The Ecommerce Features B2B Buyers Demand

B2B ecommerce companies that don’t quickly adapt to the new reality of rapidly evolving expectations of B2B customers will soon find themselves at a competitive disadvantage and miss out on a huge opportunity.

B2B customers today want the same, advanced level of functionality that they see on their favorite B2C sites. This includes features like an interactive marketplace with real-time product inventory, up-to-date pricing, mobile support, online support forums, live customer service reps, and a database that contains their corporate purchasing history, shipping preferences and payment data.

Unfortunately, few B2B websites today offer the rich features their B2C counterparts provide. That’s poor planning. Research suggests B2B ecommerce is poised to leapfrog B2C online sales. In fact, Forrester Research estimates that just last year B2B ecommerce sales doubled B2C online sales, topping $559 billion in U.S. domestic sales alone.

To take advantage of this opportunity, B2B companies must provide stronger ecommerce functionality. That includes:
•Faceted search — in which each product is defined by various categories, such as size, color and style. This saves buyers from having to browse through hundreds, or thousands, of SKUs looking for the one that meets their specifications. Faceted search is particularly important in B2B sites where products may have many more descriptors and attributes than in B2C. A shirt or a purse may have three or four characteristics, but imagine the differences that exist between screws. They can come in different lengths, thicknesses, thread patterns, materials, etc. Without faceted search, locating the right screw might require hours of combing through different suppliers catalogues. A faceted search capability might well become a major competitive edge for the ecommerce company that provides it.
•Configurator. Another invaluable feature in B2B ecommerce is the configurator. Configurators may be developed to solve all sorts of problems, such as the pricing for a custom project, or the specifications for a part that must be able to bear a certain weight or temperature. For example, NetSuite customer CMP Corp., a manufacturer of compressors for refrigeration and HVAC systems, provides an online configurator that enables customers to input requirements, such as voltage, bore size, horsepower and allows them to order a customized compressor based on those requirements within minutes. Configurators help customers make purchases quickly and can help vendors reduce the cost of human sales support while simultaneously boosting sales.
•Mobile support. Buyers everywhere are using mobile devices to conduct business, and that includes making B2B purchases. They may want to complete a purchase on their way to a client visit, or perhaps calculate a bill of materials for a client at a job site.
•Online, real-time inventory. If a customer is in a rush to get an order, they need to know how much stock is available and ready for immediate shipment. They don’t have the patience to receive an email 24 hours later that states that half of the order is back ordered.
•Customer-defined nomenclature. B2B sites should support each customer’s unique product names and numbers, so that someone ordering a part doesn’t have to hunt for a cross reference.
•Continuity orders (a.k.a. subscription or repeat orders). Often a customer places the same order each month, much like a consumer may have a weekly grocery list. They can save a lot of time with a recurring order that automatically reorders items at a set interval. With online self-service, customers can also adjust those orders if something changes.

Keep in mind that not every ecommerce platform supports these B2B capabilities. Many are focused on B2C ecommerce only. A very few, such as NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce, support both B2C and B2B. That is good news for firms that sell through B2B and B2C channels as it’s more efficient to operate both sites off of the same inventory, financial, and customer systems.

Successful B2B companies are listening to their customers’ demand for a more user-friendly and feature-rich ecommerce experience and are improving their websites to meet this demand. Investing in a flexible ecommerce platform, whether it be to upgrade an existing site or get a first site off the ground, will help maintain a competitive edge in the near future.

