LAS VEGAS— At its Impact conference on Tuesday, IBM Corp. unveiled new software that expands the “smarter commerce” portfolio it announced in March, for which the goal is helping organizations in business-to-business and business-to-commerce markets place the customer at the centre of what is often a complex lifecycle involving third parties.
The smarter commerce portfolio is about helping B2B and B2C companies market and sell goods and services, as well as service their customers. IBM chose the label “smarter commerce” because, while the process does involve enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management, those systems don’t make the customer the focal point.
The two new additions to the portfolio are the Customer Value Strategy Accelerator for designing a roadmap to target new business opportunities. The other is the Cross-channel Experience Assessment to identify gaps and pain points in existing channels.
Mike Rhodin, IBM’s senior vice-president of software solutions, explained that, across the last two years, the company has spent $2.5 billion acquiring software companies, including data integration vendor Sterling Commerce in 2010, to help manage this commerce lifecycle.
Smarter commerce, said Rhodin, falls under the IBM’s relatively new solutions business that has the mandate of identifying new markets for IBM. The other two new markets to come out of the software solutions group, besides smarter commerce, for IBM is business analytics optimization and social business.
During the same press conference, customers of IBM’s smarter commerce offerings shared their experiences. The Irish Dairy Board in Ireland, an exporter of dairy products to 90 countries, had been using technology from Sterling Commerce before it was acquired by IBM.
John O’Moore, the board’s general manager of information systems, admitted to being concerned at the start of the Impact conference because he didn’t know where Sterling Commerce would actually fit in IBM’s broader plans. But his worries were allayed when he saw “Sterling at the centre of the strategy.” That said, O’Moore still hopes to see a clearer roadmap from IBM.
One challenge the smarter commerce technology helps resolve, said O’Moore, is the fact that the Irish Dairy Board doesn’t own any warehouses or transportation facilities of its own and must rely on third parties.
J.J. Keller Associates Inc., a Neenah, Wi.-based organization that helps businesses comply with government regulations, uses smarter commerce offerings for visibility into marketing and selling initiatives on its Web site.
Adrienne Hartman, e-commerce manager with j.j. keller associates, said the analytics was able to help the company measure the success of specialized site pages designed to address specific customer issues with Webinars, downloads, news articles and products and services. From that insight, J.J. Keller Associates expanded the initiative to create other portals for customers.
At this year’s Impact conference, the Armonk, New York-based vendor discussed about 60 new and enhanced offerings that all have to do with improving business processes as the foundation for creating an agile business that can undergo transformation change.
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