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Sunday, September 12, 2010
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Increase your Website Traffic
Here is a simple list of SEO tips and tactics to help get more traffic and links to your website with some very simple and easy to follow steps.
Many people think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. Wrong answer. Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight.
Think about it this way - how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don't tell them? You must advertise. Here are some proven ways to advertise your site without spending [much] money:
The order of these does NOT matter and will not affect how your site ranks or gets traffic if you decide to do these in a different order as to how I have listed them nor will missing any of these out affect your rankings or traffic. Remember though, the more work you put in the more traffic you will get as you submit to more sites by using these different SEO tactics for link and traffic building.
Usenet Groups:
Subscribe to the Usenet groups and advertise there. A good place to start is Google Groups
Be sure to submit your site in appropriate groups!
Be sure to sign up with a backup email or you will get onto every spammers database!
Be sure you don't SPAM -- only submit a write up of your site once to any given group.
Directory Submissions:
Submit your site to as many privately run Link Directories/Search Engines as you can find. These will not generally boost your traffic in any major way but will help to maintain steady stream of qualified visitors.
Text Advertising / Links:
Text links and advertising is very effective, but it will cost to have your advertisement put on any site so this is something you will need to set a budget for.
Banner Advertising:
Fixed banner advertising is always a good form of advertising and is said to be much better then text links. Use Banners with care, IE only on sites in same niche as you would with directories and link exchanges.
Social Networking:
Social networking such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and mega blogging sites. This should be used to give information and not used to advertise your site/company.
Reciprocal Linking:
Reciprocal linking is a good deal but you need to watch your link partners as some people are not as honest as the next, and will remove your link after a couple of weeks once you forget about it. For this reason I recommend using a link manager for all link exchanges just to be safe as these will check your reciprocal links for you.
Three way link exchanges are similar to reciprocal linking but between three sites not just you and another. Basically site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A. This form of link building will also compliment your SEO campaign as well.
Banner exchange programs:
These don't cost you a thing, but will lead to a few extra visitors. Plus, you're spreading your brand all over the place on the other sites that are signed up to the same banner exchange programs.
Pay per click and/or Affiliate Marketing Programs:
Pay per click is as the name says, you pay each time someone clicks a link to your site on search engines and/or on other sites in sponsored link sections.
Affiliate marketing can be set to use either pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sale or pay per customer acquired and generally work the same as any other pay per click program.
Email Marketing:
This is sometimes taken as being spammy but as long as it�s not over used to spam thousands it should turn out ok.
Email marketing is cost effective and you can use it to send out information about special offers and new products etc, but be nice about it and don�t over use this sending to many emails out all the time.
Reviews:
Ask users/customers (depending on the site) to write a review for you, be it short or long it�s still a review and will help to show new visitors that your current client base likes how you run.
Do the odd review about your own company to get things started! Most if not all sites have done this in the past and will more than likely do it again in the future, but just make sure it looks like a real review and is only the trough!
Create your own RSS feeds or Atoms:
These are a great way to offer visitors the option to sign up to your sites news and/or update depending on how you set it up and what type of site you run.
The most important thing to remember is that you need to offer and provide good, strong content on your site for your visitors to want to come back and keep using your site, and for the search engines to see your site is worthy of the top listings.
If you want the list above to work and keep working you will need to follow these simple rules for your on site SEO tactics and keep your site fresh and up-to-date all the time.
Create good quality content that is helpful and useful to your visitors. If you just copy and paste information/content from others sites you will not get the traffic or visitors you�re looking for to stay with you as it will be old news they have all seen before.
Keep your sites and its content fresh. If you�re after repeat visitors that will want to keep coming back to your site time after time, you will need to keep not only the look and feel of your site fresh but also the content you put on it. This means you will want to do updates on your site as often as you can and keep your visitors informed on any changes.
Outsource article writing to keep the fresh content coming in. You should be able to get some quality articles/content written for you for about $5 each (based on 500 works per article and a minimum 10 article buy so that�s just $50 for 10 articles).
Your videos on your site as well as on others such as YouTube. Everyone likes to watch a video now and then because it�s easier then reading all the time. One thing you will want to remember is not to have your video on auto play as this can annoy some people.
SOURCE:http://www.addme.com/newsletters/increase-website-traffic.htm
Many people think that having a good website is all you need to get tons of visitors. Wrong answer. Getting traffic to your site takes hard work and diligence and is not accomplished overnight.
Think about it this way - how are people supposed to know where to find your site if you don't tell them? You must advertise. Here are some proven ways to advertise your site without spending [much] money:
The order of these does NOT matter and will not affect how your site ranks or gets traffic if you decide to do these in a different order as to how I have listed them nor will missing any of these out affect your rankings or traffic. Remember though, the more work you put in the more traffic you will get as you submit to more sites by using these different SEO tactics for link and traffic building.
Usenet Groups:
Subscribe to the Usenet groups and advertise there. A good place to start is Google Groups
Be sure to submit your site in appropriate groups!
Be sure to sign up with a backup email or you will get onto every spammers database!
Be sure you don't SPAM -- only submit a write up of your site once to any given group.
Directory Submissions:
Submit your site to as many privately run Link Directories/Search Engines as you can find. These will not generally boost your traffic in any major way but will help to maintain steady stream of qualified visitors.
Text Advertising / Links:
Text links and advertising is very effective, but it will cost to have your advertisement put on any site so this is something you will need to set a budget for.
Banner Advertising:
Fixed banner advertising is always a good form of advertising and is said to be much better then text links. Use Banners with care, IE only on sites in same niche as you would with directories and link exchanges.
Social Networking:
Social networking such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and mega blogging sites. This should be used to give information and not used to advertise your site/company.
Reciprocal Linking:
Reciprocal linking is a good deal but you need to watch your link partners as some people are not as honest as the next, and will remove your link after a couple of weeks once you forget about it. For this reason I recommend using a link manager for all link exchanges just to be safe as these will check your reciprocal links for you.
Three way link exchanges are similar to reciprocal linking but between three sites not just you and another. Basically site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A. This form of link building will also compliment your SEO campaign as well.
Banner exchange programs:
These don't cost you a thing, but will lead to a few extra visitors. Plus, you're spreading your brand all over the place on the other sites that are signed up to the same banner exchange programs.
Pay per click and/or Affiliate Marketing Programs:
Pay per click is as the name says, you pay each time someone clicks a link to your site on search engines and/or on other sites in sponsored link sections.
Affiliate marketing can be set to use either pay per click, pay per lead, pay per sale or pay per customer acquired and generally work the same as any other pay per click program.
Email Marketing:
This is sometimes taken as being spammy but as long as it�s not over used to spam thousands it should turn out ok.
Email marketing is cost effective and you can use it to send out information about special offers and new products etc, but be nice about it and don�t over use this sending to many emails out all the time.
Reviews:
Ask users/customers (depending on the site) to write a review for you, be it short or long it�s still a review and will help to show new visitors that your current client base likes how you run.
Do the odd review about your own company to get things started! Most if not all sites have done this in the past and will more than likely do it again in the future, but just make sure it looks like a real review and is only the trough!
Create your own RSS feeds or Atoms:
These are a great way to offer visitors the option to sign up to your sites news and/or update depending on how you set it up and what type of site you run.
The most important thing to remember is that you need to offer and provide good, strong content on your site for your visitors to want to come back and keep using your site, and for the search engines to see your site is worthy of the top listings.
If you want the list above to work and keep working you will need to follow these simple rules for your on site SEO tactics and keep your site fresh and up-to-date all the time.
Create good quality content that is helpful and useful to your visitors. If you just copy and paste information/content from others sites you will not get the traffic or visitors you�re looking for to stay with you as it will be old news they have all seen before.
Keep your sites and its content fresh. If you�re after repeat visitors that will want to keep coming back to your site time after time, you will need to keep not only the look and feel of your site fresh but also the content you put on it. This means you will want to do updates on your site as often as you can and keep your visitors informed on any changes.
Outsource article writing to keep the fresh content coming in. You should be able to get some quality articles/content written for you for about $5 each (based on 500 works per article and a minimum 10 article buy so that�s just $50 for 10 articles).
Your videos on your site as well as on others such as YouTube. Everyone likes to watch a video now and then because it�s easier then reading all the time. One thing you will want to remember is not to have your video on auto play as this can annoy some people.
SOURCE:http://www.addme.com/newsletters/increase-website-traffic.htm
SAP Bolsters NetWeaver's MDM Capabilities Part Four: SAP and A2i
SAP As Convergence Point
SAP NetWeaver, has become the main pillar of SAP AG's (NYSE: SAP) strategy to remake itself into a platform vendor. With this and mySAP Business Suite, the broadest suite of enterprise applications in the market, SAP will sell possibly everything from application servers via middleware to Web services (envisioned, in SAP's case, to orchestrate business processes by means of packaged composite applications across and/or atop existing systems). In mid July, SAP announced that it has acquired substantially all of A2i, Inc. (www.a2i.com), a Los Angeles, California-based (US), privately held software company, which, since has 1993 developed and marketed xCat, the platform for enterprise-wide product content management (PCM) and cross-media catalog publishing, but with the touted simplicity and accessibility of desktop applications.
Given its leadership position and the resulting clout in the market, SAP's decision on any technology carries a significant weight. To that end, having a company with the stature of SAP complementing its SAP Master Data Management (SAP MDM) product with a PCM platform that provides more than traditional product information management (PIM) capabilities of bringing together, in a single place, all the information needed to bring a product to market, is likely to increase the PCM concept's awareness, validate the space, and speed up its ever-growing adoption of late.
The likes of SAP will gladly serve as a convergence point that would bring ECM within collaborative business processes. Even now the SAP Records Management (SAP RM) component of SAP NetWeaver offers more than tools, as it has predefined industry specific records management layouts and scenarios, such as SAP Public Sector Records Management, mySAP Financials Dispute Management, and mySAP CRM Case Management. Also, SAP's business processes (and even processes outside SAP applications) can share content gathered at any SAP NetWeaver layer through open standards. For example, participants can publish BI content in the SAP KM repository, which then enables KM objects to exploit all SAP KM services, like subscriptions, discussions, collaboration, information aggregation, etc., and the documents associated with BI, business processes, and product models. Also, through the collaboration engine, cFolders, users can make the analytic model available to participating teams without requiring them to open a SAP BW developer workbench or have to study the metadata or databases.
For that reason, the A2i acquisition will in the short term bring together two complementary e-commerce products that should help retailers, manufacturers and suppliers manage and sell their products to other companies and customers online. Namely, as also seen with recent Click Commerce's acquisitions of Allegis and bTrade (see Click Commerce Acquires Allegis), the Comergent's acquisition of Profile Systems, the merger of QRS with Inovis (see Inovis Delves into PIM by Snatching QRS) following the earlier fallout between QRS and JDA (see Not All Acquisitions Happen: JDA and QRS), in addition to that of GXS with HAHT Commerce (respectively), and the partnership of The Kodiak Group and Cleo Communications, it is apparent that the retail-focused SAP offerings should have a broader value proposition when bundled with the A2i PCM technology. A2i PCM technology helps companies record the correct product data and push it throughout the channel to avoid, for example, overstocking or under-stocking of often incorrect product data. In other words, SAP gains PIM software, which aggregates and organizes item-related data from multiple application sources, and data synchronization/syndication tools, which let manufacturers and suppliers synchronize items with retail partners through the UCCnet foundation service.
Given Wal-Mart's requirements for its suppliers to meet data sharing regulations passed by UCCNet and given many vendors' endeavors in addressing UCCNet's compliance, one can discern one major up-sell and cross-sell rationale behind the acquisition. From the perspective of manufacturers, data synchronization is an important part of keeping up good relationships with retailers like Wal-Mart, and one solution is internal data integration via a catalog product such as xCat offered by A2i, with the GDS capability expected in the coming fall.
However, for the above ECM/PCM "bigger picture" discussion, SAP is interested not only in GDS, but also in the greater value of PCM, with tie-ins for trade promotions management, marketing resource management, financial applications, CRM applications, solutions dealing with product design, and even sourcing and procurement. None of these can be dealt with successfully without knowing what and from whom one is buying. However, without PCM functionality delivered in unison with PLM solutions, changes to product information outside of the catalog do not automatically update the catalog, since PLM should control product content throughout its life cycle, ensuring that all product content is current and accurate wherever it exists within the organization and its supply chain.
The A2i Advantage
To that end, A2i's xCat utility extends beyond mere product data, since users can define any kind of data on the A2i system. Founded in 1993, A2i (standing for "analog to interactive") initially designed and built turnkey electronic catalogs, which were first delivered on CD-ROMs. The Internet explosion has allowed the company to diversify to more robust Web-based delivery. In 1996, it acquired Israel-based Nova-ArtMedia, which further expanded its functional and developing capabilities. Unlike many peers that begun with paper catalogs and then moved into interactive media, A2i added paper publishing capabilities well after its on-line credentials have been established. The company has been profitable in serving industrial manufacturers and distributors like General Electric (GE) Consumer and Industrial, Becton, Dickinson & Company, Rubbermaid and Airgas, among several dozen customers.
A2i's xCat product has been acclaimed by users as a high-performing, comprehensive system for creating, aggregating, normalizing, cleansing, structuring, distributing, syndicating, and publishing product content that work in a variety of media including paper print, web, and CD-ROM. As said earlier on, one of the reasons why e-commerce was slow in taking off was that companies did not have the product content and the publishing tools to make it useful on an ongoing basis (such as, through the ability to continually change offerings, modify offerings, accommodate alterations to different markets).
Collecting content is difficult and expensive, given that not only do enterprises need a process for collecting content, but they also need the tools in which to place and structure the content properly. Poorly structured content cannot be published on paper and cannot be Web-enabled either. That has been A2i's focus—creating a system that allows users to structure content in a way that it can be used repeatedly. Further, since it is such an expensive process, users need to be able to leverage that investment across multiple media and to be able to publish to the Web in a fast, rich, and searchable way—in terms of not just transactional data, but also parametric information that makes it possible to search by product relationship.
To do that, xCat combines several functions, including a front end to an SQL-based database, a data mining and presentation tool, a table creation and formatting tool, media management and consolidation tools, and a catalog creation tool. The product's often lauded strengths are fast and easy searching capabilities across concocted catalogs from various suppliers with differing naming conventions, units of measure (UOMs), and terminology, in a way that lets users run a search and get reliable results. Searching for product data gets a boost with truly international search engine that automatically converts between over forty physical dimensions. The product's import and export capabilities are also solid, with connections to Adobe InDesign and Quark XPress.
SAP Strategy
SAP hereby maintains its focus on solving "down-to-earth" business problems and on positioning itself as a strategic partner to its customers. Particularly during these times of risk-averse customers, SAP's aura of a stalwart vendor and its prudent approaches to solving customers' business problems have become even more attractive and assuring both to its huge customer base and to new prospects. The company has, by and large made the right strategic decisions—it has embarked on making its proverbially unwieldy R/3 ERP product more granular and open. It has also delivered attractive ERP-adjacent components that harness its latest technology foundations, given the demand has been moving from the center to the outskirts of any enterprise, and interest in solutions that promote collaborative communication throughout the entire value chain is ever-rising.
SAP is by no means the only vendor trying to oblige enterprises in their mindset of increasingly seeking business process-oriented interoperable applications. It is no longer enough to just capture all the data in the same place, since applications are increasingly required to automate the traditional manual processes that utilize these data, such as mortgage or insurance policy application processes. However, hardly any of its direct peers can, at this stage, claim the content and multilayer comprehensiveness of SAP NetWeaver, nor the ability to wholeheartedly embrace both .NET and J2EE frameworks at several levels of integration.
Initial Web-enablement efforts of many ERP vendors have not been based on open standards, meaning that building Java wrappers does not bring much business value unless the processes can support runtime, configurable business processes consisting of many services. SAP NetWeaver, to that end, is not only a J2EE-compliant business application, but also a platform upon which users can stack other key technologies needed to architect, model, design, implement, deploy, and monitor service-oriented business solutions. SAP even offers some key enterprise content management (ECM) components in NetWeaver, including web content management (WCM), content management, database management (DM), archiving, and records management, which are not clearly presented as ECM in the technology stack, but rather remain parts of the overall SAP Integrated Framework for collaborative business processes.
The Integrated Framework is the heart of SAP NetWeaver that drives collaborative business models and processes both within and outside the boundaries of the enterprise. SAP uses this framework to allow its technical components to participate in business activities modeled in SAP XI, which is the process integration framework. Models define not only transactional requirement, but also the integration workflows needed for such as, collaborative business activity monitoring (BAM) or content aggregation and consolidation.
While it may not be very likely SAP will use this technology outline to aggressively pursue PIM, GDS, or PCM markets, it will certainly make the respective niche vendors' jobs of selling into the fertile SAP client base very difficult down the track, when SAP's up-sell and cross-sell capabilities come in earnest. SAP might have conceded to the fact that its customers might not necessarily accept the one-size-fits-all mantra when it comes to its functional applications. However, SAP hopes customers may likely opt for that approach when it comes to the enterprise integration and infrastructure. For this reason, in the long term, these specialist vendors will have to devise an answer to IBM and SAP's superior combination of viability and account control. At least, the few remaining notable competitors to IBM and SAP, such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SSA Global or Lawson Software, might further entertain their shopping spree.
