ERP Insights >> Magazine >> February - 2016 issue
The Growing Impact of IT in E-Commerce Sector
Author : Shamik Sharma, Chief Technology Officer & Product Officer, Myntra Designs Private Limited
Friday, February 19, 2016
Myntra is an Indian e-commerce company of fashion and casual lifestyle products, headquartered in Bangalore. Founded in 2007, Myntra.com has merged with Flipkart in 2014 to compete against Amazon and other established offline retailers like Future Group, Aditya Birla Group and Reliance Retail
The e-commerce sector has seen an unmatched growth over the past few decades. According to the research firm Gartner, India is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets, budding at approximately 60-70 percent per year. This evolution of e-commerce sector has largely been driven by the intensified usage of devices like smartphones, PCs and easy internet access which has led to increase in online consumer base. With the growing mobile penetration in the country, there has been an increase in the customer accessibility to online shopping portals causing an escalation of the Indian e-commerce market.
IT influence on E-commerce
Information Technology has created an unprecedented opportunity for new e-commerce companies. Being an online player, everything that we do here in Myntra is based on technology. So, IT is one of the core functions in the company. Though a lot of challenges are faced, I'd rather call them as opportunities for us. Today, as a lot of people are coming online, we have to scale up our systems, our servers, monitoring systems and our capabilities at a very fast rate to keep up with the growth that is happening with millions of people coming online over their smartphones and wanting to have a good experience.
The second big opportunity is that all of these customers' demands create a lot of data from both, the suppliers as well as from the customers and what they are interacting with. So, companies want to be able to take all of this data, make sense out of it and use it to give a personalized experience to our customers. These are two big things where technology is playing in response to the opportunities that are getting created.
Each IT trends ends up leaving an impact on different part of e-commerce business models. Here are the current IT trends that are gaining traction in e-commerce:
1.Mobile Awareness: Several companies are moving towards a more real-time transparent communication concerning business metrics so as to take required actions through their smartphones itself. Though a large number of executives are on the move, they also want to see the data about how their business is doing and being capable of taking the required actions. With growing mobile awareness, all of these kinds of things which used to be executed through e-mail or complex ERP systems; we see all that becoming very light-weight, real time and mobile-friendly.
2.Analytics: Analytics is playing a bigger and bigger role in all IT systems. Like most of the decision support systems, analytics is turning out to be much more accessible to every employee in the company. Almost everyone today has access to data and there is a lot more transparency in all organizations.
3.Machine Learning and Data Sciences: With the growth of the e-commerce market, the number of small and medium size businesses is growing at an impulsive rate. Data sciences and big data allow small scale companies also to protect themselves from online fraudsters. This is the next wave and there is a lot of interesting stuff companies are doing like applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and data sciences.
4.Cloud Computing in Ecommerce: Cloud is very important for e-commerce companies as all the servers are based out in cloud. So, if you see that suddenly the traffic has doubled or tripled or you have a sale that goes up ten times, you need a lot more servers for a very short period. So, having a cloud based system allows flexibility at a good cost to scale up the systems when needed and to scale down when not needed.
5.Big Data: Big Data is extremely voluminous, so you need to have a lot of cheap storage and you need to act on it and run processing on it at a large scale. Again, this is an area where cloud helps because when you need to run an analysis job, that's when you get the servers.
Technology in new-age product companies like Myntra is making a big difference in customers' life. In India, IT is mostly thought of as helping the organization instead of IT being considered as helping the customers. To cope up with today's always-on, always-with-you digital environment and to keep ahead with the competitors, companies need to be fast and more responsive towards customers. And that is where IT implementations can act as a major game-changer. (As told to Deepshikha Singh)
The Growing Impact of IT in E-Commerce Sector
Author : Shamik Sharma, Chief Technology Officer & Product Officer, Myntra Designs Private Limited
Friday, February 19, 2016
Myntra is an Indian e-commerce company of fashion and casual lifestyle products, headquartered in Bangalore. Founded in 2007, Myntra.com has merged with Flipkart in 2014 to compete against Amazon and other established offline retailers like Future Group, Aditya Birla Group and Reliance Retail
The e-commerce sector has seen an unmatched growth over the past few decades. According to the research firm Gartner, India is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets, budding at approximately 60-70 percent per year. This evolution of e-commerce sector has largely been driven by the intensified usage of devices like smartphones, PCs and easy internet access which has led to increase in online consumer base. With the growing mobile penetration in the country, there has been an increase in the customer accessibility to online shopping portals causing an escalation of the Indian e-commerce market.
IT influence on E-commerce
Information Technology has created an unprecedented opportunity for new e-commerce companies. Being an online player, everything that we do here in Myntra is based on technology. So, IT is one of the core functions in the company. Though a lot of challenges are faced, I'd rather call them as opportunities for us. Today, as a lot of people are coming online, we have to scale up our systems, our servers, monitoring systems and our capabilities at a very fast rate to keep up with the growth that is happening with millions of people coming online over their smartphones and wanting to have a good experience.
The second big opportunity is that all of these customers' demands create a lot of data from both, the suppliers as well as from the customers and what they are interacting with. So, companies want to be able to take all of this data, make sense out of it and use it to give a personalized experience to our customers. These are two big things where technology is playing in response to the opportunities that are getting created.
