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>>The IBM Store Integration Framework is a seamless set of middleware software products designed specifically for retail that integrates a retailer's existing devices and applications as well as future solutions.
Let's start by taking a closer look at the components that make up the framework, and then see how they work together, enabling a flexible, cost-effective infrastructure to transform your store.
IBM WebSphere Remote Server for Retail provides the framework's foundation. Specifically tailored for the retail environment, it enables retail business applications to work together collaboratively in an open standards, scalable J2EE run-time environment that runs on popular retail operating systems.
Next, a series of extensions products provide specific integration points for the kinds of solutions, applications and devices that can revolutionize all aspects of your store. POS Extensions enable you to leverage your existing POS system while also simplifying deployment and integration of new, breakthrough POS solutions.
Included is the IBM Store Integrator, which allows you to incorporate your current IBM 4690 OS-based applications. Digital Media Extensions and Services allow you to take advantage of dynamic digital content for more compelling promotions and a richer shopping experience.
Data Integration Extensions standardize POS and other in-store data for real-time sharing throughout all your applications. And RFID Extensions provide an easy-to-deploy framework to prepare your store to take advantage of pallet level and item level RFID solutions, both now and in the future.
Simply put, the IBM Store Integration Framework is a Services-Oriented Architecture designed specifically for retail. It facilitates automated sense and respond capabilities within your store, integrates multiple customer touchpoints inside and outside of your store, and permits real-time sharing of the massive amounts of data generated -by retailers.
Once you've transitioned your store infrastructure to the Store Integration Framework, deploying new solutions is much easier. They seamlessly snap into the standards-based infrastructure for rapid, cost-effective deployment. But what if you have existing applications that weren't built on open standards?
Fortunately, legacy applications can also be plugged into the framework by building an integration wrapper around them, allowing those applications to share data with other applications, both in store and throughout the enterprise. This major leap in innovation is where the seeds of the true sense and respond store take root.
Once you move from a silo'ed application environment to a standards based integrated environment where data moves seamlessly in real time between applications, incredible new possibilities emerge.
What if your inventory system listened to your POS applications, sensing diminishing product supply, and then responding by triggering automatic replenishment through your order management system? This level of integration also makes it easier to share business logic across applications.
For example, what if you could quickly deploy customer-friendly line-busting capabilities through a new mobile POS solution by enabling it to fully utilize existing POS logic and functionality? Or even leveraging that same in-store POS logic into your online transaction site, delivering true multi-channel capabilities?
The Store Integration Framework's standardized data communication also extends from the store to the enterprise, enabling you to identify trends throughout your store chain, building valuable business intelligence.
The Store Integration Framework can enable remote, centralized installation and updating of applications, as well as remote management of any device in any store, reducing costs since you don't need IT expertise at your individual stores.
This only scratches the surface of the powerful possibilities that exist when you build your store infrastructure on the IBM Store Integration Framework -- possibilities that range from revolutionizing your customers' shopping experience, to increasing employee productivity, to streamlining store operations.
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