Fresh from its splash at the Consumer Electronics Show last week, Cisco is targeting consumers in another way - through partnerships with retailers. At this week's National Retail Federation Conference in New York, Cisco released several initiatives, including its Lean Retail Architecture, the expansion of its Cisco Payment Card Industry Validated Network Design, and unified communications platforms specifically for retailers.

Lean Retail Architecture allows retailers to migrate business-appropriate applications and servers out of stores and into regional or central data centers, according to the Cisco news release announcing the initiatives. The result could lead to efficiency gains of up to 30%, according to Cisco. The company will also push its application acceleration technologies to retailers.

Cisco Payment Card Industry Solution for Retail extends the industry's PCI Data Security Standard to include the data center and Internet edge sites - "environments that many retailers must also commonly address under PCI to protect customer and employee information as required by industry regulations," says Cisco. Cisco also says it has ensured that its architecture and products will work with other security software and retail hardware.

Cisco is offering its Unified IP Phone touchscreens to "boost employee productivity" by making time and attendance functions accessible on the devices.

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