Innovation Challenge Spotlight: Keeping Retailers and Manufacturers Plugged In

If you’ve been following the Maven Wave blog recently, then you’ve likely heard about our first annual Innovation Challenge. (For a quick overview of the challenge, check out this recent post.) Over the next few weeks, we’ll be taking a closer look at each of the winning innovations and gaining insight into how businesses can use these solutions right now.

To kick off this series, we spoke with Jess Lampe, Team Airwave’s Cloud Architect and Principal Consultant at Maven Wave, about the team’s innovative Raspberry Pi solution.

What was the challenge your team hoped to solve?

We were trying to attack a problem that’s experienced by different retailers and foodservice providers (especially those with multiple locations): they use many different backend software and hardware solutions that don’t always play nice with each other, depend on unreliable third parties, or are prone to outages — from Point of Sale systems to image recognition software. So when things break down on the back end (which they often do), managers must waste time addressing these hardware and software issues. Furthermore, the complexity of addressing these challenges leads to workflow paralysis — and it can even drive customers away.

So, our goal for this challenge was two-fold:

1. Reduce overhead for store managers so they no longer need to worry about managing hardware / software.
2. Ensure better reliability by producing a fault-tolerant solution that can continue running amidst internet interruptions.

Tell us about the team’s solution.

Our solution demonstrated the ability for edge hardware to securely authenticate with a backend control plane and deploy a Kubernetes cluster-running software. For the end-user, that reduces the overhead associated with installing and maintaining hardware. Rather than require an onsite technical professional to set up and install hardware and software, the hardware is a simple, plug-and-play solution. 

What was the inspiration behind the solution?

We designed this solution specifically with our clients in mind. We’ve had a number of clients looking for secure edge management solutions, and it continues to be a solution we are pursuing as part of a 5G/IoT/edge COE. 

What makes this solution innovative?

This solution is innovative for two reasons. First, it solves a real problem for customers. Second, it does so by leveraging two areas of Atos’ broader product offerings: hardware and cloud-based application solutions. This gives the company a great opportunity to create new value in line with Atos’ broader goals.

Who do you think will benefit most from this solution?

Any customer who has edge resources (e.g., retail stores, manufacturing plants, food service providers) that require a significant amount of time to set up or manage can benefit from this solution.

This innovation is already making “waves” of its own: Maven Wave / Atos and Verizon have established an industry-leading partnership to deliver this exciting and intelligent IoT solution to retailers (or more) worldwide. Using 5G edge technology, this transformative solution is helping enterprises become more agile, make their workflows more dependable, and increase overall revenue.

To learn more about this revolutionary development (or see how you can implement it in your organization), contact us and schedule a time to connect with our experts.