Benchmark Report Details the State of Ecommerce in Distribution

Distributors are relying on ecommerce to acquire new customers and increase sales. Yet they’re not satisfied with many aspects of their current ecommerce websites. The results of a recent survey sponsored by NetSuite in partnership with Modern Distribution Management showed what distributors want to achieve from their ecommerce efforts and how they view themselves compared to their competitors. Below are some of the key findings from the report, “The 2014 State of E-Commerce Distribution: The Maturing E-Commerce Channel”.
•Ecommerce as a percent of overall revenue is rising rapidly. Respondents expect their sales to increasingly move online in 2014, with 20 percent of respondents expecting ecommerce sales to comprise 5 to 10 percent of sales in 2014.
•Acquiring new customers, growing wallet share with existing customers, and improving the usability of ecommerce sites are top priorities. Nearly 25 percent cited acquiring new customers as a top priority.
•Distributors are concerned that their own sites lack advanced features. Respondents expressed low levels of satisfaction with more advanced features such as live chat, price quotes and product suggestions.
•Support for mobile technologies has grown nearly 25 percent in one year, and more than 30 percent intend to implement mobile support in the near future.
•Catalogues are considered to be an effective method for generating ecommerce sales. Of those with mature ecommerce channels, 73 percent believe catalogues help to drive ecommerce sales.

Distributors must realize that B2B buyers are becoming just as sophisticated and demanding as B2C ones are — and increasingly represent younger tech-savvy adults moving up into procurement and management roles. Investing in ecommerce is a requirement for every distributor, and the chance to provide a high-quality ecommerce experience for customers before the competitors do is fading fast.

Don’t be left behind. Download the full report, “The 2014 State of E-Commerce Distribution: The Maturing E-Commerce Channel” to gain insight into the objectives and challenges distribution companies say they are faced with around ecommerce today and what it needed to overcome them.

Five Key Characteristics of Successful Professional Services Sales Teams

How do you measure the success of a professional services sales team? Whether they meet their quarterly quotas and the size of the deals they close are just a couple of the metrics that can illustrate success; but often it depends on what matters most to the business.

However, there are some common characteristics among successful professional services sales organizations, according to The 2013 Professional Services Sales and Marketing Maturity Model Benchmark, a survey by Service Performance Insight (SPI). For example, in a prior post on SPI’s research, I discussed how professional services automation (PSA) leads to better performance in a number of categories.

Here are five other characteristics that SPI’s research found to be common among the best performing services sales teams:

High sales quotas. Surprisingly, the sales people with the highest dollar value quotas were also the most likely to meet them. Eighty percent of the sales staff in organizations that assigned sales goals of over $3 million met their sales quotas, compared to just 60.4 percent of the staff in organizations that assigned goals of under $1 million. The organizations with the highest quotas had the best average net profit margin—15.9 percent—compared to 13.1 percent for those with the lowest quotas. The second best were those with quotas in the $2 to $2.5 million range, with 75 percent of service sales people meeting their quotas and organizational net profit of 14.2 percent.

High value deals. The services firms with the highest value deals closed also produced the most revenue per employee. Organizations with an average deal size over $200,000 brought in $208,000 per employee, while those with deal sizes of under $25,000 had revenues per employee of only $152,000.

Long-term, high value clients. Successful sales firms also have loyal, high value clients who spend a lot with them, year after year. In the survey, the organizations whose clients spent the most during the year had the highest revenue per employee. For example, firms whose clients spent more than $500,000 on average brought in $195,000 per employee, with average net profit margins of a whopping 22.5 percent! That’s in stark contrast to companies with per-client expenditures of $50,000 to $100,000 per year that pulled in only $180,000 per employee with average net profit margins of just 7.8 percent.

Value-driven, comprehensive sales focus. Sales organizations with a business value-driven approach providing comprehensive solutions tended to have the largest sales pipelines relative to forecast (233 percent) and produce a net profit margin of 14.5 percent. The lowest scorers were those who classified their sales approach as opportunistic and instinctive. They maintained a deal pipeline to bookings forecast of 152 percent and produced a net profit margin of 10.4 percent.

Spend 10-15 percent of revenue on services sales. Organizations that spent more than 15 percent or less than 10 percent had lower revenues per employee and lower rates of achieving their annual revenue targets. But those that spent between 10 percent and 15 percent did the best. Their sales teams achieved 92 percent of their annual revenue targets, with revenues of $190,000 per employee.

