Vouching for the retail industry, Intel recently unveiled the new Intel® Responsive Retail Platform (Intel® RRP) designed exclusively to take retail to the next level. It intends to do so by taking retail to an era of highly efficient personalized shopping and intelligently lead business. This announcement supports Intel’s wider efforts to integrate IoT and other technologies into retail.

It has also committed an investment of more than $100 million over the next five years in the retail industry, further boasting its intention of unifying every part of the retail operations and solving longstanding business challenges.

As addressed by Intel CEO Brian Krzani in Retail’s BIG show, the new horizontal platform fosters the creation of highly flexible, scalable and innovative solutions, bringing retail hardware, software, APIs and sensors in a standardized way.

As the retail IoT market is reportedly projected to reach $35.64 billion by 2020, the retailers are increasingly turning towards IoT solutions to drive operational efficiencies and create new and exciting customer experiences, both in the store and online.

And rightly tapping onto this opportunity, the quicker and cost effective Intel Responsive Retail Platform can be used across all types of retail businesses to integrate islands of technologies across their stores and uncover new business insights.

Key features of Intel® RRP:

• It enables real-time, automated actions for store employees, products and customers 

• It has the ability to significantly reduce cost and time to deploy new store services
• Unified platform that eliminates islands of technology across brick and mortar and online stores 

• Simplified on-boarding process for deploying and maintaining new sensors for the store. Through a robust ecosystem, the Intel RRP can quickly and efficiently be scaled to fit the needs of the retailer. Additionally, the standardization enables the rapid development and deployment of new IoT services from a multitude of suppliers. 


The IoT play in building responsive, customer-centric, smart and connected retail:

Aiming to transform the retail industry to drive new customer experiences, deliver real-time insights and create a connected and unified environment, Intel is collaborating with a diverse ecosystem of retailers such as Avery Dennison, ByReveal, Honeywell, Fujitsu, JDA, RetailNext, SAP and SATO.

The Intel Responsive Retail Platform which uses RFID, video, radio and other sensors would enable easy, holistic integration and deliver a 360-degree viewpoint of retail from the store floor through the supply chain, and deliver real-time, actionable insights.

Designed to address the industry’s toughest challenges, Intel is developing a comprehensive end- to-end portfolio for the retail industry that incorporates the wide breadth of technology necessary for advanced computing, customer experience, resource deployment, communication and deep learning that has unmatched scalability and security spanning brick and mortar, cloud infrastructure, and data center.

Intel is uniquely positioned to enable every segment of the smart and connected world – powering the majority of the world’s data centers, connecting hundreds of millions of IoT devices and fulfilling the promise of always-on, 5G connectivity, deep machine learning, and security and privacy.


The integrated technologies that come with Intel Responsive Retail Platform:

Intel based Retail sensors, Gateway and Cloud forms the crux of Intel RRP. The sensors enable data ingestion from numerous sources in the retail store in a simple cost effective manner.

The Gateway finds, configures, controls and interacts with the Intel Responsive Retail Sensors over Ethernet without third-party middleware. Provided by HP* and based on Intel® CoreTM i7 or Intel® Xeon® processors, the gateway connects to the cloud via the internet using a wired network, wireless or 3G/LTE cellular network.

Whereas cloud application is facilitated as an open-source analytics platform-as-a-service (PaaS). This cloud-based, horizontal platform features an integrated stack that reduces complexity and gives greater control to businesses.

Simbe Robotics’ Tally, powered by Intel:

Also making a debut into the industry was Simbe Robotics’ Tally, the world’s first robotic autonomous shelf auditing and analytics solution for retail, which was demonstrated by Krzanich at Retail’s Big Show. Tally works in concert with retail associates by arming them with information to ensure the store’s products are always stocked, in the right place and displaying the correct price tag. The robot operates safely during normal store hours alongside shoppers and employees, and doesn’t require any infrastructure changes to the store.

Tally is powered by an Intel® Core™ i7 processor-based Intel® NUC and uses a number of Intel® RealSense™ cameras to help understand the world around it and navigate the store safely.