Nevertheless, given the nascence of the offering, in the short term, SAP and IBM will not affect nor lessen the value proposition of independent vendors in these niches, such as Cardonet, Enigma, ePlus, Aspect (now part of i2 Technologies), GXS, Flow Systems, FullTilt, Pindar, PTC, Requisite, Riversand, SAQQARA, Velosel, and more. Thus, this acquisition, as well as IBM's earlier acquisition of Trigo Technologies signals a tremendous shift in the PIM/GDS market; somewhat simplifies the choices for larger firms seeking a route forward to GDS and streamlined internal product information processes; and notifies RFID pioneers to the need to include data synchronization in their pilots.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sap-bolsters-netweaver-s-mdm-capabilities-part-four-sap-and-a2i-17651/
SAP NetWeaver, has become the main pillar of SAP AG's (NYSE: SAP) strategy to remake itself into a platform vendor. With this and mySAP Business Suite, the broadest suite of enterprise applications in the market, SAP will sell possibly everything from application servers via middleware to Web services (envisioned, in SAP's case, to orchestrate business processes by means of packaged composite applications across and/or atop existing systems). In mid July, SAP announced that it has acquired substantially all of A2i, Inc. (www.a2i.com), a Los Angeles, California-based (US), privately held software company, which, since has 1993 developed and marketed xCat, the platform for enterprise-wide product content management (PCM) and cross-media catalog publishing, but with the touted simplicity and accessibility of desktop applications.
Given its leadership position and the resulting clout in the market, SAP's decision on any technology carries a significant weight. To that end, having a company with the stature of SAP complementing its SAP Master Data Management (SAP MDM) product with a PCM platform that provides more than traditional product information management (PIM) capabilities of bringing together, in a single place, all the information needed to bring a product to market, is likely to increase the PCM concept's awareness, validate the space, and speed up its ever-growing adoption of late.
The likes of SAP will gladly serve as a convergence point that would bring ECM within collaborative business processes. Even now the SAP Records Management (SAP RM) component of SAP NetWeaver offers more than tools, as it has predefined industry specific records management layouts and scenarios, such as SAP Public Sector Records Management, mySAP Financials Dispute Management, and mySAP CRM Case Management. Also, SAP's business processes (and even processes outside SAP applications) can share content gathered at any SAP NetWeaver layer through open standards. For example, participants can publish BI content in the SAP KM repository, which then enables KM objects to exploit all SAP KM services, like subscriptions, discussions, collaboration, information aggregation, etc., and the documents associated with BI, business processes, and product models. Also, through the collaboration engine, cFolders, users can make the analytic model available to participating teams without requiring them to open a SAP BW developer workbench or have to study the metadata or databases.
For that reason, the A2i acquisition will in the short term bring together two complementary e-commerce products that should help retailers, manufacturers and suppliers manage and sell their products to other companies and customers online. Namely, as also seen with recent Click Commerce's acquisitions of Allegis and bTrade (see Click Commerce Acquires Allegis), the Comergent's acquisition of Profile Systems, the merger of QRS with Inovis (see Inovis Delves into PIM by Snatching QRS) following the earlier fallout between QRS and JDA (see Not All Acquisitions Happen: JDA and QRS), in addition to that of GXS with HAHT Commerce (respectively), and the partnership of The Kodiak Group and Cleo Communications, it is apparent that the retail-focused SAP offerings should have a broader value proposition when bundled with the A2i PCM technology. A2i PCM technology helps companies record the correct product data and push it throughout the channel to avoid, for example, overstocking or under-stocking of often incorrect product data. In other words, SAP gains PIM software, which aggregates and organizes item-related data from multiple application sources, and data synchronization/syndication tools, which let manufacturers and suppliers synchronize items with retail partners through the UCCnet foundation service.
Given Wal-Mart's requirements for its suppliers to meet data sharing regulations passed by UCCNet and given many vendors' endeavors in addressing UCCNet's compliance, one can discern one major up-sell and cross-sell rationale behind the acquisition. From the perspective of manufacturers, data synchronization is an important part of keeping up good relationships with retailers like Wal-Mart, and one solution is internal data integration via a catalog product such as xCat offered by A2i, with the GDS capability expected in the coming fall.
However, for the above ECM/PCM "bigger picture" discussion, SAP is interested not only in GDS, but also in the greater value of PCM, with tie-ins for trade promotions management, marketing resource management, financial applications, CRM applications, solutions dealing with product design, and even sourcing and procurement. None of these can be dealt with successfully without knowing what and from whom one is buying. However, without PCM functionality delivered in unison with PLM solutions, changes to product information outside of the catalog do not automatically update the catalog, since PLM should control product content throughout its life cycle, ensuring that all product content is current and accurate wherever it exists within the organization and its supply chain.
The A2i Advantage
To that end, A2i's xCat utility extends beyond mere product data, since users can define any kind of data on the A2i system. Founded in 1993, A2i (standing for "analog to interactive") initially designed and built turnkey electronic catalogs, which were first delivered on CD-ROMs. The Internet explosion has allowed the company to diversify to more robust Web-based delivery. In 1996, it acquired Israel-based Nova-ArtMedia, which further expanded its functional and developing capabilities. Unlike many peers that begun with paper catalogs and then moved into interactive media, A2i added paper publishing capabilities well after its on-line credentials have been established. The company has been profitable in serving industrial manufacturers and distributors like General Electric (GE) Consumer and Industrial, Becton, Dickinson & Company, Rubbermaid and Airgas, among several dozen customers.
A2i's xCat product has been acclaimed by users as a high-performing, comprehensive system for creating, aggregating, normalizing, cleansing, structuring, distributing, syndicating, and publishing product content that work in a variety of media including paper print, web, and CD-ROM. As said earlier on, one of the reasons why e-commerce was slow in taking off was that companies did not have the product content and the publishing tools to make it useful on an ongoing basis (such as, through the ability to continually change offerings, modify offerings, accommodate alterations to different markets).
Collecting content is difficult and expensive, given that not only do enterprises need a process for collecting content, but they also need the tools in which to place and structure the content properly. Poorly structured content cannot be published on paper and cannot be Web-enabled either. That has been A2i's focus—creating a system that allows users to structure content in a way that it can be used repeatedly. Further, since it is such an expensive process, users need to be able to leverage that investment across multiple media and to be able to publish to the Web in a fast, rich, and searchable way—in terms of not just transactional data, but also parametric information that makes it possible to search by product relationship.
To do that, xCat combines several functions, including a front end to an SQL-based database, a data mining and presentation tool, a table creation and formatting tool, media management and consolidation tools, and a catalog creation tool. The product's often lauded strengths are fast and easy searching capabilities across concocted catalogs from various suppliers with differing naming conventions, units of measure (UOMs), and terminology, in a way that lets users run a search and get reliable results. Searching for product data gets a boost with truly international search engine that automatically converts between over forty physical dimensions. The product's import and export capabilities are also solid, with connections to Adobe InDesign and Quark XPress.
SAP Strategy
SAP hereby maintains its focus on solving "down-to-earth" business problems and on positioning itself as a strategic partner to its customers. Particularly during these times of risk-averse customers, SAP's aura of a stalwart vendor and its prudent approaches to solving customers' business problems have become even more attractive and assuring both to its huge customer base and to new prospects. The company has, by and large made the right strategic decisions—it has embarked on making its proverbially unwieldy R/3 ERP product more granular and open. It has also delivered attractive ERP-adjacent components that harness its latest technology foundations, given the demand has been moving from the center to the outskirts of any enterprise, and interest in solutions that promote collaborative communication throughout the entire value chain is ever-rising.
SAP is by no means the only vendor trying to oblige enterprises in their mindset of increasingly seeking business process-oriented interoperable applications. It is no longer enough to just capture all the data in the same place, since applications are increasingly required to automate the traditional manual processes that utilize these data, such as mortgage or insurance policy application processes. However, hardly any of its direct peers can, at this stage, claim the content and multilayer comprehensiveness of SAP NetWeaver, nor the ability to wholeheartedly embrace both .NET and J2EE frameworks at several levels of integration.
Initial Web-enablement efforts of many ERP vendors have not been based on open standards, meaning that building Java wrappers does not bring much business value unless the processes can support runtime, configurable business processes consisting of many services. SAP NetWeaver, to that end, is not only a J2EE-compliant business application, but also a platform upon which users can stack other key technologies needed to architect, model, design, implement, deploy, and monitor service-oriented business solutions. SAP even offers some key enterprise content management (ECM) components in NetWeaver, including web content management (WCM), content management, database management (DM), archiving, and records management, which are not clearly presented as ECM in the technology stack, but rather remain parts of the overall SAP Integrated Framework for collaborative business processes.
The Integrated Framework is the heart of SAP NetWeaver that drives collaborative business models and processes both within and outside the boundaries of the enterprise. SAP uses this framework to allow its technical components to participate in business activities modeled in SAP XI, which is the process integration framework. Models define not only transactional requirement, but also the integration workflows needed for such as, collaborative business activity monitoring (BAM) or content aggregation and consolidation.
While it may not be very likely SAP will use this technology outline to aggressively pursue PIM, GDS, or PCM markets, it will certainly make the respective niche vendors' jobs of selling into the fertile SAP client base very difficult down the track, when SAP's up-sell and cross-sell capabilities come in earnest. SAP might have conceded to the fact that its customers might not necessarily accept the one-size-fits-all mantra when it comes to its functional applications. However, SAP hopes customers may likely opt for that approach when it comes to the enterprise integration and infrastructure. For this reason, in the long term, these specialist vendors will have to devise an answer to IBM and SAP's superior combination of viability and account control. At least, the few remaining notable competitors to IBM and SAP, such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SSA Global or Lawson Software, might further entertain their shopping spree.
Nevertheless, given the nascence of the offering, in the short term, SAP and IBM will not affect nor lessen the value proposition of independent vendors in these niches, such as Cardonet, Enigma, ePlus, Aspect (now part of i2 Technologies), GXS, Flow Systems, FullTilt, Pindar, PTC, Requisite, Riversand, SAQQARA, Velosel, and more. Thus, this acquisition, as well as IBM's earlier acquisition of Trigo Technologies signals a tremendous shift in the PIM/GDS market; somewhat simplifies the choices for larger firms seeking a route forward to GDS and streamlined internal product information processes; and notifies RFID pioneers to the need to include data synchronization in their pilots.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sap-bolsters-netweaver-s-mdm-capabilities-part-four-sap-and-a2i-17651/
Mainstream Enterprise Vendors Begin to Grasp Content Management Part One: PCM System Attributes
SAP's recent acquisition of the former catalog management vendor A2i and IBM's acquisition of the former product information management (PIM) vendor Trigo might indicate some enterprise-wide product content management (PCM) approaches of the mainstream enterprise platform and enterprise applications or enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors, as their responses to the need for an effective master data management (MDM) system to the widespread challenges of sprinkled data integration from multiple systems, physical locations, and diverse trading partners. Thus, PCM and PIM would be the core parts of MDM solutions that will manage any kind of master data and be seamlessly integrated into a customer's existing enterprise architecture, ideally eliminating all data duplication and making centralized customer, supplier, or product information available to other applications across the organization.
SAP, IBM, and like mainstream enterprise vendors need to solve the problems inherent to data residing in disparate systems, as enterprises are becoming painfully aware of the need to clean up their structured data and unstructured content acts to capitalize on more important efforts like regulatory compliance, globalization, demand aggregation, and supply chain streamlining, to name some. To that end, these enterprise vendors have to provide the ability to also integrate emerging radio frequency identification (RFID) data into their software, as well as full support for web services-based provisioning and consumption of data and processes.
Yet, the all-encompassing content management solution is still in the ever-evolving design stage, as vendors try to piece together comprehensive systems. Therefore, there seems to be a proliferation (and subsequent confusion about) of the pertinent terms and acronyms like enterprise content management (ECM), product content management (PCM), catalog management, product information management (PIM), records management (RM), product data management (PDM), enterprise data repositories (EDR), document management (DM), knowledge management (KM), web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), enterprise information management (EIM), digital rights management (DRM), document imaging, workflow management (WM) or business process management (BPM), and many more.
Generally speaking, PCM (sometimes also called PIM) refers to a system for managing all types of information about finished products, and it is a further evolutionary step of catalog content management backed up with a workflow management. This is however different from ECM, which focuses more on document management and other unstructured editorial and web content, whereas PCM is more granular around individual data elements and focuses on highly structured product content. ECM encompasses many of the above-cited technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. In other words, it allows the management of an organization's unstructured information (e.g., e-mails, photos, spreadsheets, documents, etc.), wherever that information exists—stored in repositories, shuttled across networks, and managed over the course of its existence or life cycle.
Definition of PCM Systems
Coming back to managing structured, alphanumeric information, a PIM or PCM solution would include the ability to organize a company's product information, regardless of location, into a consolidated system of record, and be able to synchronize or distribute that information to any business partners that require it. Yet, true PCM should mean more than just the centralized repository to eliminate data duplication with a limited nugget of functionality; rather, this repository must be capable of storing all product information, while the system must be more than a point solution or an island, since it must also offer high-performance access to that information, and it must include tightly integrated functionality that can be used to drive all crucial enterprise initiatives.
First and foremost, the PCM should revolve around a single centralized repository of product information. It should be the "system of record" for all non-transactional product information and organizational intelligence about products, and eliminate data duplication and system redundancy across the enterprise. In effect, it should be the "ERP for product information" containing not only "rich product content", but also other types of related information, such as supplier information, as well as one or more supplier-specific sub-records of sourcing information for each product that allows the PCM to simultaneously drive both sell-side and buy-side initiatives. In other words, the rich product content managed by the PCM must be much more than simply transactional data about each product from the ERP or product master file (e.g., a part number, a description, and a price).
This brings us to the notion of enterprise publishing (where some PCM systems will overlap with ECM), which aims at reducing costs to create and speed deployment of all the product-related information, including user manuals, sales collateral, and web sites, that make up the complete product offering. In fact, rich product content must comprise all of the non-transactional product information within an organization, such as detailed parametric data on product specifications; merchandising text, high resolution images, drawings, diagrams, and portable data formats (PDF) for various marketing and publishing requirements; a classification scheme for organizing the products into a searchable taxonomy of categories and subcategories with category-specific attributes; product relationships to represent selling relationships (such as up-sells, cross-sells, and accessories) and structural relationships (such as assemblies, kits, and bundles); parts usage information; and finally, various product-specific services for leveraging the rich product content such as hotspots information for illustrated parts catalogs without the need for a separate system.
The term PIM has appeared more frequently lately in the discussion of global data synchronization (GDS) and syndication because of a number of market initiatives that act as catalysts for change. For example, many large retailers, including Wal-Mart, Office Depot, The Home Depot, Target, Albertsons, and Safeway have mandated their suppliers to synchronize product data via European article number (EAN)/UCCnet registry and data synchronization services. Other catalysts would include the Sunrise 2005 initiative that seeks to standardize on a format for global product identification via a new 14-digit code, and the RFID initiatives in place to bring about the rapid adoption of new radio frequency tags on all products, so that they may be more easily tracked through manufacturing and retail environments.
A full-fledged PCM system should additionally have no predetermined notion of the repository structure itself, but rather offer a fully flexible schema that can be tailored to meet the specific requirements of each enterprise and each vertical industry, and that can change over time. The PCM must be more than just a simple database application or end-user application, and more than just a standalone point solution that addresses a single functional requirement (such as UCCnet synchronization, paper print or web-based publishing, or illustrated parts catalogs). Rather, it must be a completely open system with both graphical user interface (GUI) tools for end users and multi-platform application programming interfaces (API) for programmatic access (e.g., Java 2 Enterprise Edition [J2EE], Microsoft .NET, eXtensible Markup Language [XML], web services, and simple object access protocol [SOAP]), supporting both content authoring and runtime searching, and providing a horizontal platform for building best-of-breed vertical solutions.
The like PCM system must also support all the leading middleware application stacks so that it can leverage and integrate with web application servers (WAS), enterprise application integration (EAI) and portal servers. Also, rather than a fixed web-based user interface, it should provide a flexible presentation layer that can be completely customized and tailored to particular organizational requirements and various vertical markets needs.
Finally, the PCM should be able to unify and harmonize product information stored within repositories across the enterprise, creating "a single copy of the truth" regardless of where the data resides. That is to say, the PCM must act as a centralized "hub" that plugs PCM functionality and high-performance access to highly-structured product information into all enterprise initiatives, not only at the user level but also at the enterprise integration level, for plug-and-play coordination with other extended-ERP solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), supplier relationship management (SRM) and supply chain management (SCM), where the vendors with broad offering like SAP or Oracle should be glad to oblige their users.