Each IT trends ends up leaving an impact on different part of e-commerce business models. Here are the current IT trends that are gaining traction in e-commerce:
1.Mobile Awareness: Several companies are moving towards a more real-time transparent communication concerning business metrics so as to take required actions through their smartphones itself. Though a large number of executives are on the move, they also want to see the data about how their business is doing and being capable of taking the required actions. With growing mobile awareness, all of these kinds of things which used to be executed through e-mail or complex ERP systems; we see all that becoming very light-weight, real time and mobile-friendly.
2.Analytics: Analytics is playing a bigger and bigger role in all IT systems. Like most of the decision support systems, analytics is turning out to be much more accessible to every employee in the company. Almost everyone today has access to data and there is a lot more transparency in all organizations.
3.Machine Learning and Data Sciences: With the growth of the e-commerce market, the number of small and medium size businesses is growing at an impulsive rate. Data sciences and big data allow small scale companies also to protect themselves from online fraudsters. This is the next wave and there is a lot of interesting stuff companies are doing like applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and data sciences.
4.Cloud Computing in Ecommerce: Cloud is very important for e-commerce companies as all the servers are based out in cloud. So, if you see that suddenly the traffic has doubled or tripled or you have a sale that goes up ten times, you need a lot more servers for a very short period. So, having a cloud based system allows flexibility at a good cost to scale up the systems when needed and to scale down when not needed.
5.Big Data: Big Data is extremely voluminous, so you need to have a lot of cheap storage and you need to act on it and run processing on it at a large scale. Again, this is an area where cloud helps because when you need to run an analysis job, that's when you get the servers.
Technology in new-age product companies like Myntra is making a big difference in customers' life. In India, IT is mostly thought of as helping the organization instead of IT being considered as helping the customers. To cope up with today's always-on, always-with-you digital environment and to keep ahead with the competitors, companies need to be fast and more responsive towards customers. And that is where IT implementations can act as a major game-changer. (As told to Deepshikha Singh)
The e-commerce sector has seen an unmatched growth over the past few decades. According to the research firm Gartner, India is one of the fastest growing e-commerce markets, budding at approximately 60-70 percent per year. This evolution of e-commerce sector has largely been driven by the intensified usage of devices like smartphones, PCs and easy internet access which has led to increase in online consumer base. With the growing mobile penetration in the country, there has been an increase in the customer accessibility to online shopping portals causing an escalation of the Indian e-commerce market.
IT influence on E-commerce
Information Technology has created an unprecedented opportunity for new e-commerce companies. Being an online player, everything that we do here in Myntra is based on technology. So, IT is one of the core functions in the company. Though a lot of challenges are faced, I'd rather call them as opportunities for us. Today, as a lot of people are coming online, we have to scale up our systems, our servers, monitoring systems and our capabilities at a very fast rate to keep up with the growth that is happening with millions of people coming online over their smartphones and wanting to have a good experience.
The second big opportunity is that all of these customers' demands create a lot of data from both, the suppliers as well as from the customers and what they are interacting with. So, companies want to be able to take all of this data, make sense out of it and use it to give a personalized experience to our customers. These are two big things where technology is playing in response to the opportunities that are getting created.
Each IT trends ends up leaving an impact on different part of e-commerce business models. Here are the current IT trends that are gaining traction in e-commerce:
1.Mobile Awareness: Several companies are moving towards a more real-time transparent communication concerning business metrics so as to take required actions through their smartphones itself. Though a large number of executives are on the move, they also want to see the data about how their business is doing and being capable of taking the required actions. With growing mobile awareness, all of these kinds of things which used to be executed through e-mail or complex ERP systems; we see all that becoming very light-weight, real time and mobile-friendly.
2.Analytics: Analytics is playing a bigger and bigger role in all IT systems. Like most of the decision support systems, analytics is turning out to be much more accessible to every employee in the company. Almost everyone today has access to data and there is a lot more transparency in all organizations.
3.Machine Learning and Data Sciences: With the growth of the e-commerce market, the number of small and medium size businesses is growing at an impulsive rate. Data sciences and big data allow small scale companies also to protect themselves from online fraudsters. This is the next wave and there is a lot of interesting stuff companies are doing like applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and data sciences.
4.Cloud Computing in Ecommerce: Cloud is very important for e-commerce companies as all the servers are based out in cloud. So, if you see that suddenly the traffic has doubled or tripled or you have a sale that goes up ten times, you need a lot more servers for a very short period. So, having a cloud based system allows flexibility at a good cost to scale up the systems when needed and to scale down when not needed.
5.Big Data: Big Data is extremely voluminous, so you need to have a lot of cheap storage and you need to act on it and run processing on it at a large scale. Again, this is an area where cloud helps because when you need to run an analysis job, that's when you get the servers.
Technology in new-age product companies like Myntra is making a big difference in customers' life. In India, IT is mostly thought of as helping the organization instead of IT being considered as helping the customers. To cope up with today's always-on, always-with-you digital environment and to keep ahead with the competitors, companies need to be fast and more responsive towards customers. And that is where IT implementations can act as a major game-changer. (As told to Deepshikha Singh)
