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Retail Solutions Powered by Cisco HyperFlex and Intel

Vispera, a company that creates visual intelligence solutions for retail businesses, showcased their innovative use of Cisco's Intel-powered HyperFlex HCI.

Retail Solutions Powered by Cisco HyperFlex and Intel

Early this year, Cisco hosted their annual Cisco Live! In Barcelona, a world-renowned annual customer and partner conference that is designed to build the foundation for a digital future by providing attendees with education, connections and inspiration. A key component of the event are keynote presentations in which global tech thought leaders present innovative solutions to modern-day problems and how Cisco was a cornerstone in helping achieve them.

One of the case studies presented was by Vispera, a company that creates visual intelligence solutions for retail businesses, and showcased their innovative use of Cisco's Intel-powered HyperFlex HCI solutions to redefine the retail landscape.

The company uses image recognition technology for its shelf monitoring and inventory management solution, Shelfsight. Cisco HyperFlex, together with Intel's Xeon Scalable Processors, provides the compute power needed to perform inferencing for Shelfsight at multiple retail locations.

Watch the video below to see how they do it:

Recognizing every product on the shelf

As they stood in front of shelves with cereal and other products, they explained how Shelfsight uses a camera solution for real-time shelf monitoring and in-store management. Running on Cisco HyperFlex Edge servers, powered by scalable Intel Xeon processors, Shelfsight takes measurements from the shelves every 10 minutes. It recognizes every product visible on the shelf down to a granular level, generating KPI metrics and notifying store personnel of any non-compliance issues so that they can take immediate action and replenish the shelves as necessary.

Shelfsight in uses – analyzing products on shelf

Vispera has spent the last two years focused on in-store fixed camera solutions, which is what brought them to the collaboration with Cisco and Intel by using on-prem high-performance computing. This unique collaboration is ultimately what led to the creation of Shelfsight. It's the ultimate combination of tools and companies for on-prem AI computing that's already live in many retail stores throughout the globe.

Intel's deep learning technology behind Vispera's retail solutions

The collaborative solution uses the same hardware as other enterprise applications, eliminating the need for costly specialized accelerators to run complex AI workloads. The second generation of Intel's Xeon Scalable Processor has a new technology called Intel Deep Learning Boost, which accelerates the inferencing and runs new instruction sets, called avx-512. This improves image recognition, object detection, language processing and speech recognition. Running on two node Cisco HyperFlex Edge with the new generation of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors takes advantage of this new deep learning technology and allows new workloads like image recognition to be performed at the edge where the data is.