Platform architecture for omnichannel retail

The retail landscape for brick and mortar companies transitioning to digital is incredibly complex. Saddled with extensive legacy systems that impinge rapid development capabilities, retailers need an architecture that melds the new with the old. Joel Crabb shares a platform architecture for retailers to compete in this new world.

How do legacy brick and mortar retailers upgrade their technology and compete in today’s fast evolving retail landscape? These retailers often find it impossible to integrate their vast legacy of thousands of disparate systems into a single architecture that drives technical and business strategy. However, an architecture created around the concepts of platforms and tenants offers a possible solution. Drawing on his experience as chief architect at Target, Joel Crabb shares a platform architecture for omnichannel retail that will organize and fuel the next generation of systems. The architecture takes into account both the operations of a multibillion dollar digital channel paired with a 1,800+ store footprint and associated supply chain and merchandising systems. Joel also demonstrates how to map the systems of an entire company into the platform framework in a matter of days. With a combination of microservice-based APIs, distributed data systems, and cloud patterns, we can encompass all systems of a retail company and integrate them together through distributed events. By clearly defining system types and their place in the platform, enterprise architecture moves beyond simply governance and technology specification into enterprise technical strategy.