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Gartner: The Biggest Retail IT Headache To Be Social Networks

Written by Evan Schuman
October 21st, 2009
As is apparently required by law, all of the big technology think-tanks at this time of year start making their 2010 predictions, and Gartner's certainly not one to be left out. So we reached out to Gartner's retail technology mastermind, Jeff Roster, to get his take on how his company's Top Ten list of tech areas speaks to retail CIOs. But Roster surprised us—as he annoyingly tends to do—by avoiding the obvious choices and zeroing in on social networking.

Sure, social networking is a huge retail trend, but retail IT? "You don’t need IT to Tweet, but you sure will be buying an awful lot of software in 2011 that will analyze all this unstructured information," Roster said. "Now imagine a year down the road when I can go into a retailer and start tagging my likes and dislikes on any given product. It is just mind-boggling how rapidly software will be evolving within the next 5 years."

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Posted in E-Commerce, IT Strategy/Industry, Mobile/Wireless/Contactless, Payment Systems, Premium Content, Security/Fraud, Software
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