Selling professional services is a multi-faceted process that depends on the skills of the sales team and the efficiency and accuracy of sales processes, as well as the technology infrastructure supporting it. To learn more about how to improve the performance of your service organization, visit NetSuite’s PSA section.

TEC Certifies NetSuite’s ERP for Manufacturers

Manufacturers need their ERP systems to handle all aspects of their business. That includes everything from demand planning, costing, inventory and shop floor operations to HR, financials, marketing and sales. Unfortunately, not all ERP suites provide this full range of functionality. The good news: NetSuite’s cloud ERP for Manufacturers supports all the functionality needs of discrete manufacturers.

Technology Evaluation Centers, a software analysis and certification organization, recently certified NetSuite’s manufacturing solution, noting its support of all 52 features required in a discrete manufacturing business. Better yet, NetSuite scored 80 percent or higher for the majority of those features.

The full TEC report on NetSuite ERP for Manufacturers evaluated not only features and functions, but the product’s ability to handle real-world business processes. In the report, TEC singled out five aspects of NetSuite’s software and business model for praise in particular:
•Portlet-driven dashboard. The NetSuite user interface is a customizable dashboard that uses pluggable portlets to provide shortcuts to the functions or performance metrics most important to an employee’s work. Administrators can create different dashboards for different roles. Portlets can do a variety of tasks, including display updated KPIs,execute reports or workflows, or display messages and alerts.
•Flexible reporting and analytics. NetSuite comes with 200-plus standard reports, and others are easy to create. KPIs and other metrics provide easy drill-down capabilities all the way to the source. A SuiteAnalytics tool lets users slice-and-dice data and drag-and-drop rows and columns.
•Business process design. Unlike other ERP applications, NetSuite is not built around isolated transactions, but around business processes, which makes them easier to customize and streamline. NetSuite’s SuiteFlow workflow tool lets users customize business processes with graphical drag-and-drop features, no coding needed. Customizable records (e.g., an invoice or sales lead) can be set to trigger an automatic workflow when the record is updated or a new record is created. Using complex decision trees, with branching, it’s possible to create and automate many different processes such as the escalation of a collections action, or reassignment of a stale lead.
•Cloud-based subscription model. TEC cited NetSuite’s cloud architecture as a positive feature, and noted that it allowed companies to be more flexible, to try new technologies without a large investment, and to unburden their IT staff of tedious IT tasks such as backups and restores.
•Partner network. TEC also praised NetSuite’s network of technology partners, which gives customers a wide selection of third party software to expand NetSuite’s own capabilities. Adding partner applications enables customers to add capabilities in areas such as supply chain management and product lifecycle management. For example, TribeHR, which had been a NetSuite partner, adds many new HR features to NetSuite.

NetSuite ERP for Manufacturers doesn’t stop with discrete manufacturing either. According to the report, NetSuite ERP delivers, “a significant number of additional capabilities that are commonly supported by the other top tier ERP vendors. TEC also cited NetSuite’s integrated CRM and SuiteCommerce solutions.

One more characteristic that caught TEC’s attention: NetSuite uses its own ERP software internally, as well as selling it to others. Apparently, the “eat your own dog food” philosophy is not in practice at many other ERP firms.

NetSuite’s ERP for Manufacturers Top-Rated Features

NetSuite scored well on nearly all of the TEC certification criteria, but it rated well above average in the following areas:
•Financials: general ledger, accounts payable, cost accounting and cash management
•Human Resources: benefits, payroll and employee self-service.
•Manufacturing Management: product costing, field service and repairs, product data management, project management and product configurator.
•Quality Management: production quality management, non-production quality management and inventory quality management.

The full TEC report on NetSuite ERP for Manufacturers with competitive analysis may be downloaded from the Technology Evaluation Centers (www.technologyevaluation.com) in its Certification Reports section.

