iPass Retail Office: Helping Retailers Get to the Point

Communication Is a Two-Way Street According to Forrester Research's "State of the Store Manager 2006" report, 87.5 percent of store managers surveyed believe that their stores are good resources for innovative ideas to help drive corporate success. But only 62 percent of store managers are actually sharing their best practices. Why? The problem stems from too many retailers still relying on old, expensive frame-relay solutions, which don't provide the performance or connectivity that's needed to compete effectively in an IP-based world. In Forrester's words: "As stores increasingly become a connected part of the extended retail enterprise, retailers have an opportunity to make sure that the connection works in both directions. The ones that do will find themselves plugged into a rich innovation resource others have missed."

In retail, the customer truly is king. And connecting with customers means connecting retail locations with myriad systems that allow third-party promotions, in-store pick-up of online orders, loyalty programs, inventory control and more. Today's customers demand shelves stocked with the items they're looking for, fast checkout lines with swift payment processing and customer service that goes above and beyond the call of duty.

So how do you actually meet such demands? Retailers need to be able to quickly share information across the organization while maintaining around-the-clock access to fast transaction processing in order to stay ahead of the competition and exceed customer expectations.

With the iPass Retail Office service, iPass dramatically simplifies the connectivity needs of retailers, allowing merchandisers to focus on merchandising- and customer-related issues.

Relationships May Be Hard Work, But Retail Connectivity Doesn't Have To Be
How hard is it to build and maintain a solid relationship between corporate headquarters and each store? Keeping connected via a corporate broadband WAN is time-consuming, expensive work. Ditto with contracting with dozens of ISPs to get the coverage you need, managing each service agreement separately and never knowing who to call when something goes wrong. With iPass Retail Office service, 100 percent coast-to-coast connectivity is far easier, costs less, and there's only one number to call if you should need support.

As part of the iPass family of managed, fixed-broadband products, iPass Retail Office consolidates the services of more than 150 cable and DSL operators across the U.S. and Canada, providing secure, managed broadband connections for all of your distributed locations. This includes fully managed, end-to-end IPSec-encrypted VPNs and hardware-based firewalls to extend enterprise network security. You have no design and implementation headaches, only one bill to pay, one point of support and one comprehensive service level agreement for your entire distributed enterprise. Of course, the iPass Retail Office service is Cardholder Information Security Program (CISP) certified.

Making a Long-Distance Relationship Work

iPass envisions a world where retailers enable their workforce to simply and securely communicate and connect to information from any location using the devices and communications methods that best meet their needs…allowing real-time monitoring, reporting, billing and administration through the management application of their choice.

-Ken Denman
  Chairman, President and CEO
  iPass