The Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods industry has been disrupted and fragmented by changing customer behaviors, new channels, and new players bringing innovative solutions to the marketplace. This is causing unpredictability in an industry that has been relatively stable over the past half century.  In order to compete, companies are declaring enterprise wide objectives to become more efficient, be more agile to market, and think “innovation first”.

Industry companies are addressing these corporate imperatives by optimizing their technology architectures and shifting to build Data Scientist skill sets. The challenge is that most of these companies are risk adverse and are slow to change, evolve, and innovate.

CPG Cloud Partners has collaborated with other industry interested parties to push the industry standards in this space. We have created a virtual, collaborative community with the mission to prove that Retail/CPG big data can be managed and federated in the cloud. We believe that the industry should publish data to the cloud and share to provide a rich set of base data for insights and further collaboration.

One of our first projects is focused on assessing the 3 main cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and Google) against a retail/CPG dataset. We will be looking at various aspects, including feature/functions, support, scale, and technology – but will focus it on the key industry use cases. The goal of this project will be to publish a white paper that provides the industry with an assessment of these cloud platforms. Our goal is not to assess one platform against the other, but rather provide information for the industry to use as they move to the cloud. We also intend to build out these use cases on the platforms as a means to support our findings.

An example of our initial analysis can be found here: Retail Big Data Report.