5G Will Be a ‘Big Deal’ For Retailers — And They’re Ready For It

Retailers have heavily invested in reimagining a smart store experience, with COVID catapulting the shopping experience into a new consumer-centric realm. How have nimble sellers equipped their stores with technology amid the health crisis — and how are lackluster retailers keeping up? The “Behind the Tech: Keeping Smart Stores Connected” webinar explored today’s tech investments throughout the retail industry, with a focus on the critical in-store initiatives in the year ahead, including the use of Wireless WAN, 4G and 5G. Read on for the webinar transcript and all of the presentation slides. Tim Denman: Welcome, everyone, to the “Behind the Tech: Keeping Smart Stores Connected” webinar, which is hosted by RIS News and presented by Cradlepoint. I am Tim Denman, editor-in-chief of RIS. Thank you for joining us today. Well, there's been an accelerated focus in all things e-com over the past year. The store is still the heart and soul of retail. As consumers' physical shopping habits continue to evolve, savvy retailers have been upping their in-store tech investments. With all this new tech designed to make the shopping experience quicker, safer, and more engaging, flooding into the store, retailers must take a long hard look at their network infrastructure to ensure it is not only powerful enough to support these new solutions, but customizable and nimble enough to meet changing demand. Now, with me today to explore the current state of store technology, as well as the network capabilities needed to support a tech and data powered shopping experience, Robin Manke-Cassidy from Cradlepoint and Lee Holman from IHL services. Robin and Lee, thanks for taking some time to speak with us today. Robin Manke-Cassidy: Thank you, Tim. Lee Holman: Honored to be here, Tim. Denman: The foundation for our discussion on the modern store is RIS and IHL’s annual Store Experience Study, which was published in January. The report explores sales growth, challenges, and opportunities, and emerging strategies all within the backdrop of where retailers are placing big technology investments both today and years into the future. As always, Lee from IHL co-authored the report with RIS and was an invaluable research partner. IHL also published a deeper look at the findings, as well as some previously unreleased results that are accessible via IHL website. For now, Lee can you walk us through the key findings and provide some analysis of what the results mean for the current state of the store? Lee, take us away. Holman: Great. Thanks, Tim. Thank you, everybody, for being here today. This is the 18th year we've been doing this with RIS News. It's fun — we learn new things every year, we learn things we didn't expect — it's always something we look forward to. Methodology is pretty simple and straightforward. We have that online survey that we sent out to hundreds of retailers in the October/November timeframe, we collect the data, and then clean it up. We do some crosstab analysis, so forth and so on. The results are delivered to RIS so that they can get their web release done, and then we, at IHL, do a deeper analysis that goes a step-and-a-half further. On the right-hand side, you’ll see some of the demographics. Things you need to understand about what you're seeing there with the demographics: This tends to be 60-70% of people that are truly in the know about what the IT spend is for the coming year, the technologies they're looking at. It's enhanced with the insights of some store managers, district managers, and folks like that, who also have a say in what's going to be coming down the pipe. In terms of the size of retailers, if you take a look at the lower left-hand pie, 45% of the retailers responding are tier one retailers. These tend to be the guys that have the most money to spend on information technology the coming year. That doesn’t mean, however, that we ignore the smaller guys because they are some of the most innovative in the industry. They've got neat ideas, do things a little differently, and a little more quickly sometimes than the bigger players. Some of the study highlights the similar findings over the top number one growth, obviously with COVID impacting everybody in the whole planet last year. We expected to see growth in all of these areas: Retail sales, IT spend, and store counts. Going forward, we're seeing an increase in those, or at least an expected increase for each of the respondents. Tech spend is also going to be up in certain areas, 5G is going to be a big deal in the store for a variety of reasons, and edge computing is also going to be something that a lot of retailers are paying attention to. Obviously, contactless payment — contactless technologies are a big deal now with the COVID issue. If you look at the first bullet, POS hardware, 29% is on the higher end of the scale in the course of the past 18 years. Retailers are looking at replacing some of their POS hardware, if you can take that into context with the store count increase, you have to put in new technology and new stores. That's part of what's going on. Bottom line, stores are more important than ever, with or without COVID. The effort that we put forth over the past three years in debunking the retail apocalypse, it's being borne out. Retail growth, just looking at the retail sales indicating that overall, they're going to be up 2.8%. When you break it down by segments, FDCM (that's food, drug, C-stores, and mass/merchants, including super stores, warehouse clubs) was up 8.4%. That runs in line with the data that we got back from the Census