-Ranga Bodla, Director, Industry Marketing, Wholesale Distribution and Manufacturing, NetSuite

7 Attributes Of A Comprehensive Cloud Strategy

There is a lot of hot air involved in cloud discussions and a lot of foggy principles. There is no one size fits all approach, however. Here are my top 7 attributes of a comprehensive cloud strategy that need to be addressed when you discuss cloud computing in your company, even more so if you discuss with vendors and partners. We found this framework helps to start a meaningful discussion and get everybody aligned – demystifying the cloud and leaving out the hype.

#1 Software as a Service (SaaS)
If we need to take a focus here when we talk about SaaS, it will be the user experience. Cloud solutions start with engaging the end user more than other solutions. Not because they are SaaS, because they can and they are innovating faster and responding to trends like mobility, social, collaboration, etc. Developing or consuming cloud solutions you will most often be the first using the latest and greatest available technology.

“User Experience tops everything” – this is true. But is not the User Interface only, or using mobile interfaces that makes this happen – it is consistency that matters. It is if you have design principles that follow the paradigm on how the people work AND how they can get consistency across the solutions in play. What often looks nice as an app, you see bad user experience when you need to solve additional business problems. And this then creates complexity and bad user experience again.

One of my all time favorites along those lines are innovation cycles. Make sure you get enough innovation cycles per year, as you often will need to adapt and course correct. Reducing those cycles is a sign of complexity a solution cannot manage properly.

Questions to ask:

Show me your solution on some mobile devices first; are you consistent across mobile and desktop? Is the solution build for an end user role to engage them?
How do you enable collaboration? Is this a different tool where people need to transfer information and create silos or just chat around? Or is it build in business context, collaborative across different solutions like cloud and on-premise?
Are you using a common user experience paradigm so depending on my task, independent of the solution I have similar experiences?
Do you have analytics in context? Not a toolbox… Are your analytics “speaking” in my terms and helping me to understand what the situation is? Can I drill down from there?
How often do you innovate a year and how do you manage the change?
How is the customer involved in co-innovation to define your delivery per release?
#2 Platform as a Service (PaaS)
“No good application without a good platform strategy” – this is even more true when it comes to cloud solutions. Many vendors discover this need too late. What often happens – it is more a tool set for extensions or configurations – because they did not understand what real multi-tenancy means (more about this later) or they did not think about adjacent areas to their portfolio.

Simple example: A sales person needs to have financial information, access to skill set of his co-workers, information about payment, shipping and production status of the products or services he sells… just to name a few.

And a platform that was designed to force IT-departments or partners to augment what you cannot build is not good either. You need to have an open but innovative platform that enables your eco-system to adapt what you have, to build add-ons when needed and to develop complete new solutions – but without to start from scratch.

Questions to ask:

Does your platform strategy lead to ONE platform going forward? Is the experience with your solutions thanks to the platform harmonized?
Is your platform enabling your existing products as well as empowering to build new solutions?
What innovation in future technology does your platform provide? Think about in-memory, predictive-analytics, streaming, special, graph store, etc.
Is your platform enabling and supporting apps development, mobile, analytics AND integration?
#3 Integration (and this should be part of your PaaS strategy)
As the ease of adopting point cloud solutions increases, their is a risk for organizations is that the customer experience will suffer if the solutions (from different vendors) do not speak to each other seamlessly and if the ‘ownership’ of the experience is not clear.

Important is the notion of delivering prepackaged integrations to reduce the burden on customers, a need for consistent experience for the user and simplicity in getting supported and problem resolution.

Specifically, what it means is that as integrations are run in the cloud, there should be a very consistent set of diagnostics, reporting, metrics, error handling, error tracking that is generated and that’s consistent across the many types of integrations being developed.

The most frustrating thing is when you are calling one company and they’re telling you to call the other company, and there isn’t any consistency or it’s hard to get to the bottom of the issue.

