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Wipro readies to set shop floors abuzz with TINA
By siliconindia
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Saturday, 02 February 2008, 04:50 IST
Bangalore: Wipro Technologies has come up with a new innovative service to help the retail firms to make their customer service better. The company has developed a new retail automation platform -The Intelligent NextGen Associate (TINA), reported the Economic Times.
Wipro has conceptualized and built TINA as an SOA (service oriented architecture) enabled, intelligent platform (robot). It is a platform in which different types of customer interaction applications, which use speech, touch and motion can be deployed. It can perform various functions like a simple mobile kiosk, personal assistant, and can do the checkout process as well as mechanical activities in the back office store. The client can select what all function they want on the system and the company believes that the TINA has a lot of potential value.
Major retail players in the U.S., Europe and India have shown interest in Wipro?s new solution. "We needed a solution to improve customer experience and core retail profitability for clients," said B M Bhanumurthy, Senior VP (retail CPG and distribution), Wipro Technologies.
The company will rope in with hardware manufacturers for the hardware of TINA and it will provide the software parts. The company officials declined to disclose the investment on the project. However, they informed the sources that Wipro's retail unit is now looking to patent either the parts or the entire solution.
Experts assert that the solutions like TINA could be used widely in future. However, they also feel that customers might still prefer personal interaction with shop assistants than automation or robot salesperson.