Bureau for retail sales for the U.S. — GMS sales were down. Which makes sense because a lot of soft goods retailers that are mall-based simply had no access to their stores. This is true for hospitality also. Here, we're talking mainly about restaurants. There were a couple of hotels that responded to this, as well — they were hit pretty good, too. Going forward, forecasts are up, 4.7% overall. Again, this is after a down year, which you need to take into consideration. IT spend is up 5%, store IT spend is up 4.1%. Those are not the highest numbers we've ever seen, but they're in the upper part of the range. Store counts and remodels. Again, if you're increasing your store count, if you're remodeling your stores, then you're planning on putting some new tech in there. If you take a look on the right-hand side, you see the retail sales growth forecast by channel. In-store sales, 4.8%, that's not a bad number when you think about FDCM stores having such huge growth last year, they're expecting a lot more this year. Desktop e-commerce — that’s the traditional e-commerce stuff that we do — and mobile commerce, up 12.2%, those are big numbers. That's in line with what we've been seeing in terms of growth over the past several years. Customer journeys, this has come about probably two to three years, becoming a really big issue. COVID served as an accelerant for a lot of these things, there are a number of retailers that were already well down the road in terms of adopting, buy online pickup in-store. COVID really, really accelerated everything. A lot of retailers were caught flatfooted, and in some cases, they were in a position where they had to deploy something — anything — just so they could begin saving some of the sales that they otherwise would allot to competitors. There's an issue there in terms of optimization that never happened in some cases. When you take a look at some of the information, these new customer journeys, 14-16% of all revenues. The stores are still a big part, which is important. Now, 72.4%, that's just the in-store purchases. Most of these other journeys have a store component. For instance, you can't buy online pick up in-store if there's no store. The store is still really important, not just for this to have its own self, but also for the sake of these other customer journeys. It’s priorities. This has always been a really interesting aspect to take a look at. Right off the bat, upgrading CRM and loyalty programs has always been in the top three. It's been in the top three ever since I can remember for the past 18 years. Personalizing the customer experience has been in the top two for the past three to four years. That has a lot to do with the fact that anyone that spends any time buying things online and then going into the store — the experience between the two is completely different. Online, you're treated like a king or a queen: they know your name, your preferences, what you like to buy, every bit of your buying history. You walk into the store and they're like, “who are you?” Okay, it's not that bad, but you get the drift. COVID also drove some of the other issues that we're looking at, such as contactless payments. That was a big issue last year, and it's going to be a big priority for the coming year. Then I mentioned optimizing the digital journey for store fulfillment. When some of these retailers deployed new customer journey solutions — typically, in a normal year, that solution would go to the lab, run it through the wringer, and do the optimization before it gets rolled up to the stores. In most cases, these solutions were deployed before any optimization was done. As a direct result, some of the customer journeys resulted in margins that were considerably lower than a person just walking into the store and making a purchase. Retailers have some work to do going forward in order to optimize that journey, so that they can bring the margins back in line. Otherwise, they’ll have to start charging for BOPIS, ship-from-store, and things like that. That won’t go over well for anybody. Next, traditional technology purchase plans. This is a question we've asked each year for 18 years. Basically, we ask retailers, where are you right now and what are you planning on doing going forward in terms of purchases? This year, the big deal is, again, contactless payment. Almost 40% of retailers are looking to make a purchase in 2021 in this kind of technology. That makes sense because there's the customer safety issue, the employee safety issues — those kinds of things are driving that decision. Likewise, the store-owned mobile POS. This is one that I'm not ashamed to talk about. We, the home and family, love the mobile app that Sam's Club has. It’s amazing. You can go into Sam's at the most crowded time, load up your cart, and then scan each item with your phone into your cart, you pay for it with your phone, and then it gives you a QR code. You bypass all the checkout lines right to the front door, they scan your QR code, and you're off to your car. That's the way shopping ought to be in a store like that. If you look here, traditional self-checkout, 17% of retailers are looking at adopting it this coming year, or the current year — 2021. This number is a little higher than it's been, part of this is driven by COVID. It's really interesting because self-checkout is one of those things that years ago unions were up in arms about. They were insistent upon it taking jobs away from people. With COVID, they changed their tune a bit. Now they're saying this is for the safety of the employees, that's why retailers are more keen on adopting it and walking