Nexvu Retail is the industry’s first and only end-2-end visibility solution that delivers the insight needed to ensure an amazing customer experience at each and every store. Nexvu establishes a new standard for management of the modern in-store technology environment by providing complete visibility into the health, utilization, and performance of every single store IT asset and application simultaneously and in real-time.Visit us at www.nexvu.com to learn more.

1. Retail Technology
Innovation:
Are you Proactive or Reactive?
A Nexvu White Paper
1717 Park St. Suite 110 (630) 364-4080
Naperville, IL 60563 www.nexvu.com
Introduction
The importance of innovation as a core competency
for retailers has been elevated by an increasingly dy-
namic and technology-driven consumer market. As a
result, retailers are aggressively exploring the de-
ployment of new and innovative technologies and
applications to ensure the most intuitive and satisfy-
ing user experience at all points of sale and service.
Fluid customer expectations and behaviors, evolving
delivery channels, and emerging points of customer
interaction contribute to the pace and demand for
rapid implementation of these initiatives.
Unfortunately, today’s monitoring tools and systems,
where they exist at all, cripple these initiatives by
providing little to no insight on how well these dis-
persed and business-critical assets are performing.
Nexvu establishes a new standard for man-
agement of the modern technology environ-
ment by providing complete visibility into
the health, utilization, and performance of
every store IT asset simultaneously and in
real-time. This unprecedented capability not only
ensures an exceptional customer experience, it
greatly enhances the return on investment (ROI) that
retailers require from in-store hardware and IT ini-
tiatives.
www.nexvu.com ! 1(877) 23-NEXVU
! 1 (877) 236-3988

2. Problem Statement
ROI of Best-in-Class Practices
To enable new approaches to customer acquisition
According to Aberdeen Group’s The APM Lifecycle
and retention, many retailers have implemented
Report (Feb 2010), Best-in-Class organizations that
leading-edge point-of-sale systems and other
deploy tools to proactively manage the end-user
customer-facing technologies and applications. These
experience:
assets are increasingly becoming the focus of key
competitive strategies and brand differentiation. • Are twice as likely to improve their brand reputation
This rapid and sometimes unplanned growth of new • Are 75% more likely to improve employee productivity
devices and applications across geographically di- • Proactively identify faults 82% of the time
verse locations has resulted in a new set of challenges
for both IT and business. Some of these include: • Experience a 30% decrease in end user complaints
• Decentralization of IT asset management, monitoring, • Experience 71% improvement in mean time to repair.
troubleshooting, and maintenance (a major departure from
the historical focus on the data center)
• Lack of complete visibility into the store IT infrastructure The Hidden Cost of Last-Generation IT Asset
due to the sometimes jumbled and layered assortment of Monitoring Tools
technologies and point solutions developed over time IT measurement and monitoring has traditionally
• Troubleshooting tools that lack the depth and breadth to been restricted to the area where most assets are
deal with the many generations of technologies deployed in physically located—the data center. This approach
a store reflects the limitations of last-generation monitoring
tools that are not capable of addressing the growing
• Troubleshooting tools that provide limited access into store proliferation of IT assets at multiple, geographically
infrastructure, take up too much bandwidth for practical dispersed locations. The situation is further frustrated
use, and have limited forensic capabilities by device and application incompatibility and limita-
• Lack of appropriate usage and performance metrics to tions due to bandwidth availability.
measure store performance and ROI on store-level IT in- Consequently, IT personnel are invariably forced to
vestments visit the retail sites during system downtimes and pe-
• Suboptimal placement and utilization of shopping aides riods of application performance degradation. Once
due to a lack of reliable and timely information on usage on site, the IT team encounters further difficulties
and performance metrics due to the lack of:
In essence, retailers seeking to leverage new technol- • Visibility in the IT setup
ogy initiatives are faced with both technical and • Access to up-to-date documentation
management challenges that can result in loss of
revenue caused by unexpected implementation de- • Data from and about the violating devices/applications at
lays, adverse impact on customer experience, in- the time of a threshold breach or unexpected behavior
creased maintenance costs, and prolonged downtime. • Established, meaningful baseline performance metrics.
It has become imperative to put comprehensive Last-generation monitoring solutions do not provide
monitoring and assessment tools in place at the retail sufficient visibility or actionable, quality information
store itself. This maximizes revenue generation and at the store level to support efficient and proactive IT
minimizes maintenance and troubleshooting costs asset management in the modern retail environment.
while providing detailed metrics to ensure consis-
tency and repeatability of the customer experience.
www.nexvu.com ! 1(877) 23-NEXVU
! 1 (877) 236-3988