Desired PCM System Attributes
Based on the above discussion, a proper PCM system, such as the one acquired by SAP, should have the following attributes:
Powerful product content aggregation and cleansing, management and editing of product information, since the proper PCM system should do more than store data that used to reside in another system. Instead, it must include powerful and extensive capabilities for loading, restructuring, cleansing, normalizing, and transforming source data from a variety of electronic sources, including text, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, structured query language (SQL), and XML for both flat files and relational data.
Classification into a taxonomy with category-specific attributes, since not only must the proper PCM systems have a completely flexible schema, it must also support multiple classification schemes, user-defined taxonomy hierarchies of arbitrary depth with category-specific attributes, multiple simultaneous taxonomies, and drag-and-drop taxonomy editing capabilities that allow the taxonomy of the fully populated repository to be completely restructured and refined over time.
Intelligent image management, since many systems can easily store an image as a binary large object (BLOB). By contrast, the proper PCM system must support intelligent image management with an understanding of all of the leading image formats, the ability to automatically transform images for different publishing purposes, and optimized high-performance image access and efficient image caching.
Integrated high-performance product search engine, since search mechanisms offered by traditional systems are not precise enough for searching product information. The full-fledged PCM system must hence include a fully integrated multidimensional search engine that is optimized for product search, with support not only for drill-down, parametric, and keyword search, but also units or measurement search, partial or contains search, and other types of search. To that end, there should be the ability to let customers search for goods without knowing product codes, that is, in a "No part number, no problem" manner.
Performance acceleration, with scalability up to millions of products, since traditional enterprise applications, such as ERP or CRM, are not optimized for heavy search and access loads. Similarly, a traditional relational database management system (DBMS) is slow on typical searches against large repositories, so relying on the "naked" DBMS is also a problem. Not to mention that databases have not been architected well to manage large, binary objects, since rows, columns, and SQL access are not suited for managing object like frames of a video or pages of a document. Therefore, a proper PCM system must have a self-optimizing performance acceleration layer that is able to quickly serve up product information to users and other enterprise applications.
Most catalog solutions are simple database applications that layer a thin veneer of functionality over SQL and they rely on SQL for all access to the data, whereby SQL works well with retrieving a single record from among thousands or even millions. Yet, to retrieve, for example, several thousand records from among a few million, and to limit across all of the different dimensions of the search for users to only see valid selections and valid values, that requires a multi-table join.
Also, to interactively browse and sort search results, it requires the use of cursors and temporary files, which is another thing that cripples the performance of a SQL-based DBMS. One such example would be having thirty thousand bearings and very intricate relationships of which bearings can be sold with which other bearings, which requires a system to manage and automate those relationships.
Cross-media publishing (web and paper or CD-ROM print), since the appropriate PCM system must drive all product content initiatives, including tightly integrated functionality not only for internal PCM, but also multichannel syndication, deployment of searchable web catalogs, and print solutions for catalogs and other printed publications. The things that people expect in a paper catalog in terms of layout, structure, and tabular orientation of product records, should also be deliverable to the web. Additionally, the ability to slice and dice a single master catalog that may contain several million products into as many customized virtual private, personalized, subset catalogs as necessary, whereby each slice looks like a complete catalog, either to the user on the web or when published to paper.
Database-driven print catalogs, since a full-fledged PCM system that supports print catalog publishing must do so in a way that is completely database-driven, meaning it "pushes" product information into the page layouts, rather than simply using the repository to store product information that was first entered directly into the page layout application.
The system must support UCCnet synchronization, and also be able to syndicate product information to multiple audiences, transforming it into a variety of industry-standard and user-defined XML and delimited text formats, on an ad hoc and scheduled basis.
The system must have an integrated workflow engine that can provide a framework for managing product information in a collaborative environment, and can function standalone or in conjunction with external workflow applications and systems.
The above-elaborated cross-platform compatibility; and enterprise scalability, since the appropriate PCM system must offer an n-tier architecture, capable of easily integrating with various deployment architectures, including a full suite of security and encryption services as well as the ability to integrate with leading user directories, such as lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). Finally, the PCM system must provide master and slave capabilities to enable a global 24-7 deployment consisting of both staging and publishing servers.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/mainstream-enterprise-vendors-begin-to-grasp-content-management-part-one-pcm-system-attributes-17611/
SAP, IBM, and like mainstream enterprise vendors need to solve the problems inherent to data residing in disparate systems, as enterprises are becoming painfully aware of the need to clean up their structured data and unstructured content acts to capitalize on more important efforts like regulatory compliance, globalization, demand aggregation, and supply chain streamlining, to name some. To that end, these enterprise vendors have to provide the ability to also integrate emerging radio frequency identification (RFID) data into their software, as well as full support for web services-based provisioning and consumption of data and processes.
Yet, the all-encompassing content management solution is still in the ever-evolving design stage, as vendors try to piece together comprehensive systems. Therefore, there seems to be a proliferation (and subsequent confusion about) of the pertinent terms and acronyms like enterprise content management (ECM), product content management (PCM), catalog management, product information management (PIM), records management (RM), product data management (PDM), enterprise data repositories (EDR), document management (DM), knowledge management (KM), web content management (WCM), digital asset management (DAM), enterprise information management (EIM), digital rights management (DRM), document imaging, workflow management (WM) or business process management (BPM), and many more.
Generally speaking, PCM (sometimes also called PIM) refers to a system for managing all types of information about finished products, and it is a further evolutionary step of catalog content management backed up with a workflow management. This is however different from ECM, which focuses more on document management and other unstructured editorial and web content, whereas PCM is more granular around individual data elements and focuses on highly structured product content. ECM encompasses many of the above-cited technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. In other words, it allows the management of an organization's unstructured information (e.g., e-mails, photos, spreadsheets, documents, etc.), wherever that information exists—stored in repositories, shuttled across networks, and managed over the course of its existence or life cycle.
Definition of PCM Systems
Coming back to managing structured, alphanumeric information, a PIM or PCM solution would include the ability to organize a company's product information, regardless of location, into a consolidated system of record, and be able to synchronize or distribute that information to any business partners that require it. Yet, true PCM should mean more than just the centralized repository to eliminate data duplication with a limited nugget of functionality; rather, this repository must be capable of storing all product information, while the system must be more than a point solution or an island, since it must also offer high-performance access to that information, and it must include tightly integrated functionality that can be used to drive all crucial enterprise initiatives.
First and foremost, the PCM should revolve around a single centralized repository of product information. It should be the "system of record" for all non-transactional product information and organizational intelligence about products, and eliminate data duplication and system redundancy across the enterprise. In effect, it should be the "ERP for product information" containing not only "rich product content", but also other types of related information, such as supplier information, as well as one or more supplier-specific sub-records of sourcing information for each product that allows the PCM to simultaneously drive both sell-side and buy-side initiatives. In other words, the rich product content managed by the PCM must be much more than simply transactional data about each product from the ERP or product master file (e.g., a part number, a description, and a price).
This brings us to the notion of enterprise publishing (where some PCM systems will overlap with ECM), which aims at reducing costs to create and speed deployment of all the product-related information, including user manuals, sales collateral, and web sites, that make up the complete product offering. In fact, rich product content must comprise all of the non-transactional product information within an organization, such as detailed parametric data on product specifications; merchandising text, high resolution images, drawings, diagrams, and portable data formats (PDF) for various marketing and publishing requirements; a classification scheme for organizing the products into a searchable taxonomy of categories and subcategories with category-specific attributes; product relationships to represent selling relationships (such as up-sells, cross-sells, and accessories) and structural relationships (such as assemblies, kits, and bundles); parts usage information; and finally, various product-specific services for leveraging the rich product content such as hotspots information for illustrated parts catalogs without the need for a separate system.
The term PIM has appeared more frequently lately in the discussion of global data synchronization (GDS) and syndication because of a number of market initiatives that act as catalysts for change. For example, many large retailers, including Wal-Mart, Office Depot, The Home Depot, Target, Albertsons, and Safeway have mandated their suppliers to synchronize product data via European article number (EAN)/UCCnet registry and data synchronization services. Other catalysts would include the Sunrise 2005 initiative that seeks to standardize on a format for global product identification via a new 14-digit code, and the RFID initiatives in place to bring about the rapid adoption of new radio frequency tags on all products, so that they may be more easily tracked through manufacturing and retail environments.
A full-fledged PCM system should additionally have no predetermined notion of the repository structure itself, but rather offer a fully flexible schema that can be tailored to meet the specific requirements of each enterprise and each vertical industry, and that can change over time. The PCM must be more than just a simple database application or end-user application, and more than just a standalone point solution that addresses a single functional requirement (such as UCCnet synchronization, paper print or web-based publishing, or illustrated parts catalogs). Rather, it must be a completely open system with both graphical user interface (GUI) tools for end users and multi-platform application programming interfaces (API) for programmatic access (e.g., Java 2 Enterprise Edition [J2EE], Microsoft .NET, eXtensible Markup Language [XML], web services, and simple object access protocol [SOAP]), supporting both content authoring and runtime searching, and providing a horizontal platform for building best-of-breed vertical solutions.
The like PCM system must also support all the leading middleware application stacks so that it can leverage and integrate with web application servers (WAS), enterprise application integration (EAI) and portal servers. Also, rather than a fixed web-based user interface, it should provide a flexible presentation layer that can be completely customized and tailored to particular organizational requirements and various vertical markets needs.
Finally, the PCM should be able to unify and harmonize product information stored within repositories across the enterprise, creating "a single copy of the truth" regardless of where the data resides. That is to say, the PCM must act as a centralized "hub" that plugs PCM functionality and high-performance access to highly-structured product information into all enterprise initiatives, not only at the user level but also at the enterprise integration level, for plug-and-play coordination with other extended-ERP solutions, such as customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle management (PLM), supplier relationship management (SRM) and supply chain management (SCM), where the vendors with broad offering like SAP or Oracle should be glad to oblige their users.
Desired PCM System Attributes
Based on the above discussion, a proper PCM system, such as the one acquired by SAP, should have the following attributes:
Powerful product content aggregation and cleansing, management and editing of product information, since the proper PCM system should do more than store data that used to reside in another system. Instead, it must include powerful and extensive capabilities for loading, restructuring, cleansing, normalizing, and transforming source data from a variety of electronic sources, including text, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, structured query language (SQL), and XML for both flat files and relational data.
Classification into a taxonomy with category-specific attributes, since not only must the proper PCM systems have a completely flexible schema, it must also support multiple classification schemes, user-defined taxonomy hierarchies of arbitrary depth with category-specific attributes, multiple simultaneous taxonomies, and drag-and-drop taxonomy editing capabilities that allow the taxonomy of the fully populated repository to be completely restructured and refined over time.
Intelligent image management, since many systems can easily store an image as a binary large object (BLOB). By contrast, the proper PCM system must support intelligent image management with an understanding of all of the leading image formats, the ability to automatically transform images for different publishing purposes, and optimized high-performance image access and efficient image caching.
Integrated high-performance product search engine, since search mechanisms offered by traditional systems are not precise enough for searching product information. The full-fledged PCM system must hence include a fully integrated multidimensional search engine that is optimized for product search, with support not only for drill-down, parametric, and keyword search, but also units or measurement search, partial or contains search, and other types of search. To that end, there should be the ability to let customers search for goods without knowing product codes, that is, in a "No part number, no problem" manner.
Performance acceleration, with scalability up to millions of products, since traditional enterprise applications, such as ERP or CRM, are not optimized for heavy search and access loads. Similarly, a traditional relational database management system (DBMS) is slow on typical searches against large repositories, so relying on the "naked" DBMS is also a problem. Not to mention that databases have not been architected well to manage large, binary objects, since rows, columns, and SQL access are not suited for managing object like frames of a video or pages of a document. Therefore, a proper PCM system must have a self-optimizing performance acceleration layer that is able to quickly serve up product information to users and other enterprise applications.
Most catalog solutions are simple database applications that layer a thin veneer of functionality over SQL and they rely on SQL for all access to the data, whereby SQL works well with retrieving a single record from among thousands or even millions. Yet, to retrieve, for example, several thousand records from among a few million, and to limit across all of the different dimensions of the search for users to only see valid selections and valid values, that requires a multi-table join.
Also, to interactively browse and sort search results, it requires the use of cursors and temporary files, which is another thing that cripples the performance of a SQL-based DBMS. One such example would be having thirty thousand bearings and very intricate relationships of which bearings can be sold with which other bearings, which requires a system to manage and automate those relationships.
Cross-media publishing (web and paper or CD-ROM print), since the appropriate PCM system must drive all product content initiatives, including tightly integrated functionality not only for internal PCM, but also multichannel syndication, deployment of searchable web catalogs, and print solutions for catalogs and other printed publications. The things that people expect in a paper catalog in terms of layout, structure, and tabular orientation of product records, should also be deliverable to the web. Additionally, the ability to slice and dice a single master catalog that may contain several million products into as many customized virtual private, personalized, subset catalogs as necessary, whereby each slice looks like a complete catalog, either to the user on the web or when published to paper.
Database-driven print catalogs, since a full-fledged PCM system that supports print catalog publishing must do so in a way that is completely database-driven, meaning it "pushes" product information into the page layouts, rather than simply using the repository to store product information that was first entered directly into the page layout application.
The system must support UCCnet synchronization, and also be able to syndicate product information to multiple audiences, transforming it into a variety of industry-standard and user-defined XML and delimited text formats, on an ad hoc and scheduled basis.
The system must have an integrated workflow engine that can provide a framework for managing product information in a collaborative environment, and can function standalone or in conjunction with external workflow applications and systems.
The above-elaborated cross-platform compatibility; and enterprise scalability, since the appropriate PCM system must offer an n-tier architecture, capable of easily integrating with various deployment architectures, including a full suite of security and encryption services as well as the ability to integrate with leading user directories, such as lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). Finally, the PCM system must provide master and slave capabilities to enable a global 24-7 deployment consisting of both staging and publishing servers.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/mainstream-enterprise-vendors-begin-to-grasp-content-management-part-one-pcm-system-attributes-17611/
Why Enterprise Application Search Is Crucial to Your ERP System
There are some points in history that are pivotal for societies and economies, and we are at one of these points right now. As the enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology that we use in our businesses has become more powerful and complex, the ability to simplify and find information in these massive data stores has become more critical. We are now at the crossroads where the technology that solves this problem is catching up with the ERP tools we use in our businesses. Two parallel approaches have developed to offer us different solutions—enterprise search and enterprise application search (EAS). Enterprise search allows full search of a broad spectrum of data sources ranging from content of enterprise applications, e-mail servers, intranets, and other structured or unstructured content. EAS, on the other hand, is a search function built directly into an enterprise application, allowing context-specific and general searches within the application.
Let's explore these two approaches and what they mean for those of us responsible for making the most of ERP investments.
An Historic Crossroads
Historical dates are divided into years BC, or before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and AD, or Anno Domini. It is not our intention to debate the mistakes that the monk Dionysius Exiguus made in arriving at the date of transition between eras, or whether the more neutral terms BCE and CE (for Before the Common Era and Common Era, respectively) are preferable. Instead, we will focus on the passing of two other historic landmarks and their implications for enterprise computing.
The first date we will focus on is the advent of the Internet, which changed computing forever.
When the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and open architecture networking first gave rise to the galactic network that we now refer to as the Internet, life online was very different than it is today. We can refer to this period as BG, or Before Google (although perhaps it would be more correct to refer to this period as BAV, or Before AltaVista). This new era started at the second date of importance here—the advent of full-text Internet search, which changed the Internet forever. In August of 1995, technicians at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab completed the initial index of the entire Web, allowing full-text search of ten million Web pages. AltaVista, the first globally successful, text-based search engine was born—only later to be eclipsed by Google.
What is so earth-shattering about that moment? In the early days of the Web, bookmarks, portals, and Web indexes were very important in order to find what you were looking for online. The Internet had succeeded in connecting countless remote computer networks, but in order to find anything, paradoxically, you had to first know where it was. Many sites on the Internet prominently featured links pages, which were designed to be reference points thoughtfully provided by the sites' owners to make it easier for their visitors to find specific resources online. Earlier search tools required site owners to register their web sites, and then, only very narrow keywords would be searchable rather than the entire site contents. So using an early search engine, you might, at best, be able to find a site about sports history, but not specific information on how many home runs baseball great Hank Aaron accumulated during his career (775) or the number of goals Brazilian soccer great Ronaldo has scored in World Cup play. You could find sites containing information on industrial equipment, but probably would have trouble finding "for sale" listings for a used dewatering screen for your mining operation, or a rotary die cutter for your printing and converting company.
Searching within Your Own Systems
The ability to find things on the Web using powerful search tools like Google and AltaVista is a tremendous time-saver. Similar time-saving and efficiencies can also be achieved by expediting the search for information within your company's own systems—specifically, within an enterprise application.
An enterprise application is in some ways similar to the public Internet, as it connects computer data throughout your company, uniting islands of information into a single data universe. And like the Internet, the application features some type of navigation structure to help you surf between the different screens and functions. These tabs or hierarchy of screens are the equivalent of the bookmarks we used to have to navigate the Internet. To run a query on your enterprise data, you go to the correct form and run a query in the appropriate field or dialog. Just like in the early days of the Internet, to find information in your business application, you need to know where it is.