forward. These are some of the “new” initiatives, it's in quotes because RFID has been around since World War II. Some of these other things have been deployed for quite a while now. If you look at some of the things for 2021, 20% of retailers are looking at adopting store-level 5G — that's a really, really big deal. As far as the reasons, methods, applications, and so forth, it's like the Wild West right now. There is so much that you can do with this. The key drivers are the speed and lack of latency. It's a really neat thing and will be exciting to watch what happens. I'm going to let Robin talk a lot more about that. That’s the beauty of 5G, it doesn't matter what segment you’re in. RFID is going to be really big, especially soft goods retailers from the standpoint of inventory visibility. One of the things that was tough this past year was they not only had no people coming into the stores, but they couldn't access the inventory they had in the stores. They might have had online sales for a number of things, but ran out of inventory because they had no access to the stores. Then, RFID is going to help out in a big way in terms of retail. Obviously, without COVID, it is going to help make sure that retailers can have an accurate inventory count inside their stores. If you don't have that, then BOPIS, ship-from-store, or any customer journey related to the store isn’t going to have the effect that it should. Some of the purchase plans going forward for the FDCM segments include electronic shelf labels. Prices on these have come down to a point where the retailers with the least amount or percentage-wise of capital to spend on technology are now actually able to purchase them. This also speaks to inventory visibility within the store. One thing we found in a different study was, for these retailers — food, especially grocery stores — when COVID hit, they were finding underlying inventory issues within stores. For instance, if you walk into the store looking to buy Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies, if it’s there on the shelf, they'll probably make the purchase and walk out. If it's not on the shelf, there's a dozen different brands you can choose from instead — Keebler, store brand, whatever. If you do that, there's no information given to the retailer that says, “you've got a problem with Chips Ahoy” — they don't know that there's an out-of-stock issue or that the customer left without making their priority purchase. With the advent of COVID and these extra customer journeys, now you've got a situation where if I order Chips Ahoy chocolate chip cookies online and the person picking from the store finds that there are none, then they have a decision to make: are they going to substitute it regardless of what my desires are, are they going to ask me for a substitute? If they ask for a substitute, what are they going to charge me? Will they charge me the same as the Chips Ahoy or for the substitute? All that said, retailers were experiencing this new area of out-of-stocks that they never saw before. SD-WAN, this is one of those things Robin is going to be able to speak to. Having your network optimized is a huge deal for these retailers, especially when making sure your inventory across the enterprise is visible. In hospitality, a big deal here is also RFID — whether it’s a table service restaurant, a theme park, there's lots of different applications here, especially in the area of inventory control for a bar, restaurant, or something like that. Dark kitchens or dark stores can benefit here, especially with the increase in mobile and online orders. The most infuriating thing for a customer is to be standing in the restaurant and seeing your order get bumped because some mobile order came in, right? I'm not going to name any names, but there's a couple of restaurants nearby that my family frequent a great deal, and I saw this. This is the worst thing in the world for a restaurant to have happen with a retail analyst standing there waiting for his daughter. Microservice is a big deal for them. Consumer mobile checkout. This is the same deal for hospitality that I had mentioned for Sam's Club — it's a really nice thing to have. Here’s what’s a little different. This is the exact same data, only this time, it’s sliced according to the retailers that reported a 10% or greater increase in sales this past year. Now, a lot of those retailers might be in the FDCM arena because they were going gangbusters last year. Some of the things that you can see, revenue growth for last year and for this year — there’s a lot of expectations there. Greater store count growth and greater remodel growth. One of the things that you need to think about in terms of the retail industry is, it really is a time when the big are getting bigger and the good are getting better. If you're not up to snuff in certain areas, then you're going to be left by the wayside. Part of the issue there is if you look at the IT spend growth for both the enterprise and the store of these retailers for the past 4-5 years , along with the advent of unified commerce and embracing the idea that it's not just about taking last year's revenues or taking 1.5% of last year's revenues — and that's our IT budget. It's more strategic than that though. Getting the entire board on-board is what we need to do. This is what we need to spend in order to get our IT in such a shape that we can actually do the kinds of things we're talking about here. Whether it's the customer journeys, the enhanced network capabilities, and so forth and so on. This is borne out here, the higher IT spend growth, both in the store and across the