Short summary from Pearl Norge – “Innovasjonsdagen 2019”

Bernhard Olsen, Pearl Norge

Pearl Norge held their “Innovasjonsdagen” at the Clarion Hotel, The Hub, in the centre of Oslo. 

See below for a short summary:

This year Pearl Norge moved upmarket and held their “Innovasjonsdagen” at the Clarion Hotel, The Hub, in the centre of Oslo. The format also changed and all presentations were held in the same room, which just about accommodated the close to 70 participants.

The introductions and keynote speech were again held by Pearl’s Bernhard Olsen and Geir Thoresen respectively. Geir’s message this year had a familiar ring to it and provided nothing too cheerful for Norwegian retailers as growth in the retail sector is still largely due to overseas net sales. The programme this year had in addition to retail based presentations, technical presentations, a presentation on change management, customer use cases together with a grand finale from Amazon on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Some highlights were:

• A glimpse of stores of the future particularly from the furniture industry (Bohus)
• SAP’s vision of the intelligent enterprise fuelled by intelligent technologies and creative use of company data
• Turning company data into a competitive advantage including a customer case from Ark Bokhandel (Sannsyn)
• Lindorff helping Intrum scale their credit management solutions in a large, complex environment using a Data Lake and API approach – each country responsible for their own API
• A look at the future of online shopping from Pearl, service/subscription based using components from SAP technology providing a B2Me channel and the role of X and O data
• An evaluation by Komplett of a year in the Cloud on the Microsoft Azure platform and some of the challenges faced such as scaling at peak times (e.g. Black Friday)
• Click and collect services at travel tax free shops will eventually become the most common way of purchasing your duty free
• The views of OMG-Oculos that no companies in Norway use data in a smart way and that the most important communication channel to consumers is still email
• A reality check on moving to the cloud from one of Amazon’s principal technical evangelists where he confirmed that cost is not always less by moving to the cloud

The event was well organised at a hotel venue which clearly specialised in this time of arrangement. So congratulations to Pearl on another year successfully completed with their core of loyal customers who seem well satisfied with the service they are receiving.

Tim Greni SAP, Pearl Innovasjondag

Thomas Willhelmsen, Komplett, Pearl Innovasions dag 

Read Pearl's summary article on this link (In Norwegian)

The author is Martin Brownsword.
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