In searching for information about a particular company, you need to know whether the information you want is attached to records regarding individual companies, records on people who work for the company, or records of active projects having to do with the company. With enough knowledge of precisely how you have configured your enterprise application, you can find what you are looking for.
This search method is probably an acceptable way for frequent users of a system to search for purchase orders, or to search by supplier or customer information. But it does not work that well for the occasional user of a system, or even for a heavy user of the system who is searching an application in an area with which he or she is not intimately familiar. Because enterprise applications are so broad and cover so many different disciplines within a company, it is hard for any one person to have a thorough understanding of even a majority of an application's functionality.
That is why application vendors are coming to market with various search solutions for use within their products. There are two distinct approaches to delivering this critical search function.
In short, EAS is a tool that is tightly integrated with an enterprise application, and it delivers targeted search results from within the application's knowledge base. Enterprise search is a product marketed separately from the application, and searches data both inside and outside of the application.
Enterprise search is the approach taken by a number of technology vendors, including Google, which has launched its Google Search Appliance and Google Mini products. SAP and Oracle are each marketing their search tools as a separate product to locate data not only within their own applications, but elsewhere on a company's intranet and databases. Other vendors, including Thunderstone, Index Engines, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search, and Verity, focus more exclusively on search tools rather than the enterprise applications they are to work with. All of these offerings can be considered examples of pure enterprise search. They are generic search appliances for use within an enterprise. The alternative strategy, EAS, involves a search function more tightly integrated with a specific application, and is a critical feature to look for in an enterprise application.
Going Further with EAS
For various reasons, very few enterprise application vendors are focusing first and foremost on delivering EAS, which offers Google-like search capabilities strictly within their own suites of applications. Some vendors may have a hard time engineering this feature into their products because they own a large number of different applications, all with different architectures. Other vendors may find that offering EAS is not an attractive option for them given their business models, as they prefer to develop broad technology stacks beyond the scope of their applications; so developing a stand-alone search appliance is more appropriate for them.
EAS perhaps takes search effectiveness one step further than Google and other stand-alone search tools, since a generic Google-like search does not let you fully leverage context in the design of your search. With Google and other broad enterprise search tools, you get a lot of results, but perhaps very few are relevant. In the case of a Google search of the Web, for instance, a search by a keyword like "Ford" might yield information on President Gerald Ford, actor Harrison Ford, or Ford vehicles. It is difficult to tell the Google engine exactly what it is that you are looking for. Similarly, an enterprise search of your internal data can yield thousands of irrelevant documents on any customer, with little opportunity to narrow the search to find only purchase orders, only word processor documents of correspondence, only invoices, only change orders, etc.
By integrating search technology directly into an enterprise application, application designers can allow users to specify whether they are searching for a company, a person, a purchase order, or other types of information. This helps to filter out irrelevant search results and deliver even more efficiency than a typical Google-like search.
There is a place in organizations for stand-alone search products. If a company needs to index multiple sources of data, including company intranets, local documents, e-mails, databases, etc., a number of these bolt-on search appliances can do that.
Conversely, true EAS capabilities are integrated as a component within an application. The primary purpose of EAS is to make the information within that specific application suite easily searchable through a unified interface. Because EAS is integrated into the application it is designed to be used with, it offers a number of benefits for searching application data when compared to generic products like those offered by Oracle, Google, Thunderstone, Index Engines, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search, Verity, and others. These advantages include
Cost—Because the EAS tool is integrated into an application, it does not carry additional software licensing or hardware fees. Moreover, there is no work or cost involved in integrating the search tool with your systems. EAS functionality is part and parcel of a modern enterprise application, so no integration project is necessary.
Security—Even if a bolt-on search tool has security features, these security features need to be integrated with each application and data source they are to be used with. A full-featured application search relies on the underlying security schema of an application, which means search results are only visible to people with the proper user permissions to view that data. For instance, general ledger data, closely guarded in both publicly and privately held companies, is automatically protected from unauthorized viewers.
Context—An EAS tool can use contextual information, including data on what tasks that user has been performing in the applications, to deliver more targeted results. This is similar to how Google has added various tools to allow search results to become more specific, such as geographic filters so that local results can be moved up in the list of results when appropriate. But this concept can also be used to leverage business process context rather than geographic context, so that if a system user is involved in finance-related functions, results that conform to his or her organizational role can be accentuated.
Intent—Because EAS has full knowledge of the application metadata (information about information), it is possible for the user to express intent of a search in simple, well-understood business terms such as "customer information," "order data," "product data," or other descriptors.
Hybrid search—It should be possible to combine the EAS results and traditional database search results into a single query to deliver the best of both search methods at once.
EAS and enterprise search are two different approaches that are taken by different types of companies. A company that focuses on investing in and improving its enterprise application products will naturally offer a search tool for use within those applications. Marketers of bolt-on search appliances cannot design their tools for use within specific enterprise applications. Companies that market enterprise applications along with other technology products, including middleware and bolt-on search appliances, are invested in a broad number of technologies, and naturally will want to deliver a search tool for use across its own portfolio of products and beyond. That is why, like best-of-breed enterprise search companies, SAP and Oracle may have a hard time refining their search technologies specifically for their own enterprise suite products.
Moreover, companies like Oracle and Infor Global Solutions may have a very difficult time offering refined EAS functionality for their products, as they each own so many of them. Each of the applications purchased by Oracle and Infor feature distinct data architectures, which means the EAS tool would have to be developed separately for each of the broad portfolio of products. On the other hand, companies that offer systems based on more of a uniform platform with consistent architecture throughout the enterprise suite will be able to rapidly offer integrated EAS.
Of course, there is no reason that it is not possible to, on the one hand, operate an enterprise application with its own internal EAS function and to, on the other hand, also implement an enterprise search application like Oracle SES, Google Enterprise, and other like products. An application based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can make its EAS capabilities available as a Web service in order to facilitate this exact scenario. But while many organizations may have a hard time justifying the cost of a universal search tool, they will find it highly desirable and more affordable to choose an enterprise application with EAS functionality that provides better, deeper integration with the application's data and user interface.
Furthermore, employing an enterprise application with EAS functionality may encourage users of the system to be more diligent in entering data into the enterprise application. Correspondence, diagrams, photos, engineering drawings—all of these documents can be attached to records within a top-tier application. The presence of EAS may also motivate users to make more complete use of the application. If users know that it will be much easier to find information once they upload it to an enterprise application, they will be inclined to store more correspondence and supporting data within the application.
Specific versus Universal Search
Both the Internet and enterprise applications are vast sources of information, and while we have become accustomed to powerful Internet search tools like Google, we are only beginning to harness similar tools in our internal systems. But while Internet search engines are working to offer more targeted search options, the ability to refine and target results of a search within an enterprise application is even more critical than it is on the Web.
While a number of companies—including Google—are offering search appliances that can be bolted on to enterprise applications, they are costly, and they might not work optimally with the applications they are running with. Moreover, substantial work and cost can be involved in configuring a search tool with these applications. Of course, these bolt-on search tools have an upside: they can search information both inside and outside of applications, indexing intranets, e-mail servers, and other data sources.
In particular, companies running a large number of unrelated systems ought to look long and hard at these search appliances, because for these companies, EAS will only deliver a fragmented search solution. But bolt-on search appliances cannot offer the type of highly relevant and immediately useful search results that are possible when EAS functions are tightly integrated into an enterprise application itself. Enterprise search and EAS both have their places. But a tier-one or tier-two enterprise application ought to offer quality, integrated search functionality to help users save time and increase productivity.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/why-enterprise-application-search-is-crucial-to-your-erp-system-19571/
Let's explore these two approaches and what they mean for those of us responsible for making the most of ERP investments.
An Historic Crossroads
Historical dates are divided into years BC, or before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and AD, or Anno Domini. It is not our intention to debate the mistakes that the monk Dionysius Exiguus made in arriving at the date of transition between eras, or whether the more neutral terms BCE and CE (for Before the Common Era and Common Era, respectively) are preferable. Instead, we will focus on the passing of two other historic landmarks and their implications for enterprise computing.
The first date we will focus on is the advent of the Internet, which changed computing forever.
When the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) and open architecture networking first gave rise to the galactic network that we now refer to as the Internet, life online was very different than it is today. We can refer to this period as BG, or Before Google (although perhaps it would be more correct to refer to this period as BAV, or Before AltaVista). This new era started at the second date of importance here—the advent of full-text Internet search, which changed the Internet forever. In August of 1995, technicians at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab completed the initial index of the entire Web, allowing full-text search of ten million Web pages. AltaVista, the first globally successful, text-based search engine was born—only later to be eclipsed by Google.
What is so earth-shattering about that moment? In the early days of the Web, bookmarks, portals, and Web indexes were very important in order to find what you were looking for online. The Internet had succeeded in connecting countless remote computer networks, but in order to find anything, paradoxically, you had to first know where it was. Many sites on the Internet prominently featured links pages, which were designed to be reference points thoughtfully provided by the sites' owners to make it easier for their visitors to find specific resources online. Earlier search tools required site owners to register their web sites, and then, only very narrow keywords would be searchable rather than the entire site contents. So using an early search engine, you might, at best, be able to find a site about sports history, but not specific information on how many home runs baseball great Hank Aaron accumulated during his career (775) or the number of goals Brazilian soccer great Ronaldo has scored in World Cup play. You could find sites containing information on industrial equipment, but probably would have trouble finding "for sale" listings for a used dewatering screen for your mining operation, or a rotary die cutter for your printing and converting company.
Searching within Your Own Systems
The ability to find things on the Web using powerful search tools like Google and AltaVista is a tremendous time-saver. Similar time-saving and efficiencies can also be achieved by expediting the search for information within your company's own systems—specifically, within an enterprise application.
An enterprise application is in some ways similar to the public Internet, as it connects computer data throughout your company, uniting islands of information into a single data universe. And like the Internet, the application features some type of navigation structure to help you surf between the different screens and functions. These tabs or hierarchy of screens are the equivalent of the bookmarks we used to have to navigate the Internet. To run a query on your enterprise data, you go to the correct form and run a query in the appropriate field or dialog. Just like in the early days of the Internet, to find information in your business application, you need to know where it is.
In searching for information about a particular company, you need to know whether the information you want is attached to records regarding individual companies, records on people who work for the company, or records of active projects having to do with the company. With enough knowledge of precisely how you have configured your enterprise application, you can find what you are looking for.
This search method is probably an acceptable way for frequent users of a system to search for purchase orders, or to search by supplier or customer information. But it does not work that well for the occasional user of a system, or even for a heavy user of the system who is searching an application in an area with which he or she is not intimately familiar. Because enterprise applications are so broad and cover so many different disciplines within a company, it is hard for any one person to have a thorough understanding of even a majority of an application's functionality.
That is why application vendors are coming to market with various search solutions for use within their products. There are two distinct approaches to delivering this critical search function.
In short, EAS is a tool that is tightly integrated with an enterprise application, and it delivers targeted search results from within the application's knowledge base. Enterprise search is a product marketed separately from the application, and searches data both inside and outside of the application.
Enterprise search is the approach taken by a number of technology vendors, including Google, which has launched its Google Search Appliance and Google Mini products. SAP and Oracle are each marketing their search tools as a separate product to locate data not only within their own applications, but elsewhere on a company's intranet and databases. Other vendors, including Thunderstone, Index Engines, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search, and Verity, focus more exclusively on search tools rather than the enterprise applications they are to work with. All of these offerings can be considered examples of pure enterprise search. They are generic search appliances for use within an enterprise. The alternative strategy, EAS, involves a search function more tightly integrated with a specific application, and is a critical feature to look for in an enterprise application.
Going Further with EAS
For various reasons, very few enterprise application vendors are focusing first and foremost on delivering EAS, which offers Google-like search capabilities strictly within their own suites of applications. Some vendors may have a hard time engineering this feature into their products because they own a large number of different applications, all with different architectures. Other vendors may find that offering EAS is not an attractive option for them given their business models, as they prefer to develop broad technology stacks beyond the scope of their applications; so developing a stand-alone search appliance is more appropriate for them.
EAS perhaps takes search effectiveness one step further than Google and other stand-alone search tools, since a generic Google-like search does not let you fully leverage context in the design of your search. With Google and other broad enterprise search tools, you get a lot of results, but perhaps very few are relevant. In the case of a Google search of the Web, for instance, a search by a keyword like "Ford" might yield information on President Gerald Ford, actor Harrison Ford, or Ford vehicles. It is difficult to tell the Google engine exactly what it is that you are looking for. Similarly, an enterprise search of your internal data can yield thousands of irrelevant documents on any customer, with little opportunity to narrow the search to find only purchase orders, only word processor documents of correspondence, only invoices, only change orders, etc.
By integrating search technology directly into an enterprise application, application designers can allow users to specify whether they are searching for a company, a person, a purchase order, or other types of information. This helps to filter out irrelevant search results and deliver even more efficiency than a typical Google-like search.
There is a place in organizations for stand-alone search products. If a company needs to index multiple sources of data, including company intranets, local documents, e-mails, databases, etc., a number of these bolt-on search appliances can do that.
Conversely, true EAS capabilities are integrated as a component within an application. The primary purpose of EAS is to make the information within that specific application suite easily searchable through a unified interface. Because EAS is integrated into the application it is designed to be used with, it offers a number of benefits for searching application data when compared to generic products like those offered by Oracle, Google, Thunderstone, Index Engines, Autonomy, Convera, FAST Search, Verity, and others. These advantages include
Cost—Because the EAS tool is integrated into an application, it does not carry additional software licensing or hardware fees. Moreover, there is no work or cost involved in integrating the search tool with your systems. EAS functionality is part and parcel of a modern enterprise application, so no integration project is necessary.
Security—Even if a bolt-on search tool has security features, these security features need to be integrated with each application and data source they are to be used with. A full-featured application search relies on the underlying security schema of an application, which means search results are only visible to people with the proper user permissions to view that data. For instance, general ledger data, closely guarded in both publicly and privately held companies, is automatically protected from unauthorized viewers.
Context—An EAS tool can use contextual information, including data on what tasks that user has been performing in the applications, to deliver more targeted results. This is similar to how Google has added various tools to allow search results to become more specific, such as geographic filters so that local results can be moved up in the list of results when appropriate. But this concept can also be used to leverage business process context rather than geographic context, so that if a system user is involved in finance-related functions, results that conform to his or her organizational role can be accentuated.
Intent—Because EAS has full knowledge of the application metadata (information about information), it is possible for the user to express intent of a search in simple, well-understood business terms such as "customer information," "order data," "product data," or other descriptors.
Hybrid search—It should be possible to combine the EAS results and traditional database search results into a single query to deliver the best of both search methods at once.
EAS and enterprise search are two different approaches that are taken by different types of companies. A company that focuses on investing in and improving its enterprise application products will naturally offer a search tool for use within those applications. Marketers of bolt-on search appliances cannot design their tools for use within specific enterprise applications. Companies that market enterprise applications along with other technology products, including middleware and bolt-on search appliances, are invested in a broad number of technologies, and naturally will want to deliver a search tool for use across its own portfolio of products and beyond. That is why, like best-of-breed enterprise search companies, SAP and Oracle may have a hard time refining their search technologies specifically for their own enterprise suite products.
Moreover, companies like Oracle and Infor Global Solutions may have a very difficult time offering refined EAS functionality for their products, as they each own so many of them. Each of the applications purchased by Oracle and Infor feature distinct data architectures, which means the EAS tool would have to be developed separately for each of the broad portfolio of products. On the other hand, companies that offer systems based on more of a uniform platform with consistent architecture throughout the enterprise suite will be able to rapidly offer integrated EAS.
Of course, there is no reason that it is not possible to, on the one hand, operate an enterprise application with its own internal EAS function and to, on the other hand, also implement an enterprise search application like Oracle SES, Google Enterprise, and other like products. An application based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) can make its EAS capabilities available as a Web service in order to facilitate this exact scenario. But while many organizations may have a hard time justifying the cost of a universal search tool, they will find it highly desirable and more affordable to choose an enterprise application with EAS functionality that provides better, deeper integration with the application's data and user interface.
Furthermore, employing an enterprise application with EAS functionality may encourage users of the system to be more diligent in entering data into the enterprise application. Correspondence, diagrams, photos, engineering drawings—all of these documents can be attached to records within a top-tier application. The presence of EAS may also motivate users to make more complete use of the application. If users know that it will be much easier to find information once they upload it to an enterprise application, they will be inclined to store more correspondence and supporting data within the application.
Specific versus Universal Search
Both the Internet and enterprise applications are vast sources of information, and while we have become accustomed to powerful Internet search tools like Google, we are only beginning to harness similar tools in our internal systems. But while Internet search engines are working to offer more targeted search options, the ability to refine and target results of a search within an enterprise application is even more critical than it is on the Web.