Questions to ask:

What kind of pre-packaged integration is provided directly by the application vendor? Who manages the updates?
What happens if I have issues with them? Who do I go to? How do you manage that? How do you guys work with each other?
Who maintains and updates the integrations?
Do I have a consistent experience when I configure, adapt, control or maintain those integrations?
Do you understand that integration crosses delivery models (mobile, cloud and on-premise)?
Are the integration flows designed along a business process? Do they have the transformation, routing, API calls and logging information built-in to provide end-to-end business process integrations.?
What are the application programming interfaces (API´s) that enable me to integrate to other solutions I have?
#4 Infrastructure as a Service
Your cloud offering must be build on a rock-solid infrastructure, and in addition be open enough to handle and support heterogeneous environments form multiple vendors.

Topics around scalability, availability and security come to mind right away. Many clients use the infrastructure to transform step-by-step their current landscape to the cloud. So they expect a world-class enterprise ready approach. So you not only you need an infrastructure to enable cloud solutions, but also to transfer the current applications into the paradigms of cloud computing – while innovating.

Questions to ask:

What tools are available to virtualize my current system landscape?
How can you help me to transfer my current on-premise solution to a private cloud environment? What managed services do you have to support this?
What platform is in play for private cloud? Does this platform differ from the public cloud portfolio?
Is your infrastructure able to handle global processes and available globally?
What is your data center strategy?
#5 Security (and this should be part of your IaaS strategy)
The number 1 concern we still find when discussing cloud: security. Due to current world events there is often too much of a focused on data security and privacy. Don´t get me wrong – it is important. Just check some of what we do as benchmark for your discussion here http://www.sapdatacenter.com But other topics are important as well. The top 3 for me are data location, portability and the business continuity of the vendor.

Questions to ask:

What are your efforts for data security? Physical, Network, Backup&Recovery, Compliance and Confidentiality&Integrity.
How is security handled in the design of the application and how do you “harden” your systems?
How do you handle IP if I build on your platform?
What is your data center strategy?
Can I decide where my data is kept? On-prem and cloud as well as location.
Can I talk to your security and risk officer to learn what we cloud do with our private cloud offering?
What are your certifications and can you show me your internal risk framework?
#6 Public cloud
This mean that resources are shared between organizations for maximum cost-efficiency. The cloud service provider owns and operates the infrastructure and offers access via Internet. So far, so good. But next to the security discussions above, sharing – or better said multi-tenancy – is a topic you should ask more about.

Is your vendor using multi-tenant with identical schemas? Outch. This approach – used by many vendors – offers the vendor substantial scalability. But it limits configuration options for each customer, forcing them to cope with limited business process support from the application.
Is the solution using multi-tenant with custom schemas? It offers a wide range of configuration options for each customer. But it limits the vendor’s ability to maintain one code base. It may also require the vendor to introduce customer-specific complexity into the code line, potentially impacting delivery cycles, performance and responsiveness.
Is your vendor enabling a unique hybrid approach? This is the case when the core of the approach is multi-tenant with identical database schemas for each customer; our customers are logically segmented at the database level, complete with their own database schema. You can export your own schema out of the database, import or export data, and configure or modify fields. With this approach, vendors can enable individual extensibility within the schemas with our Meta Data Framework (MDF) and XML objects maintained in the identical schemas.
Only then you can retain all the advantages of a highly scalable and secure multi-tenant model while still offering a highly configurable application. This is very important for agility and adaptability – especially for the eco-system. Of course a vendor should also be able to provide a distinct application instance per customer, offering better security through enforced memory segregation.

Questions to ask:

How do you handle multi-tenancy? Identical or custom schema or a hybrid approach?
How many innovation cycles do you have and how are they delivered and tested?
How do you handle integration in heterogeneous landscapes with your cloud solutions? Is your only option sending us to 3rd party partners or do you offer one hand to shake?
How do you manage user identity across my applications in connection to the cloud offering? Show me single-sign on and user rights administration.
Do you have a tool that can monitor my cloud solutions AND my on-premise solutions together?
#7 Private cloud
Private cloud offerings are important and a good way of transferring your current assets to the cloud. Not benefit in ripping-and-replacing your assets because a cloud only vendor tells you so.

There are areas where a cloud infrastructure operated solely for a single organization, whether managed internally or by a third-party and hosted internally or externally make sense.