enterprise. Obviously, BOPIS and delivery IT spend growth with those things is increasing as well. These are some of the things that leaders are expecting to purchase this year. This is a purchase expectation here. It's not set in stone — things change, things happen. In terms of point-of-sale hardware and software, historically, we've seen between 40-60% of those expectations never come to fruition in the year that retailers are thinking it's going to happen. That's something you need to keep in mind when you're looking at these kinds of numbers. Consumer mobile checkout shows up again here. Mobile devices for managers, this is a big deal for store ops. In other words, if the manager has a device that can be used to walk around the store and take photos, send texts and assign tasks — that’s a big win for any retailer. Conclusions? Top line, in spite of the pandemic, retailers have been really, really resilient. According to the Census Bureau last year, retail sales were up 2.3% for the industry as a whole. That number includes restaurants, because the Census Bureau includes restaurants in their retail calculations. However, that does not include automobiles. It includes auto parts and things like that, but it does not include automobiles. An increase in 2.3% in the year of COVID is truly astonishing. Retail is strong. Stores are and will continue to be important. The leading retailers have been serious about using their spend to bring about unified commerce. Having accurate inventory across the entire spectrum of your enterprise is important, the retailers that make this happen are the ones that are going to continue to rise to the top in terms of the stack up. Going forward, some of the edge computing, store-level 5G, and dark stores and kitchens are the areas where we are going to see the most spend in the coming year. Here's a timeline we've been using for the past handful of years: Here in 2021, we're looking at being in the place where AI and ML is being implemented in a big way for store operational issues. Hopefully, retailers are well down the road of fixing their inventory issues and making sure associates have the technology needed to do their job, and unified commerce while we're on the trailing end of that. If you haven't done it by now, then you're next on somebody's hitlist. That's what I have with the exception of this last slide on March Gladness. We've done this every year for the past dozen years or so. This is our charity Retail ROI. Instead of March Madness, it's March Gladness. You still get to purchase pools, and there's all kinds of prizes. With that, let me pass things back to Robin. Manke-Cassidy: Well, thank you, Lee. Every time I hear you talk about this, the information is just incredible and it leads right into where Cradlepoint can help the retail industry keep moving forward. Let's dive in a little bit. Based on everything that Lee has talked about, with the changes in the retail environment, you can see that the investment in the technologies to help drive customer experience, get a better handle on inventory and stay on top of it, and things about checking out — which is the whole user experience from the time they walk in your door to the time they leave. All of that is based on technology and based on being there all of the time. You need an always-on networking connection to make sure that you're talking to your cloud instances that are holding inventory back into your traditional data centers, but also inside the store itself. By doing this, the associates can make sure that they're interacting appropriately and in a timely manner with your customers moving forward. Let's talk about some of that technology. Some of that technology is beacons in your establishment, so you know when someone's coming in, when things are being touched on the shelf. Smart dressing rooms, I'm not sure I'm ready for this, but being able to get you the right size and make sure that you're interacting with the right colors and stuff for you. Guest WiFi, so maybe you can interact and give specials or give more information about some of the materials that they might be touching, and then personalize those experiences. Everything from quick checkout to knowing the inventory, so I can get the size I want or the technology to make it faster for me. That's the customer side of the technology you're looking at. The employee side is, how do I make sure that I'm interacting quickly with my customers and that I'm giving them the actual information? I mean, as a retail user myself, having someone not know that something's in-stock, having to run back and disappear into the back of a store is frustrating when you're out buying things. Making sure the employees always have the latest and greatest information can help checkout customers quickly. Think about the Apple store. You don't run back to a single place to check out, the associates check you out right where you are, making it fast and easy. Also, for inventory, to make sure that they have everything that they need out on the floor. Then the back office. The back office is key to making sure each one in the store works efficiently. They need to have that data almost instantaneously from each one of the stores to make sure that they're buying the right inventory and that they're sending it out. Also, what a lot of people don't talk about is the delivery part of that, too. If you're a chain that has your own warehouse, your own delivery people, and your own stores, you have to make sure that everything along that chain knows what they need to do, when they need to do it, how they need to do it, and have that information upfront. What