While a number of companies—including Google—are offering search appliances that can be bolted on to enterprise applications, they are costly, and they might not work optimally with the applications they are running with. Moreover, substantial work and cost can be involved in configuring a search tool with these applications. Of course, these bolt-on search tools have an upside: they can search information both inside and outside of applications, indexing intranets, e-mail servers, and other data sources.
In particular, companies running a large number of unrelated systems ought to look long and hard at these search appliances, because for these companies, EAS will only deliver a fragmented search solution. But bolt-on search appliances cannot offer the type of highly relevant and immediately useful search results that are possible when EAS functions are tightly integrated into an enterprise application itself. Enterprise search and EAS both have their places. But a tier-one or tier-two enterprise application ought to offer quality, integrated search functionality to help users save time and increase productivity.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/why-enterprise-application-search-is-crucial-to-your-erp-system-19571/
A Firewall is Cheaper Than a Lawyer
the Federal District Court in San Jose, California held a hearing on eBay's motion for a preliminary injunction to limit Bidder's Edge, an online auction search engine, from linking to eBay's website. In an open letter dated April 20th to its user base, President and CEO of Bidder's Edge, Jim Carney, defended his position stating that, "we remain confident in the correctness of our position and in the need to defend the openness of the Internet. eBay's attempt to block Bidder's Edge denies and constricts the free flow of information to the consumer."
Claiming intellectual property trespassing, unfair business practices, and a host of other transgressions, the giant of online auctions, eBay, filed a lawsuit last December against Bidder's Edge for linking to its site. Bidder's Edge pledges to save online auction shoppers the hassle of going from one auction to the next in search of their sought after treasures.
Last September, eBay started clamping down on auction aggregators, demanding that they remove all links to eBay's site. After initially complying with this request, the Burlington, Massachusetts based auction aggregator restored the link due to popular demand from its users.
If it doesn't get dismissed, the case known as "eBay Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, D. Calif. No 0-99, 21-200," may set a precedent in Federal District courts for the legality of linking to websites that don't want you to link to them. Positioned for a jury trial, the case will, if all components are considered, ask the question why eBay has not technically taken the measures to protect its own website with the latest firewall technology.
If implemented correctly, certain firewalls allow websites to block unwanted links to their site, without all the fuss and expense of instigating a lawsuit. In fact, the lack of proper technical due diligence to back its lawsuit begs an analysis of eBay's technical competency. After all, a firewall is cheaper than a lawyer, and implementing one is usually more expeditious than launching a lawsuit.
As the firewall market expands to unprecedented proportions, more clever implementations of firewalls will begin to replace costly lawsuits that take inordinate lengths of time to matriculate. If you don't want competitors or unsavory Internet outposts linking to your site, block their domain. Once the courts, the lawyers, eBay, and Bidder's Edge figure out what capabilities firewalls have, they'll all be wiping eggs off their face and the case will be dismissed.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-firewall-is-cheaper-than-a-lawyer-15758/
Claiming intellectual property trespassing, unfair business practices, and a host of other transgressions, the giant of online auctions, eBay, filed a lawsuit last December against Bidder's Edge for linking to its site. Bidder's Edge pledges to save online auction shoppers the hassle of going from one auction to the next in search of their sought after treasures.
Last September, eBay started clamping down on auction aggregators, demanding that they remove all links to eBay's site. After initially complying with this request, the Burlington, Massachusetts based auction aggregator restored the link due to popular demand from its users.
If it doesn't get dismissed, the case known as "eBay Inc. v. Bidder's Edge, D. Calif. No 0-99, 21-200," may set a precedent in Federal District courts for the legality of linking to websites that don't want you to link to them. Positioned for a jury trial, the case will, if all components are considered, ask the question why eBay has not technically taken the measures to protect its own website with the latest firewall technology.
If implemented correctly, certain firewalls allow websites to block unwanted links to their site, without all the fuss and expense of instigating a lawsuit. In fact, the lack of proper technical due diligence to back its lawsuit begs an analysis of eBay's technical competency. After all, a firewall is cheaper than a lawyer, and implementing one is usually more expeditious than launching a lawsuit.
As the firewall market expands to unprecedented proportions, more clever implementations of firewalls will begin to replace costly lawsuits that take inordinate lengths of time to matriculate. If you don't want competitors or unsavory Internet outposts linking to your site, block their domain. Once the courts, the lawyers, eBay, and Bidder's Edge figure out what capabilities firewalls have, they'll all be wiping eggs off their face and the case will be dismissed.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/a-firewall-is-cheaper-than-a-lawyer-15758/
SAP Bolsters NetWeaver's MDM Capabilities Part Two: xCat and SAP MDM
What xCat Offers
SAP NetWeaver, has become the main pillar of SAP AG's (NYSE: SAP) strategy to remake itself into a platform vendor. With this and mySAP Business Suite, the broadest suite of enterprise applications in the market, SAP will sell possibly everything from application servers via middleware to Web services (envisioned, in SAP's case, to orchestrate business processes by means of packaged composite applications across and atop existing systems). In mid-July, SAP announced that it has acquired substantially all of A2i, Inc. (www.a2i.com), a Los Angeles, California (US)-based an d privately held software company, which, since 1993 develops and markets xCat, the platform for enterprise-wide product content management (PCM) and cross-media catalog publishing, but with the touted simplicity and accessibility of desktop applications.
Therefore, SAP and A2i tout the following potent capabilities of xCat:
Powerful product content aggregation and cleansing, management and product information editing. The proper PCM system should do more than store data that once resided in another system. Instead, it must include powerful and extensive capabilities for loading, restructuring, cleansing, normalizing, and transforming source data from a variety of electronic sources, including text, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Structured Query Language (SQL), and XML for both flat files and relational data.
Classification into a taxonomy with category-specific attributes. Not only must the proper PCM systems have a completely flexible schema, it must also support multiple classification schemes, user-defined taxonomy hierarchies of arbitrary depth with category-specific attributes, multiple simultaneous taxonomies, and "drag-and-drop" taxonomy editing capabilities that allow the taxonomy of the fully populated repository to be completely restructured and refined over time.
Intelligent image management. Any system can easily store an image as a binary large object (BLOB). By contrast, the proper PCM system must support intelligent image management with an understanding of all of the leading image formats, the ability to automatically transform images for different publishing purposes, and optimized high-performance image access and efficient image caching.
Integrated high-performance product search engine. Search mechanisms offered by traditional systems are not precise enough for searching product information. The full-fledged PCM system must hence include a fully integrated multidimensional search engine that is optimized for product search, with support not only for drill-down, parametric, and keyword search, but also measurement search, partial/contains search, and other types of search. To that end, the ability to let customers search for goods without knowing product codes has become the A2i's Web slogan: "No part number, no problem".
Performance acceleration, with scalability up to millions of products. Traditional enterprise applications, such as ERP or CRM, are not optimized for heavy search and access loads. Similarly, a traditional relational database management system (DBMS) is slow on typical searches against large repositories, so relying on the naked DBMS is also a problem. Therefore, a proper PCM system must have a self-optimizing performance acceleration layer that is able to quickly serve up product information to users and other enterprise applications.
Most catalog solutions are simple database applications that layer a thin veneer of functionality over SQL and they rely on SQL for all access to the data, whereby SQL works well with retrieving a single record from among thousands or even millions. Yet, to retrieve, for example, several thousand records from among a few million, and to limit across all of the different dimensions of the search for users to only see valid selections and valid values, that requires a multi-table join.
Also, to interactively browse and sort search results, requires cursors and temporary files, which can also cripples the performance of a SQL-based DBMS. An example is having thirty thousand bearings with very intricate relationships of which bearings can be sold with which other bearings. This requires a system to manage and automate those relationships. Thus, xCat uses SQL-based database—either Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 or Oracle—only as a container to store the product information, but then xCat completely bypasses SQL for almost all access to the data—searching, sorting, querying, limiting, masking—and thus avoids the "four dirty words" of SQL: no cursors, no temporary files, no joins, and no views.
Cross-media publishing (web and paper or CD ROM print). The appropriate PCM system must drive all product content initiatives, including tightly integrated functionality not only for internal PCM, but also multichannel syndication, deployment of searchable Web catalogs, and print solutions for catalogs and other printed publications. The things that people expect in a paper catalog in terms of layout, structure, and tabular orientation of product records, should also be deliverable to the Web. Additionally, xCat can reportedly slice-and-dice a single master catalog containing several million products into as many customized virtual private, personalized, subset catalogs as necessary. Each slice looks like a complete catalog, either to the user on the Web or when published to paper.
Database-driven print catalogs. A full-fledged PCM system that supports print catalog publishing must do so in a way that is completely database-driven, meaning it "pushes" product information into the page layouts, rather than simply using the repository to store product information that was first entered directly into the page layout application.
UCCnet synchronization. A proper PCM system must support UCCnet synchronization, and also be able to syndicate product information to multiple audiences, transforming it into a variety of industry-standard and user-defined XML and delimited text formats, on an ad hoc and scheduled basis.
Integrated workflow engine. The system must have an integrated workflow engine that can provide a framework for managing product information in a collaborative environment, and can function standalone or in conjunction with external workflow applications and systems.
Cross-platform compatibility as elaborated above; and
Enterprise scalability. The appropriate PCM system must offer an n-tier architecture, capable of easily integrating with various deployment architectures, including a full suite of security and encryption services as well as ability to integrate with leading user directories, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Finally, the PCM system must provide master/slave capabilities to enable a global 24/7 deployment consisting of both staging and publishing servers.
SOURCE;http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sap-bolsters-netweaver-s-mdm-capabilities-part-two-xcat-and-sap-mdm-17647/
SAP NetWeaver, has become the main pillar of SAP AG's (NYSE: SAP) strategy to remake itself into a platform vendor. With this and mySAP Business Suite, the broadest suite of enterprise applications in the market, SAP will sell possibly everything from application servers via middleware to Web services (envisioned, in SAP's case, to orchestrate business processes by means of packaged composite applications across and atop existing systems). In mid-July, SAP announced that it has acquired substantially all of A2i, Inc. (www.a2i.com), a Los Angeles, California (US)-based an d privately held software company, which, since 1993 develops and markets xCat, the platform for enterprise-wide product content management (PCM) and cross-media catalog publishing, but with the touted simplicity and accessibility of desktop applications.
Therefore, SAP and A2i tout the following potent capabilities of xCat:
Powerful product content aggregation and cleansing, management and product information editing. The proper PCM system should do more than store data that once resided in another system. Instead, it must include powerful and extensive capabilities for loading, restructuring, cleansing, normalizing, and transforming source data from a variety of electronic sources, including text, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Structured Query Language (SQL), and XML for both flat files and relational data.
Classification into a taxonomy with category-specific attributes. Not only must the proper PCM systems have a completely flexible schema, it must also support multiple classification schemes, user-defined taxonomy hierarchies of arbitrary depth with category-specific attributes, multiple simultaneous taxonomies, and "drag-and-drop" taxonomy editing capabilities that allow the taxonomy of the fully populated repository to be completely restructured and refined over time.
Intelligent image management. Any system can easily store an image as a binary large object (BLOB). By contrast, the proper PCM system must support intelligent image management with an understanding of all of the leading image formats, the ability to automatically transform images for different publishing purposes, and optimized high-performance image access and efficient image caching.
Integrated high-performance product search engine. Search mechanisms offered by traditional systems are not precise enough for searching product information. The full-fledged PCM system must hence include a fully integrated multidimensional search engine that is optimized for product search, with support not only for drill-down, parametric, and keyword search, but also measurement search, partial/contains search, and other types of search. To that end, the ability to let customers search for goods without knowing product codes has become the A2i's Web slogan: "No part number, no problem".
Performance acceleration, with scalability up to millions of products. Traditional enterprise applications, such as ERP or CRM, are not optimized for heavy search and access loads. Similarly, a traditional relational database management system (DBMS) is slow on typical searches against large repositories, so relying on the naked DBMS is also a problem. Therefore, a proper PCM system must have a self-optimizing performance acceleration layer that is able to quickly serve up product information to users and other enterprise applications.
Most catalog solutions are simple database applications that layer a thin veneer of functionality over SQL and they rely on SQL for all access to the data, whereby SQL works well with retrieving a single record from among thousands or even millions. Yet, to retrieve, for example, several thousand records from among a few million, and to limit across all of the different dimensions of the search for users to only see valid selections and valid values, that requires a multi-table join.
Also, to interactively browse and sort search results, requires cursors and temporary files, which can also cripples the performance of a SQL-based DBMS. An example is having thirty thousand bearings with very intricate relationships of which bearings can be sold with which other bearings. This requires a system to manage and automate those relationships. Thus, xCat uses SQL-based database—either Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 or Oracle—only as a container to store the product information, but then xCat completely bypasses SQL for almost all access to the data—searching, sorting, querying, limiting, masking—and thus avoids the "four dirty words" of SQL: no cursors, no temporary files, no joins, and no views.
Cross-media publishing (web and paper or CD ROM print). The appropriate PCM system must drive all product content initiatives, including tightly integrated functionality not only for internal PCM, but also multichannel syndication, deployment of searchable Web catalogs, and print solutions for catalogs and other printed publications. The things that people expect in a paper catalog in terms of layout, structure, and tabular orientation of product records, should also be deliverable to the Web. Additionally, xCat can reportedly slice-and-dice a single master catalog containing several million products into as many customized virtual private, personalized, subset catalogs as necessary. Each slice looks like a complete catalog, either to the user on the Web or when published to paper.
Database-driven print catalogs. A full-fledged PCM system that supports print catalog publishing must do so in a way that is completely database-driven, meaning it "pushes" product information into the page layouts, rather than simply using the repository to store product information that was first entered directly into the page layout application.
UCCnet synchronization. A proper PCM system must support UCCnet synchronization, and also be able to syndicate product information to multiple audiences, transforming it into a variety of industry-standard and user-defined XML and delimited text formats, on an ad hoc and scheduled basis.
Integrated workflow engine. The system must have an integrated workflow engine that can provide a framework for managing product information in a collaborative environment, and can function standalone or in conjunction with external workflow applications and systems.
Cross-platform compatibility as elaborated above; and
Enterprise scalability. The appropriate PCM system must offer an n-tier architecture, capable of easily integrating with various deployment architectures, including a full suite of security and encryption services as well as ability to integrate with leading user directories, such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Finally, the PCM system must provide master/slave capabilities to enable a global 24/7 deployment consisting of both staging and publishing servers.
SOURCE;http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/sap-bolsters-netweaver-s-mdm-capabilities-part-two-xcat-and-sap-mdm-17647/
Advertising Online - A Guide to Successful Market Penetration Part Three: Geo Targeting and Fraud Protection
Geo Targeting and Fraud Protection Programs
Pay-Per-Click search engine traffic is a popular means of bringing qualified users to sites. Technology has evolved tremendously, allowing the targeting and tracking abilities of an engine to supply PPC campaigns with less advertising and more of a direct marketing platform. However, while the theory is sound, the traffic being supplied may not always be real. (This is why it is important to list with a reputable engine that has strict fraud detection programs). On the flip side, the same type of technology used to identify and suppress certain types of traffic can also be used for good geo targeting can supply geographically specific traffic to your site.
Any reputable search engine offering fraud detection programs should maintain at least three separate and different methods of fraud detection, and should have a strict policy of filtering those fraudulent clicks detected back to the advertiser at no charge. The frequency cap on click traffic is one such measure. During a predetermined period of time a frequency cap, or filter, will reject all duplicate clicks from the same IP address that are made to the same URL for a single query. The longer the time period, the better ROI you can expect.
While frequency capping is efficient, it does not solve the entire problem. A checksum value should also be attached to an advertisers' URL. This ensures that any click transaction being performed on that URL is being executed in a live search environment and not being looped by a script. Similar to applying a checksum to the search URL, the application of a session id based on the time of the search is also effective. This embeds an expiry time on the search URL and will refuse any click transactions if they occur after a predetermined period of time.
For example, if a click to your link happens 2 hours after the actual search occurred, one could safely assume that some form of caching has occurred and that the transaction did not happen in a live search environment. There are some risks for the publisher in discarding good transactions as some user sessions could run past the expiry time, yet most agree that the interest of the advertiser is paramount, and that the loss is minimal.
Geo-Targeting
For North American, or English speaking countries, search engines use a final effective means of limiting fraud activity - by discounting click traffic coming from countries in which English is not the standard language. All ISPs are given blocks of IP addresses to supply to their clients. The first segment of digits on the IP address acts much like a country code and identifies which ISP, and in which country, the IP address originates.
This is how traditional geo-targeting works and can be an effective means for eliminating fraud. When checking your log files, if you notice a lot of click traffic coming from one IP address, you can trace its origin by visiting the American Registry of Internet Numbers. After feeding the IP address into their "whois" search, it will tell you who has been assigned that IP address, whether this is an ISP or another business entity. Should the IP address not be assigned to the Americas, you can verify RIPE Network Coordination Center for all Russian, European, and Middle Eastern registries or the Asia Pacific Network Information Center.
Good filtering techniques and policies are important, but cannot act as a substitute for human intervention. No publisher has the ability to catch everything before it happens. Taking the time to review your click log files and to inform your publisher of any anomalies will help prevent further abuse and, more importantly, save you money.