Don’t only focus on virtualization and benefits in total cost of ownership on the IT level. Also ask for innovation and what a private cloud offering can bring to your business. But leverage this scenario when public cloud does not work for this purpose and you want to have very differentiating and dedicated solutions.

In reality we will see hybrid cloud scenarios more than pure plays. Hybrid cloud as the composition of more than one entity (private, public or even further also on premise) that remain unique entities but are bound together. Hybrid cloud combines the benefits of multiple deployment models. You need to be careful you not getting the bad of both worlds if your vendor does not understand how the right mix is established and how it will play together.

Questions to ask:

What can you do for me to get my existing solutions into the cloud, while innovating them?
Is your infrastructure capable to run mission critical cloud solutions?
How do you manage hybrid cloud landscapes and integration between cloud and cloud, cloud and on-premise and cloud and 3rd party?
The convergence of an “always on” culture and digital empowerment requires businesses to rethink the future and drive unprecedented transformation while executing at an accelerated pace. Today’s Cloud is not just about Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and it’s not just about IT. It’s about driving business innovation and agility, enabling new processes and insights that were previously impossible.

To get and stay ahead of the competition, you’ve got to be able to innovate and adapt your business processes quickly to capitalize on new trends and market shifts. You’ve got to enable people and organizations that share processes to share the underlying technology infrastructure that drives them so they can collaborate better. And most important, you’ve got to ensure that these processes – and the technologies running them – are tightly integrated across all functions so that business can be flawlessly executed anywhere, anytime from any device.

Cloud is an enabler of business change and acceleration, not more – but not less. It is about getting the VP of Marketing, Sales, Service, HR, Procurement, Controlling, and and and… around a single table with IT, and having a educated discussion about what helps the enterprise and the end users best.

What is Functional Two-Tier ERP?

The idea of standardizing on a single on-premise ERP instance globally has failed. As we’ve discussed two-tier ERP is the solution and it typically is deployed as a financial consolidation play. But with NetSuite SuiteCommerce, it is possible to have a functional two-tier ERP system as well.

Functional two-tier ERP is another powerful application of a two-tier ERP strategy; natively integrating Ecommerce with core operational systems (back-end ERP) to meet rising customer expectations for a consistent experience across all touch points, from smartphones to call centers and from tablets to point of sale consoles in virtually any country around the globe. Several NetSuite customers like Williams-Sonoma, CA Technologies, Magellan, Igloo and others have successfully used NetSuite SuiteCommerce to expose their inventory in storefronts in a variety of languages across a multitude of interfaces.

In short, it means running NetSuite for managing operational ecommerce and POS systems and Oracle or SAP ERP systems for global financial consolidation. But why do you need this functional two-tier? Why can’t you just extend your existing Oracle or SAP implementation to achieve the same results and build storefronts? Because, it is hard, it takes much longer time and it costs a lot more.

For example, Williams-Sonoma, a high-end American homeware empire with $4 billion in revenue, expanded into Australia with four of their brands opening stores in Sydney’s Bondi Junction: Williams-Sonoma, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Kids, and West Elm. With leases already signed and a short runway to the opening date, a combined ecommerce, point of sale (POS) and ERP system couldn’t be delivered using the Oracle systems Williams-Sonoma was running in the U.S. But using NetSuite’s SuiteCommerce, Wiliams-Sonoma developed what was needed for launch within the required timeframe: all four stores’ POS systems, and all four ecommerce websites in pixel-perfect form in about seven months— and all of it running off a single SuiteCommerce back end. It was easy to deploy NetSuite because of two fundamental reasons: the SuiteCommerce platform provided the necessary functionality and, according to Williams-Sonoma, the NetSuite engineers went the extra mile.