3. The Nexvu Solution Develop Unique, Proprietary Insights About Cus-
tomers And Store Operations
Nexvu is a ground-up reinvention of device and ap-
plication monitoring methodology for IT asset man- Nexvu offers the ability to track every URL accessed
agement. With a single deployment per store, Nexvu from store kiosks. This is useful for analyzing trends
provides real-time health, utilization, and perform- in consumer interest among products in inventory or
ance reports on each and every IT asset—without identifying competitor sites most typically accessed
adding any overhead or agents to the store IT infra- by customers for product comparisons.
structure.
Ability To Accommodate Future Technologies
With scalability to cover virtually unlimited stores or
assets within your business, Nexvu provides an easy- Nexvu is the only solution that has the ability to
to-deploy and cost-effective solution that addresses monitor multiple generations of new and innovative
the challenges posed by the modern, highly distrib- technologies, like digital signage, IP TV, VoIP, RFID,
uted and e-commerce dependent retail environment. etc.—in both applications and devices—right out of
the box. Nexvu will continue to deliver the same
Gather Valuable Network And Application Intelli- health, utilization and performance data for future
gence At The Store Level generations without requiring any changes to its
software or hardware.
Nexvu inspects and analyzes every element of every
communication on the store network and presents
this data in an intuitive and user-friendly reporting
and alerting format. IT and network managers can
proactively utilize this information to learn about the
behavior of applications and assets under various
shopping conditions and preempt any disruptive is-
sues across the infrastructure.
This visibility is also key for highly effective and effi-
cient troubleshooting at the store level as well as for
providing access to corporate IT staff to remote
monitoring of all store-level devices and applications.
The Nexvu appliance gathers both short- and long-
term data about the performance, health, and utili-
zation of all the elements of the IT infrastructure.
This helps to achieve the ultimate goal of high cus-
tomer satisfaction and unequalled end-user experi-
ence as measured by the Application Performance
Index (APDEX)*.
Effective Asset Positioning In The Store
Nexvu offers real time analysis on the utilization and
throughput of all the applications, kiosks, cash regis-
ters, mobile devices, etc. in a retail location. These
comprehensive utilization metrics enable store man-
agers to reposition assets in frequently accessed areas *The Apdex Alliance is a community of enterprises and vendors striv-
to maximize throughput and revenue generation ing to understand and improve application performance using the
Apdex methodology. which links application performance to business
while minimizing customer wait times. objectives. (www.apdex.org)
www.nexvu.com ! 1(877) 23-NEXVU
! 1 (877) 236-3988

4. Nexvu Key Features Simple Implementation, Rapid Deployment
Nexvu offers an unprecedented list of features that Nexvu requires minimal implementation effort. The
make it the IT asset monitoring solution of choice single appliance is simply connected to mirrored
for some of largest retailers in the world: ports, SPANS, network taps, or hubs at the retail site
and is then accessed via a web-based utility. The ap-
• Agent-less and Passive Monitoring
pliance is pre-configured to deliver the data of pri-
Ideal for a highly distributed store environment and places
mary interest to various stake-holders.
no additional burden on the network
At the NOC or corporate level, Nexvu can feed any
• Low Touch
and all data, reports, exceptions, and traps into a
Operates autonomously at the store level
centralized system that might already be in place, or
• Future-Generation Ready it can feed to its own command center and applica-
Agnostic to common multi-generational technology infra- tion server. The Nexvu application server provides a
structures and flexible enough to adapt to next generation suite of highly interactive business intelligence and
technologies reporting dashboards.
• Operates on all IP and MAC addressable devices
Summary
Especially important for retailers with POS systems that
are non IP addressable Nexvu delivers an unmatched competitive advantage
to global retailers by providing unprecedented visibil-
• Out-of-the-Box Compatibility
ity into IT infrastructure.
Capability to recognize and inspect over 3000+ protocols
and 800 application signatures available out of the box. • Ensures a best-in-class, consistent user experience
Easy to configure custom protocols. • Ensures high employee satisfaction and productivity
• Customizable • Provides end-to-end visibility, in real time, from a single
Smart GroupsTM allow for customized monitoring and location across the entire organization
reporting
• Monitors and reports on the health, utilization and per-
• Framework Integration formance of every active IT asset within the store
Integrates seamlessly with framework products like HP
Openview, Solarwinds, BMC, Tivoli, etc. • Enables store managers to make smart investment and lo-
cating decisions based on accurate and timely information
• Smart-Phone-Ready
Consolidates regional, national, and global data at your • Identifies cost-reduction opportunities
fingertips on mobile devices including iPad and BlackBerry • Standardizes store IT performance measurements across
• Rapid Deployment the entire retail chain
Can be pre-configured for large-scale deployment automa- • Maximizes availability and usability of all assets by pro-
tion and ease actively minimizing downtime and time-to-repair
• Maximizes ROI on all IT investments.
For more information on the Retail Sentry or to
schedule a demonstration, please visit:
www.nexvu.com
www.nexvu.com ! 1(877) 23-NEXVU
! 1 (877) 236-3988