Dynamic Vertical Solutions to set up 'Retail Centre of Excellence'

16 Jan 2010

Dynamic Vertical Solutions (DVS), a market and technology player in end-to-end integrated and adaptable business management applications, has announced its selection to set up a 'Retail Centre of Excellence' in India by LS Retail. The Retail Centre of Excellence will be fully operational to go live in the first quarter of the next financial year. The Retail Centre of Excellence is an initiative to provide retailers of all sizes insights into usage and application of cutting edge technologies in the retail industry and would showcase an end-to-end solution roadmap for the retail industry. Through the Centre, DVS would demonstrate the strengths of its retail offerings provide thought leadership on industry issues and promote usage of ground breaking technologies making it a centre of learning for the Indian retail community.

Microsoft India, the Indian subsidiary office of Microsoft, has given its full support to this initiative. DVS, which works very closely with Microsoft as one of its primary Principal Partners, will look to support Microsoft Dynamics Partners in India and across the globe to penetrate and support the Indian Retail Market.

"IT is a fundamental backbone of the retail business and our aim to set up the Retail Centre of Excellence is to allow our audience to come down and see what we are offering to them, and check out how it will be beneficial to them," says Rakhee Nagpal, Chairman and MD, Dynamic Vertical Solutions. The Centre's target will be not only big retailers, but also mid or small size businesses who are very large in numbers.

Nagpal is very optimistic about growth and hopes that mid and small size retail players will also proactive in adopting technologies to run their businesses. The objective, according to Nagpal, is to localise solutions, along with developing tools and techniques for retail businesses, training people for using business technologies, consultation for new technology implementation, and for new innovations.

LS Retail sees plenty of action in India's retail space that has triggered the need for newer technology adoption, which will be pushing IT market growth. The need is to tell people how technology would help in managing their businesses, especially newer or relatively unorganised smaller players in this sector, says Nagpal. "DVS plans to customise products to make standard technology pertinent to the particular region or country, which is crucial for the widespread adoption and usage of technology. Addressing taxation and compliance issues would be important areas where we will focus to make solutions good enough to support local businesses," she stresses.

With retail verticals, DVS feels that Food & Grocery would be most lucrative, followed by fashion, hospitality, etc. DVS will be targetting niche various verticals as well. In the Retail Centre of Excellence, they will also allow people to have virtual experience of working in the existing business model using available technology.

DVS has already executed business technologies implementations for prominent retailers including Lilliput, Aditya Birla Retail and Hariyali Kisan Bazaar.

Speaking on the partnership, Gunnar Gunnarsson, CEO of LS Retail, said, “DVS' unparalleled domain expertise and retail industry experience of the Indian and the Indian sub-continent markets have made them the best fit organisation to drive an initiative of this nature forward.”

Congratulating DVS on the setting up of the Retail Centre of Excellence in India, Rajan Anandan, MD, Microsoft India said, “The Retail Centre of Excellence will be a much required platform and space for businesses to interact, learn and adopt best of breed retail technology solutions.”

Through the newly created Retail Centre of Excellence, DVS will deliver business value to retailers seeking to improve their bottom line profitability. The centre will provide a platform for the country’s retail organisations to exchange ideas, develop concepts and showcase scalable, best-of-breed retail solutions to the Indian market. Its focus will be on catering to the business and operational needs of retailers, and demonstrating how technology can streamline and improve business performance. Some of the key activities and initiatives of the Centre will be to:

• Create a technology lab at DVS headquarters through which the LS Retail suite of solutions on Microsoft Technologies will be showcased. This can be utilised for customers, prospective customers, partners, prospective partners, industry associations and so forth.

• Demonstrate sub vertical industry-specific (i.e. telecom, fashion & apparel, food & grocery, electronics etc) solutions across the retail sector.

• Advise companies on IT strategy, solution roadmap and bring in best practices from across the globe to ensure customers derive maximum benefits from retail solutions.

• Conduct audits for on-going/completed retail implementations.

• Produce whitepapers on industry best practices and vertical-specific fact sheets.

• Organise customer events to facilitate knowledge and experience sharing which acts as an educative platform for the Industry.

• Educate and enable partners and select solution development teams on India localisation aspects of LS Retail through workshops, trainings etc to facilitate them providing the best quality service to Indian retailers.

-- Gaurav Kumar