Delivering an Interconnected Retail Experience through a Network Refresh with The Home Depot

To drive a world-class interconnected experience for its customers and associates, The Home Depot embarked on a full network refresh across its stores. Coleen Matsuo, Senior Director of Technology at The Home Depot, spoke in a session alongside Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, to discuss the drivers behind the refresh, the solution evaluation, the deployment experience, and the benefits for customers and associates. Attendees learned how the retail leader is leveraging the latest in edge technology to blend the digital and physical worlds and enable customers to design, research and purchase materials with ease.

Excerpts from Coleen Matsuo’s talk:

Several years ago, we embarked on what we call the One Home Depot initiative to drive seamless, frictionless customer experiences wherever our customers shopped, whether that was in our stores or online. To support that initiative, we understood that our customers were changing and evolving. They didn’t want to have one shopping experience inside the store and a totally different shopping experience online. We had to figure out to how to merge those two and make it seamless for them.

We recognized it was more than helping our customers shop where they wanted, when they wanted - it was also our associates that we had to bring into that interconnected retail experience. We needed modern devices, high speed networks, and capabilities that would allow them to meet the customer where they were.

As we approached the challenge of modernizing Home Depot's IT infrastructure to cope with new shopping habits, the solution was to embrace network-as-a-service and reduce the burden on engineers, freeing them up from the day to day operational responsibilities and enable them to focus on innovation, understanding business problems and then coming up with solutions for those. This would further drive the interconnected retail vision of one Home Depot forward.