Retail and eCommerce highlights this week includes the launch of Reward Gateway’s new analytics engine. Oracle and Microsoft’s announcement of their new cloud interconnect location in Amsterdam, Commercetools global e-commerce rollout of Glen Dimplex’s brands. Facebook finally becomes payments company as WhatsApp Pay rolls out in India.
Reward Gateway introduces analytics engine
Reward Gateway, an employee engagement company launched its new SmartInsights Analytics engine into its flagship employee engagement platform. The suite of analytics gives HR leaders insight into key indicators, such as overall employee engagement, recognition activity, benefit uptake. It also provides access to social responses that can impact important business metrics, such as employee turnover or customer satisfaction.
The new visual and intuitive dashboards put clear and easy-to-understand data into the hands of HR and managers in real-time. The SmartInsights Analytics Engine also includes a manager results dashboard. The dashboard helps pinpoint areas in need of improvement specific to a team, division or department. This makes managers more productive by combining insights and action in the same application.
The dashboards provide dynamic and up-to-date information about an employee’s overall use of the platform. This includes recognition and reward activity among employees across departments, and discount activities. HR leaders will be able to use this data to address engagement needs in-real-time. They will also be able to identify opportunities to make meaningful changes for the business.
Oracle and Microsoft bring enterprise cloud interoperability
Oracle announced the continued expansion of its cloud interoperability partnership with Microsoft with a new cloud interconnect location in Amsterdam.
Oracle’s new location means enterprises can build workloads that interoperate between Microsoft Azure and Oracle cloud regions within the EU. This announcement builds on an existing partnership and introduction of interconnect in the US announced in June of 2019.
The Oracle-Microsoft interconnect locations are important for businesses wanting to put more of their data and workloads into the cloud. In addition, Oracle and Microsoft provide integrated identity and access management. As a result, customers don’t have to manage multiple passwords when accessing their cloud resources and applications. The collaborative support model and global partner ecosystem add to the enterprise-class experience.
Microsoft and Oracle plan to make the direct interconnect available in additional regions. This includes the US West Coast, in a US Government specific region, in Asia, and more in Europe.
Commercetools to deploy Glen Dimplex global eCommerce sites
Commercetools, a provider in next-generation commerce software has announced a partnership with Glen Dimplex Group. Glen Dimplex is owner of home brands like Morphy Richards, Roberts Radio, and Faber. Glen Dimplex will be using the Commercetools commerce platform to support the global e-commerce rollout for its brands.
One of the reasons Glen Dimplex chose Commercetools was its microservices architecture. This group can take a step-by-step approach to eCommerce development, releasing non-transactional product catalogues first and add transactional capabilities later. It can then test and rollout improvements in controlled stages to ensure it can maximise sales.
Commercetools’ platform allows Glen Dimplex to take ‘a white-label approach’ to e-commerce development and deployment. This means it can build once and redeploy over and over again.
Using Commercetools’ true cloud, headless and API-first commerce platform, Glen Dimplex has already released its first multi-language, multi-region site, for faberfires.com. The company plans to launch a new commerce site for its Roberts Radio brand this year. The company has 30 more sites in the pipeline which will launch on a brand-by-brand basis.
Facebook’s WhatsApp Pay rolls out in India
WhatsApp will be allowed to move forward with WhatsApp Pay – its digital payment platform – in India. The company has 400 million users in the country. It ran a pilot test phase of the payment service in the US for the last two years. It has also piloted the payment app with 1 million users in India in 2018.
WhatsApp has recently secured permission from the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to launch WhatsApp Pay in the country. The company made assurances that it would comply with data localisation norms. Analysts believe WhatsApp is trying to scale its payments service to handle transactions similar to Chinese competitor WeChat.
By integrating the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) standard, payments can be sent electronically without users having to enter their passwords.
Other competitors in this space include Google Pay, Paytm and PhonePe. Google apparently reported more than 240 million UPI transactions via phone in May 2019. Paytm saw 200 million and PhonePe noted 230 million transactions.
