Peter Walker, HMV Group

Peter Walker, Solutions Architect at HMV Group, is the latest individual to take part in our 30-Second Interview

Q: What's the next big thing in retail?
A: If the PCI council release a statement on end-to-end (or point-to-point) encryption any time soon, everyone will be looking to implement one of the various flavours of that. If not, it will probably be various integrations with mobile phones (NFC, Geo-tagging, feedback, etc).

Q: Biggest challenge to current business?
A: From an IT perspective - making systems flexible enough to integrate quickly and easily with the many strategic partners that business leaders want to work with under the current climate of alliance and cloud thinking.

Q: What is your biggest headache in your job right now?
A: Legacy systems containing lots of undocumented processes.

Q: Most exciting or promising technological developments?
A: The UK will in the next few years be seeing a sudden step up in fixed and mobile broadband speeds - this will see further shifts towards digital media consumption, and smart phone use.

Q: How important is mobile, social networking, Internet retailing and the cloud to retailers?
A: These aspects are more interesting than they are important. They will certainly cause a change in the way retailers do business, will offer more flexibility to business change, and allow further insight into customer behaviour, but the changes will be organic rather than dramatic, and there will be many challenging projects to learn from along the way.

Q: What do you hate about exhibitions and wish would change?
A: Hard sell.

Q: What, if anything, do you love about exhibitions?
A: Friendly exchanges of ideas.

Q: What would you like to see at Retail Business Technology Expo?
A: More hands-on demos for the technically minded.

Q: Whose job would you most like outside of retailing / hospitality?
A: Jeremy Clarkson's.

Q: What is your favourite 'gadget' (work or personal)?
A: My android phone.

Peter Walker was speaking to the organisers of Retail Business Technology Expo as part of the 'Talking Shop' campaign.

Published March 2011