Smart store analytics architecture
Microsoft Cloud for Retail in partnership with AiFi offers Smart store analytics that brings frictionless checkout data from AiFi through the Retail Cloud AiFi Connector. The app transforms the data into the standard retail data model from Microsoft Azure Synapse database templates to provide semantic consistency across apps and deployments. Standardized metadata and self-describing data in Common Data Model facilitates metadata discovery and interoperability between data producers and apps such as Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Azure Data Factory, Microsoft Azure Databricks, and Microsoft Azure Machine Learning packages.
Smart store analytics is deployed from Microsoft Cloud Solution Center into a Microsoft Power Apps environment, with Microsoft Dataverse as storage. Customers can select either Managed Data lake or Bring Your Own Lake. Smart store analytics supports continuous replication of in-store data from the smart store provider to Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage and runs analytics, aggregations, and machine learning. The generated results and analytics are visualized in Power BI embedded in Power Apps.
Power Apps admin users can also access the managed Azure Data Lake directly for additional extensibility and customization. Azure Data Lake is a storage solution that allows you to process data on demand, scale instantly, and only pay per job. It provides enterprise-grade security, auditing, and support. Each business is different and has different scenarios; Azure Data Lake gives you the flexibility to customize consumption and transition your data to other destinations.
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