This report came out last week right before
Thanksgiving. There are no big surprises
here too different from Forrester's report that came out last month. A few things did stand out to me had to do
with the industry leader, GXS.
I had the opportunity to join GXS at their annual customer
conference this year and visit with their executive team and many large
customers. The conference was a first
class event and provided a conducive venue for key GXS personnel to get to know
and listen to their customer's needs and wants.
Many of the presentations covered the strategic direction of the company
which I am sworn to secrecy here to mention.
But what I can mentioned, which the Gartner article touches on, is that
the industry leader is investing a lot of time and money addressing SOCIAL
supply chain issues.
Social supply chain issues has to do with being able to
find, connect and collaborate with your business partners, vendors and
customers in an efficient means and often referred to as Web 2.0. At the conference they announced the launch
of two new tools that addresses social supply chain networks. One is a system called TeamBook that is a
Microsoft Sharepoint tool which GXS built to better serve their clients. The functionality includes user groups,
threaded discussions with support personal and other GXS customers, as well as
the ability to chat and post support tickets.
The second is a partnership with RollStream which I covered in a
previous article here.
Social Business Networks (SBNs) is the hottest area, along with
virtualization and business intelligence,
that major corporations and government agency CIOs are looking into today. In a recent book just out this week by Andrew
McAfee of Harvard University, titled, Enterprise
2.0, Dr. McAfee states that {Social Business Networks} offers significant
improvements, not just incremental ones, in areas such as generating,
capturing, and sharing knowledge; letting people find helpful colleagues,
tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise and harnessing the "wisdom
of crowds." He goes on to convince the
reader that these new Internet tools justify a new version of the web, Web
2.0.
In my humble opinion, these are critical activities whose
adoption will define the difference between industry winners and losers over
the next five to ten years. And this
industry will feel a lot of growing pain.
As the industry leaders have already evolved through the dot bomb era
into an open Internet network cloud computing generation, with a lot of baggage
to tote around. A couple of frightening
points that the Gartner report outlines includes huge debt loads, year over
year declining revenue, and companies that are still running on old legacy
systems. That's not a great sign for the
industry when the leader has more debt then revenue and the revenue is
declining. Online business collaboration
tools seem to be a necessity for survival.
Please login or register to add comments |