Data and the Rise of the Digital Enterprise
Our list of blue chip customers continues to grow, Gartner now recognized our market and our leadership position , and we are on a steady growth ramp….time to reflect back on our journey!
Technology is changing the way we live. It’s changing the structure of industries, creating new opportunities in the marketplace for innovation and competition, setting lofty expectations for customer experience, product and service delivery, and partner collaboration, and developing more efficient and powerful tools internally for an organization’s operations, supply-chain, sales, and marketing departments. The rise of the digital enterprise – the enterprise that uses technology as a competitive advantage – is the paramount factor in today’s data-driven economy. The organization, large or small, that can quickly and effectively access and utilize data to drive down cost and improve performance, will pull far ahead of the competition.
The pressure is on. And it’s unrelenting.
It took more than 100 years for stock trading to evolve from dividends paid out to investors in East India trading voyages in the 1600s, to official stock exchanges in London and New York in the late 1700s. And another 200 years for the advent of the NASDAQ in 1971, the first network of computers to execute trades electronically. Now, in less than 50 years since that first electronic trade, the global stock market has evolved into a one-upmanship of nanosecond, and even sub-nanosecond, exchanges.
In the 1950s American Airlines developed a new flight reservation system called SABRE. Working with developers at IBM over the next 10 years, SABRE was handling 83,000 phone calls a day by the 1960s. By the 1990s, the Internet was being fully realized and SABRE was extended to America Online customers. In 2007, a SABRE-based reservation system was deployed by one of the most innovative airlines in the market, Virgin Atlantic, which then went on to become the first airline to offer in-flight wi-fi to its passengers. In 1995, Southwest was the first airline to establish a homepage on the Internet. Now, 20 years later, 80% of Southwest’s passenger revenues are booked via Southwest.com, Swabiz.com, and Airtran.com.[1]
The evolution of the digital retail marketplace is moving even faster. Only 20 years ago Amazon was an online bookstore. Today it’s the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States.[2] In 1996, Dell began selling computers through its website, and today can boast that it is the largest ecommerce website for commercial technology products in the world.[3] zulily, a popular online shopping site initially targeted at moms, was launched in 2010, and by 2014 recorded a revenue of $285M, a 97% increase from the previous year.[4] Gone are the days of waiting in long lines to buy a movie ticket. Now with Fandango, 36 million movie fans a month have a new user experience as they discover, buy tickets and share their passion for movies in a more engaging and interactive way all online.
Internally facing tools have experienced remarkable evolution as well, and now require 24x7x365 uptime to fuel a global base of users who “never sleep”.
CRM tools first stepped onto the scene in 1986 when ACT!, basically a digital rolodex was introduced. By the early 90s the term “sales force automation” was being used regularly. In 1993 Tom Siebel left Oracle to create Siebel Systems, which quickly became the leading SFA provider on the market. Throughout the 90s the industry realized that this “SFA” was not a tool just for sales, but for all customer management opportunities, and the term “customer relationship management” replaced the SFA moniker. In 1999 Salesforce.com launched. Within 10 years Salesforce could claim 55,400 customers, and in two more years, by 2011, that number had grown to 93,200 with 3 Million subscribers using the software via the cloud.[5]
In just 50 years, since 1965, Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) applications have evolved from financial accounting and inventory management to encompassing almost every department and app in the digital enterprise, including HR, engineering, distribution and supply chain management, CRM, and advanced planning and scheduling. Now, ERP has found a home in the cloud to enable workforces independent of location.[6]
The success of the digital enterprise is no longer an issue of “you snooze, you lose.” This is an issue of “you blink, you sink.”
To be competitive, first and foremost, your digital enterprise must be available 24/7/365. Downtime is revenue lost.
Second, your offerings have to be able to scale. If you have an app or service that comes on to the scene and takes off like a rocket, you’d better be ready to scale up. This means having your IT infrastructure aligned and ready to handle the influx.
Third, agility. You have to be ready and able to react and adapt to changes in the market all the way from sales to IT.
So where do you start? When you’re trying to compete in this 24/7/365 business world, where availability, scalability, and agility are paramount to success, look at your data center first. The data center has become the lifeblood of the digital enterprise.
In my next blog I will explore how the digital enterprise, with data as its fuel, relies on a modern IT infrastructure, and the pieces of that infrastructure that must come together to deliver the availability, scalability, and agility that can give your digital enterprise a competitive edge.
[1] http://www.swamedia.com/channels/Corporate-Fact-Sheet/pages/corporate-fact-sheet
[2] Jopson, Barney (July 12, 2011). "Amazon urges California referendum on online tax". Financial Times.
[3] http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/uscorp1/fast-facts
[4] http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/business-directory/20018/zulily/
[5] http://www.slideshare.net/Salesforce/salesforce-timeline-3-8755593
[6] http://ctnd.com/wp-content/uploads/1405_graphic-cre8tive-erp-through-the-ages-1.jpg
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