Increasing demand for cross-border ecommerce, high internet penetration, and smartphone adoption in the region are driving retailers to adopt digital technologies and invest in infrastructure upgrades. In turn, this creates a lot of partnership opportunities for services vendors to aid retailers in their digital journey - creating engaging customer experiences and unifying commerce by transforming core business processes.

The retail industry in Asia/Pacific is at the forefront of digital transformation, with investments in DX technologies expected to double by 2019. Reinforcing this trend, we see retailers across Asia/Pacific clearly prioritizing the improvement of their networks, cybersecurity, and datacenters to build foundational capabilities that further expand digital initiatives across their business ecosystems.

“With this trend, service providers and vendors need to adapt their offerings and integrate 3rd Platform technologies with core retail functions to help retailers in the journey to converge their digital and physical channels," says Rijo George Thomas, Senior Market Analyst of IDC's Asia/Pacific Business and IT Services Research.

“Asia has a fast growing middle-class and millennial population, the buying and consumption patterns of whom have evolved to become more tech-enabled. To capture the spend from this growing segment, retailers in Asia are transforming themselves through the use of innovation accelerators such as AI, augmented and virtual reality, robotics, and blockchain to name a few,” says Cathy Huang, Senior Research Manager for Services, IDC Asia/Pacific.

This transformation is multi-faceted, touching on operation, omni-channel, work source, data governance and so forth. To tap into these opportunities in the retail vertical, Services providers should demonstrate deep understanding towards the vertical, and explicitly include the knowledge transfer component in their services engagement, for example providing digital training for retailer organizations' employees.