Similarly, CA Technologies leveraged the power of SuiteCommerce to develop two ecommerce sites for two product lines in record time on top of an antiquated (and thus unexpandable) SAP back office system, that was running inventory and other back-office operations. CA Technologies chose NetSuite instead of relying on SAP because SAP could not realize CA’s multi-pronged goals of rolling out a new recurring billing model and expanding business opportunities and rapid global expansion, while managing costs. SAP proved to be too expensive with CA Technologies’ focus on SMBs for their new commerce sites. CA Technologies also wanted to leverage channel partners to go-to-market rather than rely on direct sales and thus wanted to be able to educate them on the new sites quickly. The NetSuite SuiteCommerce platform proved to be the most suitable for the purpose given that it was built to enable rapid development and deployment of multi-channel commerce sites while leveraging the strength of the cloud. Explore more about NetSuite and our view on two-tier ERP strategy, and chime in with your questions and comments.

As always, l look forward to your comments and questions.

-Kishore Bhamidipati, Director Product Marketing, NetSuite

Is It Time To Float Your Business Up Into The Cloud?

This is the third posting in my cyber awareness series for small to medium-sized business owners. One of the biggest buzzwords being used right now is “the cloud.” So, what is the cloud?

There are many different definitions you can find, but for the small business owner it means essentially outsourcing your IT infrastructure (possibly including applications, servers, data storage, etc) remotely. Why would you move to the cloud? The most commonly cited reasons are focused upon the core business and cost savings, but in reality every company should consider carefully any move to the cloud to ensure it is the correct move for them.

For small to mid-size business owners migrating some or all of their systems to the cloud environments presents the usual IT issues, but the problems are compounded by having data stored and managed remotely, by external organizations and often in multiple locations. Among these issues are special considerations for privacy, interoperability, data and application portability, data integrity, business continuity, and security.

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In this posting I’m going to focus upon the security issues, technical challenges, and best practices associated with a move to the cloud. In a discussion with one of our cloud security gurus, Mike Johnsen, he highlighted some of the key issues that a business owner should be aware of and factor into the decision-making process:
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System Complexity. A public cloud computing environment is extremely complex compared with that of a traditional data center.

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Shared Multi-tenant Environment. Public cloud services offered by providers have a serious underlying complication—client organizations typically share components and resources with other consumers that are unknown to them.

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Internet-facing Services. Public cloud services are delivered over the Internet, exposing the administrative interfaces used to self-service and manage an account, as well as non-administrative interfaces used to access deployed services.

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Loss of Control. While security and privacy concerns in cloud computing services are similar to those of traditional non-cloud services, they are amplified by external control over organizational assets and the potential for mismanagement of those assets.

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Governance. With the wide availability of cloud computing services, lack of organizational controls over employees engaging such services arbitrarily can be a source of problems. While cloud computing simplifies platform acquisition, it doesn’t alleviate the need for governance; instead, it has the opposite effect, amplifying that need.

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Compliance. Achieving industry-specific security compliance becomes more complex due to the different paradigm the “Cloud” brings.

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Data Location. When information crosses geographic borders, the governing legal, privacy, and regulatory regimes can be ambiguous and raise a variety of concerns.

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Risk of Unintended Data Disclosure. A fundamental underlying vulnerability is the difficulty of collecting meaningful consent for the processing of data available on the cloud.

There are, however, some benefits of a cloud based environment from a security perspective. Some of these benefits would include:
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In general, security measures are cheaper when implemented on a larger scale. The cloud provider or third parties can generally offer managed security services which may be cheaper than maintaining an in-house security staff full time.

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Standardized Interfaces for managed security devices which creates a more open and readily available market for security services.

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Rapid and smart scaling of resources which facilitates the ability of the cloud provider to dynamically reallocate resources for filtering, traffic shaping, authentication, encryption, etc., to defensive measures (e.g., against DDoS attacks) has obvious advantages for resilience.

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Audit and evidence-gathering which can provide dedicated, pay-per-use forensic images of virtual machines which are accessible without taking infrastructure off-line, leading to less down-time for forensic analysis.

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More timely, effective, and efficient updates and defaults which can facilitate images and software used by customers to pre-harden and update with the latest patches and security settings according to fine-tuned processes.

