AppShare Technologies Inc.
Seamless Transition into Retail Digitalization

The death and attempted resurrection of brick-and-mortar stores is a hard-hitting reality of today. However, when a Fortune 100 retail company faced this situation, who did they turn to? AppShare Technologies. This Illinois-based IoT solution provider saved the day by helping turn the retail chain’s brick-and-mortar stores into smart stores. They accomplished this by integrating all touchpoints, ranging from POS to price tags, and creating a new digitalized customer-centric shopping experience in five outlets. The outcome—a 35 percent increase in customer engagement and 67 percent conversion rate. The process was further amplified by introducing virtual mirrors, a digital real-time apparel and accessories trial screen, among several other IoT hardware and software integrations. This is one of the several success stories orchestrated by AppShare.

In the present-day global retail market, organizations that aim to digitalize their operations and offerings are stalled by three factors, according to Ashok Sukumaran, founder and chief strategy officer of AppShare. The primary challenge that organizations face is the dearth of IoT-compatible hardware. With a major part of their hardware being legacy, decision-makers are looking at investing time, money, and resources into a complete digital makeover. Adding to this challenge, several organizations fear their security standpoint, which they believe can be compromised by connecting touchpoints through the IoT. Furthermore, the connectivity between the internal touchpoints to calibrate and circulate data is low. With the aim to bring an end to these predicaments, Ashok pulled AppShare, previously a big data and analytics firm, into the IoT realm to resolve the prevalent businesses challenges.

Ashok elucidates that AppShare does not take an off-the-shelf approach since they believe that one product cannot solve problems holistically. “Instead, every solution offered to the customer is tailor-made based on their existing infrastructure, challenge, industry, and use case,” he adds.

Engaging a diverse array of subject matter experts (SME), AppShare provides customers with suitable solutions. The IoT provider takes a consultative approach by carefully examining the customer’s requirements and data. Bringing in sensors and hardware- and chip-driven software, AppShare turns any environment into a digitally empowered and viable ecosystem. In addition to hardware and software integration, the organization also understands and analyzes the data flowing through the infrastructure. As a means to empower this data, AppShare builds cloud-based dashboards and data analytics with reporting to help the management in making business decisions.

With the dashboard feature, organizations have a better view of the multi-layered software and data. An exemplification of this was a European healthcare company that engaged AppShare while operating in the U.S. Toiling under massive datasets, the organization found it hard to keep track of patients’ historical data, such as medical history and insurance. AppShare helped digitalize the process by building a mobile app to collate all the medical records and related data that could be viewed on a unique dashboard. While this helped the organization in handling the massive and fast-moving data, it also ensured compliance with regulations such as PCI and HIPAA.

With a keen eye on the future, Ashok indicates that he will steer the organization into new verticals. Serving the retail industry largely, he aims to extend services to telecom, insurance, and banking industries in the near future. With strong expertise in data management, AppShare will begin to help organizations integrate hardware and software using AI and IoT, over the next two years. Additionally, the services provided to retail customers is expected to be further amplified with the involvement of augmented and virtual reality to provide better customer engagement. “End of the day, we want to be pioneers in providing omnichannel solutions and application and cloud development, all under one roof,” concludes Ashok.