On a positive note, if the search engine that you list with is able to discount clicks based on IP addresses, it is likely they have geo targeting available to its advertisers. It is quickly becoming an industry standard. Most search engines that employ a geo-targeting program for search and/or banner advertisers, notice a dramatic increase in clickthrough rates. It is akin to asking for only certain type of traffic to come to your site based on a geographic parameter. If you would like to only have users come to your site from the west coast or even a specific city, this is entirely possible. Geo targeting is the first step to directing specific types of users to your site in the future it may be able to be directed by many other types of profiles as the technology becomes more refined.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/advertising-online-a-guide-to-successful-market-penetration-part-three-geo-targeting-and-fraud-protection-16834/
Pay-Per-Click search engine traffic is a popular means of bringing qualified users to sites. Technology has evolved tremendously, allowing the targeting and tracking abilities of an engine to supply PPC campaigns with less advertising and more of a direct marketing platform. However, while the theory is sound, the traffic being supplied may not always be real. (This is why it is important to list with a reputable engine that has strict fraud detection programs). On the flip side, the same type of technology used to identify and suppress certain types of traffic can also be used for good geo targeting can supply geographically specific traffic to your site.
Any reputable search engine offering fraud detection programs should maintain at least three separate and different methods of fraud detection, and should have a strict policy of filtering those fraudulent clicks detected back to the advertiser at no charge. The frequency cap on click traffic is one such measure. During a predetermined period of time a frequency cap, or filter, will reject all duplicate clicks from the same IP address that are made to the same URL for a single query. The longer the time period, the better ROI you can expect.
While frequency capping is efficient, it does not solve the entire problem. A checksum value should also be attached to an advertisers' URL. This ensures that any click transaction being performed on that URL is being executed in a live search environment and not being looped by a script. Similar to applying a checksum to the search URL, the application of a session id based on the time of the search is also effective. This embeds an expiry time on the search URL and will refuse any click transactions if they occur after a predetermined period of time.
For example, if a click to your link happens 2 hours after the actual search occurred, one could safely assume that some form of caching has occurred and that the transaction did not happen in a live search environment. There are some risks for the publisher in discarding good transactions as some user sessions could run past the expiry time, yet most agree that the interest of the advertiser is paramount, and that the loss is minimal.
Geo-Targeting
For North American, or English speaking countries, search engines use a final effective means of limiting fraud activity - by discounting click traffic coming from countries in which English is not the standard language. All ISPs are given blocks of IP addresses to supply to their clients. The first segment of digits on the IP address acts much like a country code and identifies which ISP, and in which country, the IP address originates.
This is how traditional geo-targeting works and can be an effective means for eliminating fraud. When checking your log files, if you notice a lot of click traffic coming from one IP address, you can trace its origin by visiting the American Registry of Internet Numbers. After feeding the IP address into their "whois" search, it will tell you who has been assigned that IP address, whether this is an ISP or another business entity. Should the IP address not be assigned to the Americas, you can verify RIPE Network Coordination Center for all Russian, European, and Middle Eastern registries or the Asia Pacific Network Information Center.
Good filtering techniques and policies are important, but cannot act as a substitute for human intervention. No publisher has the ability to catch everything before it happens. Taking the time to review your click log files and to inform your publisher of any anomalies will help prevent further abuse and, more importantly, save you money.
On a positive note, if the search engine that you list with is able to discount clicks based on IP addresses, it is likely they have geo targeting available to its advertisers. It is quickly becoming an industry standard. Most search engines that employ a geo-targeting program for search and/or banner advertisers, notice a dramatic increase in clickthrough rates. It is akin to asking for only certain type of traffic to come to your site based on a geographic parameter. If you would like to only have users come to your site from the west coast or even a specific city, this is entirely possible. Geo targeting is the first step to directing specific types of users to your site in the future it may be able to be directed by many other types of profiles as the technology becomes more refined.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/advertising-online-a-guide-to-successful-market-penetration-part-three-geo-targeting-and-fraud-protection-16834/
Advertising Online - A Guide to Successful Market Penetration Part Two: Search Engine Strategies
Keyword Advertising
Most search engines use the CPC model, and price keywords based on their market value. Currently, the market is stating that generic keywords such as investment and insurance are highly valued and consequently more obscure, but targeted keywords are valued much lower. Another, more efficient system is categorizing the website and determining the market value of the industry the website falls into and taking a step back from pricing keywords. The average price in the industry for CPC advertising, including categorization, is fragmented as the CPC can range from 1 cent to 2 dollars depending on the industry.
Everything stems from your keywords since it is these words that will let you be visible to the billions of online searchers. However, there is more to building keyword lists than just coming up with words that describe your product or service offering. For example, results show that 45% of users search by using a combination of keywords (key phrases), 28% use one keyword, 18% search by a pre-defined option (such as browsing through a directory category) and 9% search by typing in a question (NPD).
There are two schools of thought when it comes to creating a keyword list. The first is listing generic keywords in order to generate the most traffic as possible to your site, resulting in high click through ratios, but low conversion rates. The other option is listing targeted keywords that will drive targeted traffic to your site, resulting in traditionally lower click through rates, but higher conversions ratios. For example if you are selling ECRM services in New Jersey, and are only capable of delivering your services in the US, then you may not want to list the single keyword "ECRM". You would receive a high amount of clickthroughs, but from traffic that may not be interested in purchasing, or from users that you would not logistically be able to supply. This is a waste of advertising dollars. If you were to list keyword phrases such as "ECRM in the US" or "improve ECRM for US business" you would receive more targeted traffic, given that the user typing in this keyword is probably looking for information on ECRM in the US.
Since building targeted keyword lists requires some knowledge of online advertising, search engine's staff editors are always available to help in building highly targeted keywords for your campaign. Keyword enthusiasts also go to Wordtracker.com and WordSpot.com. The number of keywords that you list on a search engine is also crucial to your online success. Each additional keyword and keyword phrase you suggest will increase your site's chances of being located. Think of it as not only placing as many hooks as possible in the lake, but also making sure they are of the right type to attract what you need.
Powerful Creatives
Almost as important as the keywords are the creatives that support them. Creatives in the search industry refer to the titles and descriptions that expand upon the keywords. They provide a small glimpse of what your website has to offer.
It is important to be as clear as possible for a number of reasons. First, it is preferable not to use superlatives, caps or exclamation marks in your titles because this reduces the validity of your offer and is not viewed as a professional listing. Second, it is suggested that the title and the description have the keyword in it to further prove that the result is relevant.
It should also expand in as few words as possible the website's is offering. Using the ECRM solutions firm as an example, the title should have the following elements: "ECRM business solutions for US businesses". The description then, as an expansion of the title should have the following elements: "Reputable ECRM business solutions that can make you business more profitable". Using this method of advertising on search engines, you are sure to be attracting your target market to your site, (from a purely geographic demographic).
Relevant URL's
In addition to using specific and relevant titles and descriptions, the URL that you submit to the search engine must be very targeted. Ideally, the user should get to the exact page that they are looking for on the first click. For example, if the user is searching for a specific ECRM solution, that solution should be on the URL associated with the creative. Internet searchers have low patience levels, and if they cannot immediately find what they are looking for on your site they will give up and move on to the next result on the list.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/advertising-online-a-guide-to-successful-market-penetration-part-two-search-engine-strategies-16828/
Most search engines use the CPC model, and price keywords based on their market value. Currently, the market is stating that generic keywords such as investment and insurance are highly valued and consequently more obscure, but targeted keywords are valued much lower. Another, more efficient system is categorizing the website and determining the market value of the industry the website falls into and taking a step back from pricing keywords. The average price in the industry for CPC advertising, including categorization, is fragmented as the CPC can range from 1 cent to 2 dollars depending on the industry.
Everything stems from your keywords since it is these words that will let you be visible to the billions of online searchers. However, there is more to building keyword lists than just coming up with words that describe your product or service offering. For example, results show that 45% of users search by using a combination of keywords (key phrases), 28% use one keyword, 18% search by a pre-defined option (such as browsing through a directory category) and 9% search by typing in a question (NPD).
There are two schools of thought when it comes to creating a keyword list. The first is listing generic keywords in order to generate the most traffic as possible to your site, resulting in high click through ratios, but low conversion rates. The other option is listing targeted keywords that will drive targeted traffic to your site, resulting in traditionally lower click through rates, but higher conversions ratios. For example if you are selling ECRM services in New Jersey, and are only capable of delivering your services in the US, then you may not want to list the single keyword "ECRM". You would receive a high amount of clickthroughs, but from traffic that may not be interested in purchasing, or from users that you would not logistically be able to supply. This is a waste of advertising dollars. If you were to list keyword phrases such as "ECRM in the US" or "improve ECRM for US business" you would receive more targeted traffic, given that the user typing in this keyword is probably looking for information on ECRM in the US.
Since building targeted keyword lists requires some knowledge of online advertising, search engine's staff editors are always available to help in building highly targeted keywords for your campaign. Keyword enthusiasts also go to Wordtracker.com and WordSpot.com. The number of keywords that you list on a search engine is also crucial to your online success. Each additional keyword and keyword phrase you suggest will increase your site's chances of being located. Think of it as not only placing as many hooks as possible in the lake, but also making sure they are of the right type to attract what you need.
Powerful Creatives
Almost as important as the keywords are the creatives that support them. Creatives in the search industry refer to the titles and descriptions that expand upon the keywords. They provide a small glimpse of what your website has to offer.
It is important to be as clear as possible for a number of reasons. First, it is preferable not to use superlatives, caps or exclamation marks in your titles because this reduces the validity of your offer and is not viewed as a professional listing. Second, it is suggested that the title and the description have the keyword in it to further prove that the result is relevant.
It should also expand in as few words as possible the website's is offering. Using the ECRM solutions firm as an example, the title should have the following elements: "ECRM business solutions for US businesses". The description then, as an expansion of the title should have the following elements: "Reputable ECRM business solutions that can make you business more profitable". Using this method of advertising on search engines, you are sure to be attracting your target market to your site, (from a purely geographic demographic).
Relevant URL's
In addition to using specific and relevant titles and descriptions, the URL that you submit to the search engine must be very targeted. Ideally, the user should get to the exact page that they are looking for on the first click. For example, if the user is searching for a specific ECRM solution, that solution should be on the URL associated with the creative. Internet searchers have low patience levels, and if they cannot immediately find what they are looking for on your site they will give up and move on to the next result on the list.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/advertising-online-a-guide-to-successful-market-penetration-part-two-search-engine-strategies-16828/
Advertising Online - A Guide to Successful Market Penetration Part One: Why Internet Advertising
Why Internet Advertising?
Online advertising in the past year has proven to be no longer an option, but a requirement. With billions of pages on the web, companies are increasingly feeling the pressure to advertise online to bolster corporate presence, B2B and B2C revenues and to also turn their websites into sources for acquiring client information. Indeed, statistics show that more and more business is being conducted online, and a recent study conducted from Ernst and Young reveals that 74% of Americans purchased online in the last year.
Accordingly, of all Internet users in the US, 94% of them query search engines to find information on the Web (Nielson-Net Ratings). Even more appealing is the fact that 81% of people querying search engines find the information every time they search (NPD). Considering these numbers and how relatively inexpensive and risk free Internet advertising is compared to other types of traditional media, it is a wonder why more businesses are not optimizing their sites on search engines (aka SEO Search Engine Optimization) to bolster online presence.
This is Part One of a three-part article on successful online advertising.
Part Two will discuss Search Engine Strategies.
Part Three will cover Geographical Targeting and Fraud Prevention Programs.
Search Engine Marketing Is Essential
Reaching the ever-increasing number of online users is critical to complementing your offline advertising efforts as well as establishing your corporate presence on the net. Corporate websites should be information rich for both returning users and new users. They should also be a platform for your company's values and offering. Attracting your clients, or potential business partners to your website is therefore the key to not only forging long-term relationships, but also bolstering online sales.
CEOs and marketing directors need to acknowledge the power of search engine marketing. It's one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available, yet most companies spend little on search engine optimization. In a recent study from Marketing Sherpa, "more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100's websites not optimized properly". This is a striking statistic when considering that next to email, search engines are the most widely used application on the Internet (Market Leap).
A fully integrated marketing campaign should therefore include aggressive Internet advertising, which consists of listings on search engines, portals, directories and banners on strategic portals and large sites. Most importantly, listing your site on search engines with a broad reach is important to expose your product and/or services. Search engines will provide the technology to bring your corporation to people who are actively looking for your solution. And since over 80% of web site traffic is guided by search engines (Forrester Research), the question remains: how do you use search engines effectively in order to draw clients, partners and industry experts to your site?
To support online initiatives, listing and ranking high on search engines is a critical step towards garnishing success. In the industry, the top 10 results receive approximately 80% more traffic than those in positions 11-30 (I search). Now, how do you achieve that top rank?
There are various ways to approach getting top listing with the large search properties. Some sites use specific keywords and phrases to allow large indexing engines to recognize the validity of the site to the users, some also purchase relevant keywords and phrases from content suppliers who feed this information to the large search properties. Most of these content suppliers charge per referral.
There are many different types of pricing structures, the two most popular being bidding and CPC. The later version charges only when a user clicks on the search result (CPC- Cost per Click- Model), and redirects the user to your site. There is little risk in comparison to traditional advertising media, which charges strictly on demographics, circulation, and the likelihood of how many people will see or hear your message. Paying a content supplier on a "cost per click" referral is akin to having someone deliver a bus load of people to your store and charging you pennies for every potential customer who steps through the door. In this scenario, even if two people purchase, you will have been successful in your online marketing efforts.
Added Benefits of Advertising Online: Tracking your ROI
You can analyze down to the penny your increase in sales through keyword advertising by tracking the conversion rates (sales generated from clicks) for each ad dollar that you spend. You only have to create a specific URL, per initiative, pointing to your website so that you can track which marketing effort the click is coming from. You will then be able to monitor someone clicking on your advertisement, going to your site and converting into a sale. This information will notify you which keywords, creatives and marketing effort are producing an ROI and which efforts are not.
Data Warehousing
An organization's Data Warehouse is detailed information obtained about each client, including their behaviors, and their preferences. The Data Warehouse is typically a combination of detailed demographic data on a customer. You may obtain this type of information from clients that submit information about themselves by opting in to your company's newsletters, updates or specials information via your site. Oftentimes, parties that are interested in your product/service offering are more willing to take five minutes in the comfort of their own home to optin to receive company information.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/advertising-online-a-guide-to-successful-market-penetration-part-one-why-internet-advertising-16823/
Online advertising in the past year has proven to be no longer an option, but a requirement. With billions of pages on the web, companies are increasingly feeling the pressure to advertise online to bolster corporate presence, B2B and B2C revenues and to also turn their websites into sources for acquiring client information. Indeed, statistics show that more and more business is being conducted online, and a recent study conducted from Ernst and Young reveals that 74% of Americans purchased online in the last year.
Accordingly, of all Internet users in the US, 94% of them query search engines to find information on the Web (Nielson-Net Ratings). Even more appealing is the fact that 81% of people querying search engines find the information every time they search (NPD). Considering these numbers and how relatively inexpensive and risk free Internet advertising is compared to other types of traditional media, it is a wonder why more businesses are not optimizing their sites on search engines (aka SEO Search Engine Optimization) to bolster online presence.
This is Part One of a three-part article on successful online advertising.
Part Two will discuss Search Engine Strategies.
Part Three will cover Geographical Targeting and Fraud Prevention Programs.
Search Engine Marketing Is Essential
Reaching the ever-increasing number of online users is critical to complementing your offline advertising efforts as well as establishing your corporate presence on the net. Corporate websites should be information rich for both returning users and new users. They should also be a platform for your company's values and offering. Attracting your clients, or potential business partners to your website is therefore the key to not only forging long-term relationships, but also bolstering online sales.
CEOs and marketing directors need to acknowledge the power of search engine marketing. It's one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available, yet most companies spend little on search engine optimization. In a recent study from Marketing Sherpa, "more than 90 percent of the Fortune 100's websites not optimized properly". This is a striking statistic when considering that next to email, search engines are the most widely used application on the Internet (Market Leap).
A fully integrated marketing campaign should therefore include aggressive Internet advertising, which consists of listings on search engines, portals, directories and banners on strategic portals and large sites. Most importantly, listing your site on search engines with a broad reach is important to expose your product and/or services. Search engines will provide the technology to bring your corporation to people who are actively looking for your solution. And since over 80% of web site traffic is guided by search engines (Forrester Research), the question remains: how do you use search engines effectively in order to draw clients, partners and industry experts to your site?
To support online initiatives, listing and ranking high on search engines is a critical step towards garnishing success. In the industry, the top 10 results receive approximately 80% more traffic than those in positions 11-30 (I search). Now, how do you achieve that top rank?
There are various ways to approach getting top listing with the large search properties. Some sites use specific keywords and phrases to allow large indexing engines to recognize the validity of the site to the users, some also purchase relevant keywords and phrases from content suppliers who feed this information to the large search properties. Most of these content suppliers charge per referral.