if you could have that agility without having compromises? What if you could get that fast interaction when you need it? Wouldn't it be great to have that flexibility? One of the things I didn't hear Lee talk about, the number of stores that are not signing long leases anymore, they're picking up and moving. They're staying maybe for six months in one location and then moving to another so they're not stuck into a big lease situation. Me having to pick up and move my network, that can be very expensive. What if we could make that easy for you? One of the problems with IT of any organization is downsizing, right? You want to get the most staff time without having to invest in a lot of people. We just don't have the skill sets in some cases, we just don't have the money to make a huge IT organization. How do you reduce the complexity of managing the stores remotely? How do you make sure they're secure? How do you make sure that the transactions are happening quickly enough? What if you could have the intelligence to be able to tweak the environment very quickly and make sure the performance is up and running? A wireless LAN is really what we're going to be talking about today. When we talk about wireless, we're talking about 4G, LTE, and 5G environments. Actually not having you necessarily have to be connected to a wired connection. Getting that faster uptime, but also being up online all the time and not worrying about the length of time it takes to bring a connection back to where you are. The agility — what I was talking about earlier — being able to move that environment or that network wherever you need it, whether it's outside, inside, moving around, in mobile devices, mobile delivery trucks, or a mobile branch. Dependability. We need to make sure that our network connections are there while our stores are up and running all of the time. Even when they're offline, at that point, you're also checking inventory, checking all kinds of things to make sure it's always there. Then finally, performance. We, at Cradlepoint, are very excited about 5G. We had announced our readiness for a lot of our devices. We're ready for 5G, you don't have to wait for it. In all honesty, it’s a way the Telcos are rolling out or the carriers are rolling out 5G. You might need to have some of your locations running on 4G until that 5G comes into their environment. One of the other things that you need is a centralized management. With Cradlepoint, we're able to offer you a cloud-based management solution. You can send a device out to a store and they can just plug it in and turn it on without having to go out and touch it. It will download its configurations, come up and running. You can centrally change configuration for all of your deployed solutions. You can go ahead and be able to upgrade them, manage and monitor it, be able to see all the traffic coming back and forth, and be able to optimize that traffic and control it as you need it. This is very much an added solution that gives you the portability and the flexibility that a lot of organizations are looking for today. What if we stepped back then looked at the different use cases? Some of the challenges that organizations have, we've talked about a little bit: I need to be able to move my location quickly, I need to be able to come online quickly, I can't wait for wired connections to be pulled through, I've got limited staff, I need to be able to manage these network connections effectively without having a lot of staff running out to the stores and managing it, I need to be able to move locations, I need to make sure the security is there. You don't want anyone just jumping on your network, so you need to be able to segregate to network traffic. If you do have a user WiFi, they won't interfere with the connections that you need for all of the technology that you're running in your stores. Cradlepoint provides a very simple solution for this. We have a router selection that gives you cellular connectivity. Not only the cellular, if you do want a wired connection for backup or failover, you can still bring that in if you want to. We provide the segmentation that you need. For those of you that, and Lee actually mentioned it, SD-WAN, if you need to be able to manage and control that granular level of traffic and be able to send it across different links, we have those capabilities for you, as well as the edge security. The firewalls, the data loss prevention, we have those built into our solutions, so that you can go ahead and get the speed and agility you need. Flexibility — what if I don't want a wired connection? Maybe wired connections in some locations just don't have performance. Depending on where you're at, you could be up in the mountains and those wired connections aren't going you do you much good. It's very complicated billing. If you have hundreds of stores and have to deal with multiple ISPs to be able to provide those services, it becomes a drain not only on your IT staff, but on your accountants and your financials to keep up with all of that. We have a solution that gives you dual carrier cellular broadband connections, so that you can load balance between a couple of different providers across all your stores, and basically have one or two bills that you're having to deal with. IoT applications — this is one of my favorite areas to be looking at today. I've been in technology for a very long time and the IoT has been around for maybe 10 years or more. We're really getting to the point where IoT applications and devices are integral in everything that we do, from security cameras to monitors, to now in retail, we're