QNAP® Systems, Inc. (QNAP) demonstrated its AI-based Smart Retail Solution and applications for Momentum, the largest sportswear franchise retail store in Taiwan at the Intel Edge Computing Solution Summit in Taipei on December 17, 2019. QNAP’s Smart Retail Solution integrates surveillance, facial recognition, customer flow analysis, and edge devices to greatly accelerate retail digital transformation and O2O commerce.

“Edge computing plays a central role in offloading multitasking applications, since transmitting big data from multiple retail stores to data centers can be highly bandwidth-consuming and requires large storage capacity,” said Meiji Chang, General Manager of QNAP. “By computing data gathered from on-premise QVR Applications, the QuCPE Edge Computing Server helps deploy a one-stop retailing IT structure with low-latency and enhanced security.”

QNAP’s comprehensive Smart Retail Solution employs edge computing technology ranging from end-point applications to edge devices consisting of QuCPE Edge Computing Servers and QVR Software including QVR Pro, QVR Face and Retail Pro. QVR Face adopts Intel OpenVINO® and VAS Library technology to identify visitors age and gender while categorizing customers into the VIP list or Blacklist. For deploying the smart surveillance system in retail stores, QVR Pro also features Motion Search and SIP camera for detecting suspicious activity and sending emergency alerts through SIP broadcast intercom.

Meanwhile, QNAP’s Retail Pro is a store traffic analysis software that analyzes visitor flows based on their shopping journey. By integrating data including people counting, path analysis and heat map with the POS system, store managers can interrelate certain in-store behavior features and actual sales data. This data can provide valuable sales insights and reports to assist store managers optimization of marketing strategy plans and daily business operations to improve overall customer experience.

The QuCPE Edge Computing Server uses high-performance Intel® Xeon® 12-core processor with Intel® Open Network Edge Services Software (OpenNESS) and Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) hardware acceleration technology to boost packet processing performance and throughput. With limited IT manpower in traditional franchises, the QuCPE series also supports cloud-based centralized network management to achieve Zero Touch Provisioning.

From in-store data collection to computing analysis and business insights, QNAP’s Smart Retail Solution helps retailers transform valuable in-store data into business intelligence, and assist retailers in forming customer-centric business strategies through AI technology. As a result, retailers can use retail data to increase visitor rates and conversion rates. Moreover, QuCPE supports QNAP’s SD-WAN solution, QuWAN, to provide steady and optimized network transmissions for big data smart retailing.