There are many different types of pricing structures, the two most popular being bidding and CPC. The later version charges only when a user clicks on the search result (CPC- Cost per Click- Model), and redirects the user to your site. There is little risk in comparison to traditional advertising media, which charges strictly on demographics, circulation, and the likelihood of how many people will see or hear your message. Paying a content supplier on a "cost per click" referral is akin to having someone deliver a bus load of people to your store and charging you pennies for every potential customer who steps through the door. In this scenario, even if two people purchase, you will have been successful in your online marketing efforts.
Added Benefits of Advertising Online: Tracking your ROI
You can analyze down to the penny your increase in sales through keyword advertising by tracking the conversion rates (sales generated from clicks) for each ad dollar that you spend. You only have to create a specific URL, per initiative, pointing to your website so that you can track which marketing effort the click is coming from. You will then be able to monitor someone clicking on your advertisement, going to your site and converting into a sale. This information will notify you which keywords, creatives and marketing effort are producing an ROI and which efforts are not.
Data Warehousing
An organization's Data Warehouse is detailed information obtained about each client, including their behaviors, and their preferences. The Data Warehouse is typically a combination of detailed demographic data on a customer. You may obtain this type of information from clients that submit information about themselves by opting in to your company's newsletters, updates or specials information via your site. Oftentimes, parties that are interested in your product/service offering are more willing to take five minutes in the comfort of their own home to optin to receive company information.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/advertising-online-a-guide-to-successful-market-penetration-part-one-why-internet-advertising-16823/
Now Just Where Did I Put My Search Engine?
While most of the technical press focuses on unstructured documents, as well as extensible markup language (XML) and hypertext markup language (HTML) search technologies, the unpublicized truth remains that more than 80 percent of today's business applications require interaction with a relational database. As Terry Moriarty noted at the 2004 Software Development West Conference, "the organization is all about the database." The other "skeleton in the data closet," or shameful industry secret, is that there is relatively little search help for the business user when it comes to locating corporate information in databases. And since locating information accounts for 25 to 35 percent of an information user's time, the lack of focus on the database search ultimately results in a productivity blind spot in media and corporate attention.
Much of the reason for this blind spot lies in the double (and sometimes confusing) meaning of the term search when applied to databases: this might mean data, or it might mean metadata (in other words, the business category of the data—such as table and column names—and descriptions). Historically, a search at the database level simply meant a data query, or specifically, a structured query language (SQL), against a table or group of tables. Thus, the traditional technology goal of software providers was to make SQL easier to generate, through wizards, natural language parsers, and so on. "Just ask your business question, and our product will do the query," was the "holy grail," or the highest aim of data access. Likewise, the goal of information technology (IT) trainers and managers was to educate users in developing SQL skills to reduce their reliance on programmers.
What's the Problem?
However, even for users who can compose left outer joins with the best of them, the problem of locating the correct database, table, and column (to query or report against) in a multidatabase enterprise (often with thousands of tables and many thousands of columns) can be formidable. This aspect of the search problem, the "search before the search," is described as the metadata search issue: in which database, schema, table, or column is the information? Business users ask characteristic questions when searching: If I wanted to ask for total commissions by month, where would I look to find my salespersons' commissions? If I wanted to create a report of sales per product, where would I find my customer sales orders? And as an IT analyst, if I wanted to integrate our customer data, where would I find customer addresses?
This metadata search problem is compounded beyond mere size and distribution of data, by wide variations in metadata design and labeling. Varied and arbitrary vocabularies, lexical mangling, and untamed formatting dispersed between table and column names all contribute to the challenge of locating the correct metadata prior to querying, reporting on, or integrating the actual data.
There are standard workarounds for this metadata search problem: (a) stay at a company long enough to become familiar with the location of everything; (b) call a programmer who is intimate with the business database and tables at issue; (c) browse through schema lists or explorers for each database, opening any candidate table that looks suspicious; or (d) query a catalog for all possible combinations of semantics and lexical structures. The metadata demon is even more intimidating if you are a traveling consultant new to a client's data stores (who ya gonna call?).
A Glass Half Full
The introduction of standardized or exemplar metadata, synonym dictionaries, and repositories helped alleviate this pain by centralizing all metadata and providing a more natural language vocabulary. However, there are still downsides to this approach. These dictionaries generally need to be manually constructed and cross-referenced with their respective source databases. With thousands of business elements, this can be a huge task to inaugurate, let alone maintain. And, more importantly, much of the key search problem still remains, namely, how to locate the desired metadata quickly among innumerable elements? A schema explorer in a metadata dictionary is nearly as extensive as its native source counterpart. Phrase or wild card searches still challenge the system and the dictionary designer for their range in lexical and synonym variations.
The goal, of course, is to make the database metadata search as easy and dynamic as a web search, but with the added ability to accommodate the unique problems of database metadata structure. Tools that can help achieve this goal are as important and useful as tools that help abstract the complexities of SQL generation from the end user. Ideally, the final goal of database information retrieval is a dynamic tool (without IT intervention) that completely hides both metadata and SQL from the business users. However, the wide variations of metadata (unlike the syntax of SQL keywords) will challenge this ideal, most likely for some time to come. A program can assist the user by making calculated guesses of correct metadata, but ultimately the human eye and the human brain will need to be involved.
Managers grappling with the complex issues of metadata management need to be aware that aside from the huge and publicized problem of integrating and retrieving dispersed document and XML metadata and data, the issue of easy database metadata searches and data access for end users is also of primary importance. The days of calling programmers (or keepers-of-the-data-keys) to the rescue every time a new business query or report is needed, are drawing to a close (or ought to be). "Where do we keep our supplier contact data?" is a question for system analysts that is one question too many in an age of true database metadata searches.
Mazda's Data Challenge—And Its Solution
This question has been nearly eliminated at Mazda North America, thanks to MetaTrieval Software's natural language metadata search tool, MetaTrieve. Mazda North America is an automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) which sells cars and trucks through a dealer network of more than 700 dealers throughout the US and Canada. Mazda's specialty is fun-to-drive vehicles with a sports car orientation. The new CX-7 and MAZDASPEED 6 are representative of Mazda vehicles, and are aptly portrayed in Mazda's "zoom-zoom" commercials, which memorably features a young boy whispering "zoom zoom" as a Mazda drives by.
To support sales and service of its vehicle and parts, Mazda maintains multiple databases from many vendors running on a wide variety of platforms. These include an online transaction processing (OLTP) mainframe database 2 (DB2) to support transactions, and an e-commerce universal database (UDB) database to support MazdaUSA.com. For support of marketing campaigns and reports, Mazda uses an SQL server database (which also supports the KANA eMail response system), and for customer assistance agents, it uses a customer relationship management (CRM) SQL database. A UDB database supports dealer sales and service, an SQL database shared with Ford Motor tracks safety issues, and multiple departmental Access databases support business.
Business analysts, auditors, information technology (IT) analysts, and programmers at Mazda need to generate large numbers of ad hoc queries and reports to support the analysis and planning of business initiates and dealer objectives. The information they need, however, may be distributed and duplicated across many databases, with no standard vocabularies for business elements in tables and columns. The challenge, then, is to locate information throughout the enterprise before querying, reporting, integrating, or warehousing data. The bulk of this challenge lies in the sheer immensity of the steps involved in the task:
sifting through silos of printouts of database schemas or models
opening each table in an explorer or schema browser tool
trying multiple catalog searches against multiple databases
calling a programmer or database administrator (DBA) who was familiar with the business area
To resolve this challenge, Mazda installed MetaTrieve in 2004. Using MetaTrieve, the business or IT user simply enters the business element to be searched for (for example, vehicle purchase date), and MetaTrieve locates the database, table, and column in seconds. The user now knows where information is stored. A specific task example illustrates a very common data discovery problem and two very common questions in business: Do we have this data in the company? And where is it?
Mazda and its marketing campaign partners decided to execute a dealer service campaign to entice customers to visit authorized Mazda dealers for automotive service. The deadline for the data extract was fast approaching, and the final piece of information to be included in the marketing material—the dealer hours of service—was still missing. No one in the marketing group was sure if the data was present in-house, and if so, which database, table, and column the data resided in. Someone in the company knew, of course, but who was that person? Would it be necessary to call every programmer who worked with service or dealer systems?
A user who had MetaTrieve installed was able to speed things up. The user performed a single search for dealer service hours throughout the enterprise, and found the information in seconds. The campaign file extract was complete and out the door in time for delivery to the consumer.
The World and Everything in It
Now more than ever, business information users have urgent data needs, and high expectations regarding easy, natural language search technologies. The Web and companies like Google and Yahoo! have spoiled them in this regard. Users often assume that this same ease of search should extend to the database and its metadata—and managers expect such a solution to be inexpensive and low maintenance. These assumptions have only recently been fulfilled with natural language query builders and database metadata search technologies. The time for true comprehensive enterprise searching is near.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/now-just-where-did-i-put-my-search-engine-18554/
Much of the reason for this blind spot lies in the double (and sometimes confusing) meaning of the term search when applied to databases: this might mean data, or it might mean metadata (in other words, the business category of the data—such as table and column names—and descriptions). Historically, a search at the database level simply meant a data query, or specifically, a structured query language (SQL), against a table or group of tables. Thus, the traditional technology goal of software providers was to make SQL easier to generate, through wizards, natural language parsers, and so on. "Just ask your business question, and our product will do the query," was the "holy grail," or the highest aim of data access. Likewise, the goal of information technology (IT) trainers and managers was to educate users in developing SQL skills to reduce their reliance on programmers.
What's the Problem?
However, even for users who can compose left outer joins with the best of them, the problem of locating the correct database, table, and column (to query or report against) in a multidatabase enterprise (often with thousands of tables and many thousands of columns) can be formidable. This aspect of the search problem, the "search before the search," is described as the metadata search issue: in which database, schema, table, or column is the information? Business users ask characteristic questions when searching: If I wanted to ask for total commissions by month, where would I look to find my salespersons' commissions? If I wanted to create a report of sales per product, where would I find my customer sales orders? And as an IT analyst, if I wanted to integrate our customer data, where would I find customer addresses?
This metadata search problem is compounded beyond mere size and distribution of data, by wide variations in metadata design and labeling. Varied and arbitrary vocabularies, lexical mangling, and untamed formatting dispersed between table and column names all contribute to the challenge of locating the correct metadata prior to querying, reporting on, or integrating the actual data.
There are standard workarounds for this metadata search problem: (a) stay at a company long enough to become familiar with the location of everything; (b) call a programmer who is intimate with the business database and tables at issue; (c) browse through schema lists or explorers for each database, opening any candidate table that looks suspicious; or (d) query a catalog for all possible combinations of semantics and lexical structures. The metadata demon is even more intimidating if you are a traveling consultant new to a client's data stores (who ya gonna call?).
A Glass Half Full
The introduction of standardized or exemplar metadata, synonym dictionaries, and repositories helped alleviate this pain by centralizing all metadata and providing a more natural language vocabulary. However, there are still downsides to this approach. These dictionaries generally need to be manually constructed and cross-referenced with their respective source databases. With thousands of business elements, this can be a huge task to inaugurate, let alone maintain. And, more importantly, much of the key search problem still remains, namely, how to locate the desired metadata quickly among innumerable elements? A schema explorer in a metadata dictionary is nearly as extensive as its native source counterpart. Phrase or wild card searches still challenge the system and the dictionary designer for their range in lexical and synonym variations.
The goal, of course, is to make the database metadata search as easy and dynamic as a web search, but with the added ability to accommodate the unique problems of database metadata structure. Tools that can help achieve this goal are as important and useful as tools that help abstract the complexities of SQL generation from the end user. Ideally, the final goal of database information retrieval is a dynamic tool (without IT intervention) that completely hides both metadata and SQL from the business users. However, the wide variations of metadata (unlike the syntax of SQL keywords) will challenge this ideal, most likely for some time to come. A program can assist the user by making calculated guesses of correct metadata, but ultimately the human eye and the human brain will need to be involved.
Managers grappling with the complex issues of metadata management need to be aware that aside from the huge and publicized problem of integrating and retrieving dispersed document and XML metadata and data, the issue of easy database metadata searches and data access for end users is also of primary importance. The days of calling programmers (or keepers-of-the-data-keys) to the rescue every time a new business query or report is needed, are drawing to a close (or ought to be). "Where do we keep our supplier contact data?" is a question for system analysts that is one question too many in an age of true database metadata searches.
Mazda's Data Challenge—And Its Solution
This question has been nearly eliminated at Mazda North America, thanks to MetaTrieval Software's natural language metadata search tool, MetaTrieve. Mazda North America is an automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) which sells cars and trucks through a dealer network of more than 700 dealers throughout the US and Canada. Mazda's specialty is fun-to-drive vehicles with a sports car orientation. The new CX-7 and MAZDASPEED 6 are representative of Mazda vehicles, and are aptly portrayed in Mazda's "zoom-zoom" commercials, which memorably features a young boy whispering "zoom zoom" as a Mazda drives by.
To support sales and service of its vehicle and parts, Mazda maintains multiple databases from many vendors running on a wide variety of platforms. These include an online transaction processing (OLTP) mainframe database 2 (DB2) to support transactions, and an e-commerce universal database (UDB) database to support MazdaUSA.com. For support of marketing campaigns and reports, Mazda uses an SQL server database (which also supports the KANA eMail response system), and for customer assistance agents, it uses a customer relationship management (CRM) SQL database. A UDB database supports dealer sales and service, an SQL database shared with Ford Motor tracks safety issues, and multiple departmental Access databases support business.
Business analysts, auditors, information technology (IT) analysts, and programmers at Mazda need to generate large numbers of ad hoc queries and reports to support the analysis and planning of business initiates and dealer objectives. The information they need, however, may be distributed and duplicated across many databases, with no standard vocabularies for business elements in tables and columns. The challenge, then, is to locate information throughout the enterprise before querying, reporting, integrating, or warehousing data. The bulk of this challenge lies in the sheer immensity of the steps involved in the task:
sifting through silos of printouts of database schemas or models
opening each table in an explorer or schema browser tool
trying multiple catalog searches against multiple databases
calling a programmer or database administrator (DBA) who was familiar with the business area
To resolve this challenge, Mazda installed MetaTrieve in 2004. Using MetaTrieve, the business or IT user simply enters the business element to be searched for (for example, vehicle purchase date), and MetaTrieve locates the database, table, and column in seconds. The user now knows where information is stored. A specific task example illustrates a very common data discovery problem and two very common questions in business: Do we have this data in the company? And where is it?
Mazda and its marketing campaign partners decided to execute a dealer service campaign to entice customers to visit authorized Mazda dealers for automotive service. The deadline for the data extract was fast approaching, and the final piece of information to be included in the marketing material—the dealer hours of service—was still missing. No one in the marketing group was sure if the data was present in-house, and if so, which database, table, and column the data resided in. Someone in the company knew, of course, but who was that person? Would it be necessary to call every programmer who worked with service or dealer systems?
A user who had MetaTrieve installed was able to speed things up. The user performed a single search for dealer service hours throughout the enterprise, and found the information in seconds. The campaign file extract was complete and out the door in time for delivery to the consumer.
The World and Everything in It
Now more than ever, business information users have urgent data needs, and high expectations regarding easy, natural language search technologies. The Web and companies like Google and Yahoo! have spoiled them in this regard. Users often assume that this same ease of search should extend to the database and its metadata—and managers expect such a solution to be inexpensive and low maintenance. These assumptions have only recently been fulfilled with natural language query builders and database metadata search technologies. The time for true comprehensive enterprise searching is near.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/now-just-where-did-i-put-my-search-engine-18554/
Secure Your Search Engine
A serious root level compromise on Zeus Technologies' high-performance web-server was reported on the well-known Bugtraq security mailing list earlier today. In its insecure state, the Zeus search engine, which is transportable to virtual websites, can be used to request any file on the webserver, including the password file which contains the "root" password. Once you are logged into a UNIX server with the "root" password, you can do anything you want to the server including assigning new passwords to users, stealing confidential information, inserting viruses and trojan horses, and blowing away entire filesystems. If you have a backend database on your webserver, this could be a database administrator's worst nightmare.
Hopefully this security vulnerability will bring awareness to the user community that not all search engines are safe. Careful planning and analysis should be done before plopping any search engine on a webserver. Have your organization's security team do an analysis on any search engine before dropping them on your webservers.
To plug the vulnerability, organizations using the Zeus search engine should disable the insecure version immediately. While disabling the search engine, restrict the web UI to a select few hosts for added security. To their credit, Zeus responded quickly (within three hours) with a fix and posted new binaries on their site. Once secured, their attractive user interface will have administrators taking a second look at it. We would have a much more secure internet if all vendors responded to security holes as fast as Zeus.
Hopefully this security vulnerability will bring awareness to the user community that not all search engines are safe. Careful planning and analysis should be done before plopping any search engine on a webserver. Have your organization's security team do an analysis on any search engine before dropping them on your webservers.
