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28 Oct 2011SOFTWARE: Seamless Connection to Flexible Software Solutions
Recent Gauteng Business News
"Businesses today are operating in a highly competitive environment in which lines between actions taking place within and outside an organisation's four walls are blurring," says Gerald Naidoo, CEO of Logikal Consulting. âThis convergence forces the rapid adoption of new business models and integration strategies that extend beyond the firewall. End-to-end business-to-partner integration is becoming essential as companies seek to meet the needs of customers, partners, and suppliers.â
He adds that companies need secure, flexible business processes to collaborate with new value chain partners and drive new offers to customers. In order to achieve this, businesses are focusing greater attention on community excellenceâor building an extended community of business partners and suppliers to bring new products and services to market and enhance how they are sold and distributed.
Flexible Software Solutions Looking to Help Create New Business Processes
âOrganisations therefore have to create new business ecosystems that support real-time collaboration between systems and people across enterprises, as well as create new business processes that extend to multiple partners, suppliers, and customers. To retain current customers and attract new ones, companies need to create a rich product and service mixâwhich means they need the ability to quickly onboard a diverse set of partners. A business integration solution focused on community excellence will help sales and marketing meet these goals faster by allowing content partners to self-provision, access self-help, and monitor data exchange transactions,â Naidoo says.
This approach will also support the seamless integration and transformation of partner data with back-office systems. This will enable sales and marketing to quickly aggregate product and pricing data into catalogues for use in downstream offer modelling.
âEssentially, what is required is a cost-effective and consistent operational infrastructure which extends in a flexible manner to deal with both existing systems and the partner environment. While ease of use is essential to meet time-to-market goals, the entire infrastructure must be built on rock solid, robust technology,â Naidoo. âIt must scale, it must be reliable, and it must provide for business process management so that companies can adapt to what competitors are doing, add new offers, or change the rules of an offer on the fly.â
Sterling Commerceâs Flexible Software Solutions
The Sterling Commerce solution offers all of this and more. Seamlessly connecting events, transactions, and files from external partners with internal systems and processes, the software gives all stakeholders visibility into business operations at multiple levels of granularity, rapidly responds to business changes and monitors and acts on events in real time.
âA business integration solution should allow you to react to market dynamics quickly and with very little effort. As a gateway, it must be able to talk to any system you have in place today and any communication method your business partners might support. As a process enabler, it should allow you to quickly assemble offers to meet the needs of your customers. As a visibility and collaboration tool, it should enable more efficient ways of selling and give both you and your partners better insight into your business operations. As a means to governance, it should track and record every transaction end-to-end, at any granularity you specify. And, finally, as a security tool, it should protect against fraud, theft, revenue leakages, and liability. Sterling Commerce provides a single off-the-shelf tool that ensures results with their flexible software solutions,â Naidoo concludes.
Business News Sector Tags: Infotech|