talking about digital labels to be able to change the pricing and the knowledge about digital signage, so you're not printing out signs anymore. You have digital signage, but being able to manage and control that traffic is key. It needs to be up all the time as well, you want to be able to centrally manage it. We have solutions, again, for managing all of these different types of IoT devices that are showing up, from your POS system all the way through self-checkout, and being able to segregate or air gap that traffic is key. Cradlepoint has the solutions for that. Finally, temporary location. Temporary location is more than just the popup Halloween stores, it can be anything like a store within a store. Maybe I'm a Coach store and I'm located in Nordstrom's, I have my own counter, my own staff. I need to be able to bring my own connection to attach my technology and hardware. A lot of organizations are just out in the middle of the mall, there's probably not a hardware connection, or if there is a hardware connection, it's going to be very costly. So being able to bring my network and pick it up and move it wherever my store needs to be is important because not only are your stores moving, it's your vehicle. Again, those delivery trucks, that inventory for them to be able to know what's on the truck, what they're delivering at any point in time. Maybe you know the GPS location of your drivers, so you know if you need to readvert someone where they are, how efficient, and do they have the inventory you need to deliver out there. Cradlepoint has those solutions to help you address all of the challenges that you're looking at and all of the new technology that Lee was talking about that many of you are looking at. I want to talk about 5G for just a minute. As I said earlier, it's rolling out. Many of the carriers have the simple first line of 5G. There's several different levels of connectivity and speeds with which the 5G is going to be rolling out. There might be some areas where you're going to need 4G for a while, and then you'll be able to roll out 5G. The different spectrums are there. You need a technology that will help you migrate from 4G to 5G and the upper echelons of those spectrums when they come around. We have that solution for you. You also want carrier class connectivity. You want the speed, which your endpoints can be run at more efficiently, and we can help you with that. Also, intelligence. How do you know the performances of the devices and allowing SD-WAN to help you optimize with QoS across those connections to have that always-on connectivity, but also the security you need to make sure that you're maintaining the transmission of traffic from one place to another. Then the full lifecycle. The installation, the management, the upgrade, the ongoing analysis, you need a whole platform that helps manage that. Cradlepoint can help you with those solutions. In conclusion, the agility that retail needs and the connectivity that the agility and the flexibility that you need in that connectivity. Cradlepoint is here to support you, from standalone sites to moving sites, to moving vehicles, from popups on day one to longevity in all of your sites. We can help you manage those new technologies that are going to be driving the customer experience and the business experience for your retail establishment. Denman: Thanks, Robin. Thanks, Lee. We are almost out of time, but we do have a few minutes here for a few questions from the audience. We've got quite a few in here. One, just clarifying question, someone asked if we could clarify what dark stores and kitchens are. Dark stores and kitchens are large facilities that resemble an existing store or restaurant, but aren't necessarily open to the public. It's just to fulfill orders that are placed online — basically, a fulfillment center. We’ve got a question here about 5G, for you, Robin. You talked about a lot of capabilities of 5G. The question is, a lot of this stuff could just be done with WiFi. What is the real difference? What changes by going to 5G versus a traditional wireless network? Manke-Cassidy: With a traditional wireless network you still have to have a wired connection. If you're doing WiFi, that backend edge router either has to have a cellular connection or it has to have a host of different wired connections that's attached. What the cellular connection gives you is the advantage to always have an always-on connection, and the portability to be able to move it wherever you need to. Actually, here where I live, my whole town went out because someone hit one of the major lines leading into my town. That meant all of the physical wires were down, but there were many cellular capabilities that were still available. I was able to just switch over very quickly and use my cellular connection, because I have a Cradlepoint device here at home. I was able to stay up and running and not realize any difference. What the question is, is what is my connectivity back out to the internet itself? Is that cellular or is that a wired connection, or a combination? Denman: Perfect. We have another question here about 5G. The question being, what if 5G is not available at all of my sites? Can I still take advantage of the technology? Manke-Cassidy: Completely. What's great about Cradlepoint is we have been around for 10-plus years. Currently all of our solutions run on 4G LTE. Many of them are already either 5G ready or 5G optimized. When 5G becomes available in your area, it's just going to be a small upgrade to get to that 5G connectivity. What's great is you can manage both 4G and 5G from the same environment. Some locations