To plug the vulnerability, organizations using the Zeus search engine should disable the insecure version immediately. While disabling the search engine, restrict the web UI to a select few hosts for added security. To their credit, Zeus responded quickly (within three hours) with a fix and posted new binaries on their site. Once secured, their attractive user interface will have administrators taking a second look at it. We would have a much more secure internet if all vendors responded to security holes as fast as Zeus.
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/secure-your-search-engine-15287/
Concur Aims To Be Single Point Of (Purchasing) Access
Concur Technologies, Inc. was incorporated in 1993 as Portable Software, and soon offered as its first product a shrink-wrapped retail application to automate travel and expense (T&E) reporting for individuals. It expanded its product line in 1996 by offering a client-server travel and expense package called Xpense Management Solution (XMS), and again in 1998 by bringing XMS to the Intranet. The Intranet version of XMS - recently renamed Concur Expense - now accounts for the majority of Concur's travel and expense-related revenues, which in turn are the bulk of the company's overall revenues.
Concur has recently been expanding its capabilities through acquisition. The ten-person 7Software was acquired in 1998 - two years after 7Software was incorporated. 7Software had a product called CompanyStore that was to be used to automate the procurement of routine items such as office supplies, furniture, computers and expendables; these are generally referred to as MRO goods (for "Maintenance, Repair and Operations"). It was at this time that Portable Software changed its name to Concur and announced its EmployeeDesktoptm (now called Concur eWorkplace) strategy of moving past the T&E market. The new strategy is to offer a single desktop platform for all in-house functions, including T&E, procurement, Self-Service Human Relations (SSHR), time and attendance, and facilities management.
In June 1999 Concur acquired Seeker Software, a provider of Web-based human resource self-service applications, in order to incorporate The Seeker Workplace (now called Concur Human Resources), Seeker's suite of HR employee and managerial self-service Web-based applications, into EmployeeDesktop (now called Concur eWorkplace, see below).
In October of 1999 the company renamed its product line to Concur eWorkplace. This product promises workplace access to T&E management, travel booking, Web-based purchasing, HR processing, and other functions yet to be named. Its announcement was marred by a simultaneous release of preliminary fourth-quarter financial results significantly below analyst expectations - the difference was approximately $3 million out of an expected $12 million. Chairman/CEO S. Steven Singh, a co-founder with Michael Hilton, attributed the shortfall to unexpected delays in closing business, due in part to a lengthening of the sales cycle brought on by their introduction of three new products during that quarter. Concur has had some concerns about its sales force as the company has transitioned from a single product to a corporate portal positioning, and has addressed these with new hires at all levels.
Concur has attempted to paint itself as the challenger to Ariba, the acknowledged leader in E-procurement applications, although Concur is not the clear number two in that market. However, Concur's wider strategy of being a single solution for all of what it calls the "workplace eCommerce solutions" certainly calls for it to go head-to-head with the E-procurement leader. This is because E-procurement is widely seen as the most significant business-to-business application area. It is the one that most significantly impacts a corporation's profitability.
The MRO procurement area is in the midst of turbulent change as the market morphs faster than the definitions can keep up. Concur's differentiation against Ariba early in its strategy was based on its broader range of products, primarily its T&E product but also its SSHR solution delivered through its integrated front-end portal, and its intent to deliver to smaller companies than were within Ariba's field of vision. Ariba has taken initiatives to reach smaller companies as have other vendors.
Concur's response to the small and mid-size market is more ambitious than those of its larger competitors. In line with its position as a provider of a full range of desktop services, Concur announced its ASP (application service provider) model in which its complete product line is available for companies to use via the Internet. These applications are operated by Concur, using Exodus Communications as a host. They offer the same capabilities as the software a larger firm would purchase and install on its own servers.
Also confusing the issue in E-procurement is that the line between product developer and impresario is becoming very fuzzy. PurchasePro, for example, does not have any "product" at all. Its function is to create public and private marketplaces where suppliers and buyers come together. Ariba and Commerce One do have software products, in both client-server and Internet versions, but also devote considerable effort to building markets and aggregating diverse vendor content into unified catalogs. Concur, which began as a software vendor, has also created a marketplace, Concur Commerce Network™, which serves as a single site for its customers to procure goods from a wide variety of vendors.
Another significant problem for all players in this arena is to integrate with a company's existing back-end processes, which may range from legacy products to integrated ERP solutions. The latter are especially important because the lagging ERP industry, seeing browser-based application deployment as its best market opportunity, will be a competitive player. Concur's approach to these problems is to provide the technology necessary to link to all the major ERP systems.
Concur has partnership agreements with all of these vendors and has so far had no difficulties in obtaining the information needed to build interfaces. However, there are some indications in other parts of the industry that the ERP vendors, who are attempting to remake themselves into E-commerce providers, are becoming reticent about being helpful to companies they now see as competitors. If this becomes a trend then vendors like Concur could be squeezed; however, we doubt that it will pass the annoyance level.
Concur's customer base is comprised of more than 320 companies, representing over 2.4 million employees. Companies ranging from 50 to 200,000 users have selected Concur's products.
The company recently hired a seasoned procurement specialist, Mark Sullivan, as Vice-President and General Manager of Concur Procurement for its Large Market Division. Mr. Sullivan most recently served as chief procurement officer for Imation Corp.
Vendor Strategy and Trajectory
Concur will announce Version 6.0 of its Concur eWorkplace product for Q2 of 2000, and will be putting it into beta in the near future. This is the version of the product that will offer the unified single interface - from a single login to integration at the database level - that is needed to complete its picture for being a provider of a true desktop product suite.
No one can deny that Concur has a compelling case. To buy similar applications from other vendors requires separate integrations and employee training. Once Concur has placed one of its applications inside a company, the version 6.0 promise is that addition of other functions is nearly seamless - and both faster and cheaper than the alternative.
Already selling based on the promises of Version 6.0 as much as on the functionality of the individual modules, Concur's strategy relies on leveraging its leadership position in T&E solutions, its growing position in SSHR, and its more than 2.4 million current users to sell its other applications to its customers. At the same time, new sales prospects for a single application are treated to the vision of workplace integration. That this is a message that appeals to executives is proven by the fact that HR and Procurement executives frequently attend the sales presentations of the T&E product.
For Concur, leveraging that leadership position does not equate to emphasizing repeat sales. Concur believes that the key to winning is to aggregate as many sites and users as possible. Thus, their sales strategy is to emphasize new customers rather than repeat sales. Also, they are taking the move from product vendor to suite vendor very seriously. As an example of how it permeates their thinking, the Concur.net marketplace will extend past MRO or capital assets to include suppliers of travel and HR products. The latter offering could be especially attractive to companies with cafeteria-style benefits plans. Done right it could allow individual employees to manage their benefits offerings without resort to HR staff.
Concur's activities have been devoted to Version 6.0 and to launching its ASP product and its new marketplace. This looks to us to be a well thought-out plan, clearly in line with the overall strategy. We would expect that R&D will continue emphasizing the vision. Look for announcements like these over the next year:
New related application areas, including time and attendance and facilities management. Time and attendance is likely (probability 60%) to be developed internally, but we would expect facilities management to be added through acquisition (probability 85%).
New features to its keynote T&E, SSHR and purchasing products. The national mess with HMO medical care suggests that a natural extension would be to provide tools for employees to manage their benefits accounts right down to tracking submissions to, and payments from, insurers. This may seem to be merely a feature that would benefit employees, and not the employer directly. But we suspect that a good deal of productive desk time is actually spent on the phone trying to get through HMO bureaucracies. Since Concur's Intranet and Internet products already allow employees to access their benefits information from home, a feature like this could actually impact the bottom line. (It's only half tongue-in-cheek to suggest that corporate portals may eventually offer grocery shopping and other consumer conveniences.)
Better integration with emerging XML business standards including Microsoft's BizTalk. Concur has already established itself as having an "open" approach that can work with any other standards, including those used by rivals Ariba and Commerce One. The bulls in the XML standards arena are likely to be kicking up a lot of dust for a while, and Concur will naturally want to track them. Open standards is an especially important story for attracting vendors to its marketplace.
New unrelated product areas. With its excellent rules engine for defining workflow, any area of a business that has complex workflow definitions is a natural for Concur to enter. Document management is one possibility: it is still a sleeping application except in niche industries (like publishing) and a few specialized areas (specifically the E-commerce division of the typical company.
The extent to which Concur's strategy affects operations can be seen in its most recent quarter. Figure 1 shows Concur's Sales and R&D expense history. The large increase in spending in the 4Q99 and 1Q00 reflect a decision to accelerate the process of moving their software to support a Web-based ASP model. This was a response to a much more active interest in ASP products than originally projected. The interest also extended to larger companies - Concur has had expressions of interest from companies with as many as a thousand employees. The payoff has been that of 47 new license customers in the first quarter, 35 were from ASP licenses. (Overall, Concur's spending on R&D and Sales has been about average for the industry - see Figure 2, which shows the most recently reported numbers from Concur and its competitors - a 10K is from an annual report, a 10Q is from a quarterly report.)
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/concur-aims-to-be-single-point-of-purchasing-access-15204/
Concur has recently been expanding its capabilities through acquisition. The ten-person 7Software was acquired in 1998 - two years after 7Software was incorporated. 7Software had a product called CompanyStore that was to be used to automate the procurement of routine items such as office supplies, furniture, computers and expendables; these are generally referred to as MRO goods (for "Maintenance, Repair and Operations"). It was at this time that Portable Software changed its name to Concur and announced its EmployeeDesktoptm (now called Concur eWorkplace) strategy of moving past the T&E market. The new strategy is to offer a single desktop platform for all in-house functions, including T&E, procurement, Self-Service Human Relations (SSHR), time and attendance, and facilities management.
In June 1999 Concur acquired Seeker Software, a provider of Web-based human resource self-service applications, in order to incorporate The Seeker Workplace (now called Concur Human Resources), Seeker's suite of HR employee and managerial self-service Web-based applications, into EmployeeDesktop (now called Concur eWorkplace, see below).
In October of 1999 the company renamed its product line to Concur eWorkplace. This product promises workplace access to T&E management, travel booking, Web-based purchasing, HR processing, and other functions yet to be named. Its announcement was marred by a simultaneous release of preliminary fourth-quarter financial results significantly below analyst expectations - the difference was approximately $3 million out of an expected $12 million. Chairman/CEO S. Steven Singh, a co-founder with Michael Hilton, attributed the shortfall to unexpected delays in closing business, due in part to a lengthening of the sales cycle brought on by their introduction of three new products during that quarter. Concur has had some concerns about its sales force as the company has transitioned from a single product to a corporate portal positioning, and has addressed these with new hires at all levels.
Concur has attempted to paint itself as the challenger to Ariba, the acknowledged leader in E-procurement applications, although Concur is not the clear number two in that market. However, Concur's wider strategy of being a single solution for all of what it calls the "workplace eCommerce solutions" certainly calls for it to go head-to-head with the E-procurement leader. This is because E-procurement is widely seen as the most significant business-to-business application area. It is the one that most significantly impacts a corporation's profitability.
The MRO procurement area is in the midst of turbulent change as the market morphs faster than the definitions can keep up. Concur's differentiation against Ariba early in its strategy was based on its broader range of products, primarily its T&E product but also its SSHR solution delivered through its integrated front-end portal, and its intent to deliver to smaller companies than were within Ariba's field of vision. Ariba has taken initiatives to reach smaller companies as have other vendors.
Concur's response to the small and mid-size market is more ambitious than those of its larger competitors. In line with its position as a provider of a full range of desktop services, Concur announced its ASP (application service provider) model in which its complete product line is available for companies to use via the Internet. These applications are operated by Concur, using Exodus Communications as a host. They offer the same capabilities as the software a larger firm would purchase and install on its own servers.
Also confusing the issue in E-procurement is that the line between product developer and impresario is becoming very fuzzy. PurchasePro, for example, does not have any "product" at all. Its function is to create public and private marketplaces where suppliers and buyers come together. Ariba and Commerce One do have software products, in both client-server and Internet versions, but also devote considerable effort to building markets and aggregating diverse vendor content into unified catalogs. Concur, which began as a software vendor, has also created a marketplace, Concur Commerce Network™, which serves as a single site for its customers to procure goods from a wide variety of vendors.
Another significant problem for all players in this arena is to integrate with a company's existing back-end processes, which may range from legacy products to integrated ERP solutions. The latter are especially important because the lagging ERP industry, seeing browser-based application deployment as its best market opportunity, will be a competitive player. Concur's approach to these problems is to provide the technology necessary to link to all the major ERP systems.
Concur has partnership agreements with all of these vendors and has so far had no difficulties in obtaining the information needed to build interfaces. However, there are some indications in other parts of the industry that the ERP vendors, who are attempting to remake themselves into E-commerce providers, are becoming reticent about being helpful to companies they now see as competitors. If this becomes a trend then vendors like Concur could be squeezed; however, we doubt that it will pass the annoyance level.
Concur's customer base is comprised of more than 320 companies, representing over 2.4 million employees. Companies ranging from 50 to 200,000 users have selected Concur's products.
The company recently hired a seasoned procurement specialist, Mark Sullivan, as Vice-President and General Manager of Concur Procurement for its Large Market Division. Mr. Sullivan most recently served as chief procurement officer for Imation Corp.
Vendor Strategy and Trajectory
Concur will announce Version 6.0 of its Concur eWorkplace product for Q2 of 2000, and will be putting it into beta in the near future. This is the version of the product that will offer the unified single interface - from a single login to integration at the database level - that is needed to complete its picture for being a provider of a true desktop product suite.
No one can deny that Concur has a compelling case. To buy similar applications from other vendors requires separate integrations and employee training. Once Concur has placed one of its applications inside a company, the version 6.0 promise is that addition of other functions is nearly seamless - and both faster and cheaper than the alternative.
Already selling based on the promises of Version 6.0 as much as on the functionality of the individual modules, Concur's strategy relies on leveraging its leadership position in T&E solutions, its growing position in SSHR, and its more than 2.4 million current users to sell its other applications to its customers. At the same time, new sales prospects for a single application are treated to the vision of workplace integration. That this is a message that appeals to executives is proven by the fact that HR and Procurement executives frequently attend the sales presentations of the T&E product.
For Concur, leveraging that leadership position does not equate to emphasizing repeat sales. Concur believes that the key to winning is to aggregate as many sites and users as possible. Thus, their sales strategy is to emphasize new customers rather than repeat sales. Also, they are taking the move from product vendor to suite vendor very seriously. As an example of how it permeates their thinking, the Concur.net marketplace will extend past MRO or capital assets to include suppliers of travel and HR products. The latter offering could be especially attractive to companies with cafeteria-style benefits plans. Done right it could allow individual employees to manage their benefits offerings without resort to HR staff.
Concur's activities have been devoted to Version 6.0 and to launching its ASP product and its new marketplace. This looks to us to be a well thought-out plan, clearly in line with the overall strategy. We would expect that R&D will continue emphasizing the vision. Look for announcements like these over the next year:
New related application areas, including time and attendance and facilities management. Time and attendance is likely (probability 60%) to be developed internally, but we would expect facilities management to be added through acquisition (probability 85%).
New features to its keynote T&E, SSHR and purchasing products. The national mess with HMO medical care suggests that a natural extension would be to provide tools for employees to manage their benefits accounts right down to tracking submissions to, and payments from, insurers. This may seem to be merely a feature that would benefit employees, and not the employer directly. But we suspect that a good deal of productive desk time is actually spent on the phone trying to get through HMO bureaucracies. Since Concur's Intranet and Internet products already allow employees to access their benefits information from home, a feature like this could actually impact the bottom line. (It's only half tongue-in-cheek to suggest that corporate portals may eventually offer grocery shopping and other consumer conveniences.)
Better integration with emerging XML business standards including Microsoft's BizTalk. Concur has already established itself as having an "open" approach that can work with any other standards, including those used by rivals Ariba and Commerce One. The bulls in the XML standards arena are likely to be kicking up a lot of dust for a while, and Concur will naturally want to track them. Open standards is an especially important story for attracting vendors to its marketplace.
New unrelated product areas. With its excellent rules engine for defining workflow, any area of a business that has complex workflow definitions is a natural for Concur to enter. Document management is one possibility: it is still a sleeping application except in niche industries (like publishing) and a few specialized areas (specifically the E-commerce division of the typical company.
The extent to which Concur's strategy affects operations can be seen in its most recent quarter. Figure 1 shows Concur's Sales and R&D expense history. The large increase in spending in the 4Q99 and 1Q00 reflect a decision to accelerate the process of moving their software to support a Web-based ASP model. This was a response to a much more active interest in ASP products than originally projected. The interest also extended to larger companies - Concur has had expressions of interest from companies with as many as a thousand employees. The payoff has been that of 47 new license customers in the first quarter, 35 were from ASP licenses. (Overall, Concur's spending on R&D and Sales has been about average for the industry - see Figure 2, which shows the most recently reported numbers from Concur and its competitors - a 10K is from an annual report, a 10Q is from a quarterly report.)
SOURCE:http://www.technologyevaluation.com/research/articles/concur-aims-to-be-single-point-of-purchasing-access-15204/
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