Amazon.com has been down this road before: Like one-time Amazon e-commerce "partners" Toys R Us and Borders before them, Target executives announced last week that the world's second-largest retailer plans to say adios to Amazon.com and "build and manage its own platform for Target.com," with an expected launch date before the 2011 holiday season.
About a year ago, CIO.com examined the Wi-Fi hotspot pricing strategies of retailers Starbucks, McDonald's, Borders and Panera Bread in "Free Wi-Fi: Should Retailers Offer It to Customers?"
Your department-information technology-has just played a starring role in blowing a multimillion-dollar enterprise software project. The intense glare from the CEO, CFO and other business leaders is squarely focused on the CIO, VP of applications, project managers and business analysts charged with making sure that this didn't happen.
No so long ago, the computer geek was confined to the back rooms and basements of companies everywhere.
Most businesses today have more data than they know how to use. And getting at that data and then presenting it in a useful manner for cogent analysis are two tasks that typically haunt organizations.
During the past year, CIO.com has examined the critical role that business analysts play inside today's corporate IT environments, straddling the bridge between IT and business teams at project time. We looked at what business analysts actually did for software implementation projects; explained why BAs were so important for CIOs and IT; identified the six secrets of top-notch business analysts; and showed how BAs can help drive technology strategy that increases revenue.
How many people actually <em>use</em> their function keys-you know, those little buttons on your keyboard that go from F1 to F12? We're guessing not many.
As is the case with selling McMansions, Mercedes SUVs and 63-inch HDTVs, pushing expensive technology products and services during a global recession isn't an enviable task. Late last year, when the economic meltdown began and corporate IT budgets went under the CFO's knife, tech vendors had to hastily reevaluate their marketing messages and overhaul their sales tactics.
A famous superhero once noted, with trepidation: "With great power comes great responsibility." Retail juggernaut Wal-Mart, with US$401 billion in worldwide sales, has always wielded the "great power" part with its suppliers.
For any business today, purchasing enterprise software -- ERP, CRM, BI and supply chain -- apps is probably unlike any other corporate activity.
No one has to remind CIOs just how bad the last 10 months have been: New data from our exclusive survey of top IT executives shows that CIOs may have hit rock bottom with their budgeting and cost-cutting measures.
<strong>1.</strong> ERP may be linked with complexity, high cost and 18-month rollouts, but enterprises today have many alternatives to behemoths SAP and Oracle. On-demand and software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors offer robust ERP product sets, and open-source apps can be bought via Amazon.com's EC2 platform. Ray Wang, vice president and principal analyst with Forrester Research, says users have turned to SaaS for innovative functionality, as well as lower costs.
CIOs are famous for their generic, canned and oftentimes boring remarks on anything from ERP and clould computing, to vendor relations and social media technologies.
Every enterprise software vendor is hearing the same thing these days from their customers: "I need to cut my software licensing and pricing costs. What can you do to help me out?"
At SAP's 2009 Sapphire Show, Leo Apotheker gave no ordinary keynote presentation. In Apotheker's first opportunity to speak to the masses as SAP's sole CEO, he officially took the ceremonial CEO reins from retiring Henning Kagermann, his long-time friend and his co-CEO for the past year.