionCloud and Azure, our team is available around the clock to guarantee a 4-hour recovery in case of serious issues or anomalies. There is a huge advantage for physical commerce: the risk of disaster is limited and the cost of purchasing, maintaining, and operating backup systems is reduced.”

Portier reports that when looking for the right cloud solution, VusionGroup had also considered Azure’s best-in-class security measures and compliance certifications because that made it suitable for the company’s applications that require high levels of data protection. Additionally, the fact that Azure provides a range of services for machine learning and artificial intelligence allows VusionGroup to incorporate advanced analytics and intelligent capabilities in its solutions.

“Our VusionCloud SaaS applications serve many customers at once,” says Portier. “As a result, we can provide a much higher level of security and reliability than our customers could afford on their own. Thus, they are finding high quality software with exceptional reliability, high-end security, and quicker, less costly deployments.”

These factors, in addition to the decreased burden on internal IT resources, positions the company’s VusionCloud solution as the sophisticated infrastructure retailers are looking for. “The VusionCloud platform is the only platform that gives retailers the full ‘elastic’ power of the cloud to very quickly roll out and manage over time a large number of stores and Retail IoT devices,” says Portier. “Its highly extensible infrastructure can handle several million daily updates in parallel in a timely manner, thereby enabling extremely rapid data integration of over 1 billion items per hour, as well as generating over 100 million images per hour.”

Continuing to expand into the global marketplace

One of the biggest advantages to the Microsoft partnership for VusionGroup is the Microsoft Partner Center. The MPC enables sales development at a global scale and streamlines several business processes to make it easier for Microsoft partners to manage their relationship with Microsoft and their customers.

“Partner Center gives you access to the tools you need to get work done,” mentions Portier. “Through this platform, we can all work together to help selling products and services to mutual customers. It significantly helps to expand our presence in different regions of the globe by leveraging the strengths and networks of Microsoft globally as we continue to expand our business and bring new and important technologies to the retail industry.”

Learn more about VusionGroup on LinkedIn and X.