- General
- November 9, 2018
- 7 minutes read
Gap partners with Microsoft for a more seamless digital shopping experience
Gap Inc Gap has made new moves to boost the digital experience for its customers with Microsoft as its primary cloud…
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| Gap Inc |
Gap has made new moves to boost the digital experience for its customers with Microsoft as its primary cloud provider. The retailer is taking on new initiatives to accelerate its mobile and digital capabilities and enhance its supply chain and in-store experience with new methods to shop.
This new moves are led by Gap chief information officer Sally Gilligan along with Rathi Murthy, It’s chief technology officer who will both facilitate ongoing growth of the company’s active and value business and support expansion of online and mobile services across its brands.
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| Gap Inc |
Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will enable the company quickly scale for future holiday seasons as it migrates hundreds of applications to the platform over the next several years beginning with critical inventory, store and site management systems.
The cloud capabilities will allow efficient and reliable scaling for all peaks of consumer demand ranging from holidays to back-to-school seasons and will streamline a supply chain that moves over 1.2 billion product units a year. The Azure platform will also support Gap’s DevOps model of rapid software builds, releases and tests.
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| Gap CTO Rathi Murthy (middle)
Gap Inc
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“Azure is going to play a very, very big role for us to be able to scale our business seamlessly,” Murthy said. “We’ve seen a huge transformation in the whole retail industry in shopping patterns,” She stated. “Our online business continues to grow, so we need to make sure our platform is fast, responsive and able to scale.”
San Francisco based Gap is also building a centralized data platform on Azure to bring about personalized shopping experiences and faster responses to a changing retail landscape that is witnessing more customers hopping digitally and researching products online before brick-and-mortar purchase.
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| Rathi Murthy (left) and Gap chief information officer Sally Gilligan
Gap Inc
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“You can’t be on your legacy platforms if you want to empower your best talent,” says Murthy. “You’ve got to be on the next-generation platform. That’s where Office 365 and Windows 10 come in.”
In addition to technological innovations, developing of female talent and working with students and community is also part of this new initiative. “For me, diversity is not just diversity in race and gender, but diversity in thoughts and action as well,” says Murthy, a longtime mentor for other women. “Our customers are 70 percent women and it’s important to have the same representation in-house, in technology, in all aspects. Then we are best able to serve our business.”