that have 4G can stay on 4G until that 5G is available. For those that have our capability for 5G, you can start right away. For you and for the stores, you manage it, you deploy it, and you configure it exactly the same way. Denman: Are you able to use QoS to prioritize the traffic? Manke-Cassidy: Yes. Many people are looking for SD-WAN. There's a handful of capabilities that SD-WAN provides you that people are looking for, such as: QoS of their traffic, ensuring POS traffic always gets top priority and inventory comes a bit lower. It makes sure that your consumer customer traffic might be the second priority after your POS system, and balancing across multiple links. If you have multiple cellular links or cellular and wired links, you can route the traffic across all of those connections using SD-WAN capabilities. It's a huge feature that many, many customers, when they're looking at SD-WAN, are looking at as really that QoS capability. Denman: We have one more real nuts and bolts question. Can you talk about the security of the system and the security particularly around the solution that you were describing from Cradlepoint? Manke-Cassidy: Yes. Many of you, in technology, have probably been not only reading about SD-WAN or SASE. This is really the edge access security that customers are looking for on the edge of their network, so at the edge of your site, branch, or location back into Cloud or to your data center. The security that Cradlepoint provides is that we have a built-in firewall, that stateful firewall that is on the device by default. We also have DLP capabilities and such, as well. What we've also done is offer integration. If you're using Palo Alto, Prisma in your backend infrastructure in your enterprise network. You can now connect that with the Cradlepoint router to add additional security functionality from Palo Alto. There's many different ways that you can slice and dice the security on these devices. We’ve partnered with people like Palo Alto to give you the Crem Solution with Cradlepoint. Denman: Thanks, Robin. Those are all the real tactical, nuts and bolts, questions that we have. Lee, you showed some numbers about the success that retail has been. Despite COVID, we see revenues up, investment up — kind of a cheeky question here. How is retail doing, really? Obviously, there's a few real leaders that are knocking it out of the park. What about the rest of the industry? Holman: How well you're doing probably depends on where you are in terms of the retail segments. As I mentioned, the FDCM segments (food, drug, mass/merchants, C-stores), those guys are the ones that knocked it out of the park last year. They were the essential retailers that provided sustenance for the populace. They did gangbusters in terms of sales growth and so forth. The folks that really did not do well are folks that have been doing poorly for the past handful of years, we're talking especially about soft goods retailers and the department store retailers. Both of them had double-digit sales declines last year over 25%. It makes sense. I mentioned malls before, when they were closed there was no access to the stores, there was no access to the inventory they had. Even if they got online orders, they couldn't use that inventory to fulfill those orders. The interesting thing, though, is at the very beginning of last year, in the first two-and-a-half months of 2020, especially soft goods retailers, actually showed an increase in sales compared to the same period of the previous year. So the retailers in that segment, the ones that are still viable, that are still looking forward to the future, those guys are making headway. In some cases, they've pared down store counts to a more sustainable level, taken care of inventory issues, taken care of some of the other issues they were facing in terms of business models. Some of those retailers were starting to go well, and then COVID happened, which just hammered them big time. I'm expecting that they will recover and move forward. Department stores are a little different story. They have an awful lot of real estate with an awful lot of overhead. One of the things that we saw when we were doing work on debunking the retail apocalypse, there's a handful of reasons why just a very small number of retailers were responsible for the vast majority of retail closings over the previous three years. One of those reasons had to do with the business model. In some cases, these retailers have been around for 100 years. For the most part, their business model just hasn't changed over the past 20, 30 years, or so. That's troublesome because that means you're not connected with the way consumers are behaving now. It means your technology is not up-to-date. The whole thing about retail right now is the experience of coming into the store — it used to be that you had to go to the store to purchase items. Now, it's a choice — with the advent of the internet, you can have anything. I mean, if you're in certain metropolitan cities, you can have anything delivered within two hours, which is truly astonishing. For the most part, consumers have massively more choices than they used to have. Now, retailers have to be all about making sure that customers want to come into their stores. It’s a completely different mindset, a completely different business model that they've got to deal with. If they choose not to embrace that, then they're going to go by the wayside and be overrun. Denman: Thank you. We are, unfortunately, out of time. Again, thank Lee and Robin for your time, and thank all of you for listening.

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