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Benefits of resource concentration which provides the advantage of cheaper physical limitation and physical access control and the easier and cheaper application of many security-related processes.

So what can you do as a small business owner to accurately assess your need to move to a cloud environment and execute the move, if required? Here is a thorough, although probably not all inclusive list of some of the best practices a business owner should use when looking at a move to the cloud.
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Plan. Carefully plan the security and privacy aspects of cloud computing solutions before engaging them (e.g., SLA negotiations)

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Ascertain. Understand the cloud computing environment offered by the cloudprovider.

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Policy. Ensure that a client-side and provider-side cloud computing solution satisfies organizational security and privacy requirements.

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Continuity of Operations. If the cost of losing access to an application is severe, it is recommended that subscribers perform the work locally unless a provider is willing to agree to pay for pre-defined damages for specific types of service interruptions.

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Compliance. A subscriber should determine: (1) whether the capabilities for defining the necessary controls exist within a particular provider, (2) whether those controls are being implemented properly, and (3) ensure that the controls are documented.

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Administrator Staff. Subscribers should make sure that processes are in place to compartmentalize the job responsibilities of the provider’s administrators from the responsibilities of the subscriber’s administrators.

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Legal. Subscribers should investigate whether a provider can support ad hoc legal requests for: (1) e-Discovery, such as litigation freezes, and (2) preservation of data and meta-data.

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Operating Policies. Subscribers should ascertain the operating policies of providers for their: (1) willingness to be subjected to external audits and security certifications, (2) incident response and recovery procedures/practices, (3) internal investigation processes with respect to illegal or inappropriate usage of IT resources, and (4) policies for vetting of privileged uses such as the provider’s system and network administrators.

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Acceptable Use Policies. Subscribers should ensure that all subscriber personnel read and understand the provider’s acceptable use policy, and negotiate an agreement for resolution of agreed upon policy violations in advance with the provider.

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Licensing. Subscribers should ensure that both the provider and subscriber properly license any proprietary software installed into a cloud.

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Patch Management. Subscribers and providers should agree on a set of procedures a subscriber needs to perform to take an application offline (whether a software patch is going to be installed by the provider or subscriber), the testing that must be performed to ensure the application continues to perform as intended, and the procedures needed to bring the application back online. Plans for system maintenance should be expressed in the SLA.

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Subscriber-Side Vulnerabilities. Subscribers should minimize the potential for web browsers or other client devices to be attacked by employing best practices for web browser security and patching, and seek to minimize browser exposure to possibly malicious web sites.

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Data-at-Rest and Data-in-Transit Encryption.

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Physical. Subscribers should consider physical plant security practices and plans at provider sites as part of the overall risk considerations when selecting a provider.

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Authentication. Subscribers should consider the use of authentication tokens, which some providers offer, to mitigate the risk of account hijacking.

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Identity and Access Management. Subscribers should have visibility into to the following capabilities of a provider: (1) the authentication and access control mechanisms that the provider infrastructure supports, (2) the tools that are available for subscribers to provision authentication information, and (3) the tools to input and maintain authorizations for subscriber users without the intervention of the provider.

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Performance Requirements. Subscribers should benchmark current performance scores for an application, and then establish key performance score requirements before deploying that application to a provider’s site.

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Visibility. Subscribers should request that a provider allow visibility into the operating services that affect a specific subscriber’s data or operations on that data.

Although this list of best practices may seem daunting, the more of these best practices that the business owner can use, the less risky, and more secure their eventual cloud implementation may be.

Beyond TCO: The Real Value Of The Cloud

Ask ten people what the Cloud is and you’ll probably get ten different answers. The Cloud is fast becoming the defacto standard for deploying and managing technology. But there’s still a lot of confusion about what the Cloud actually is and what it can do for business. Here are the top five myths about the cloud…and the reality behind them:

Myth: The Cloud is all about IT and Total Cost of Ownership

Reality: The Cloud is about driving new levels of process efficiency, collaboration, and insight. Line-of-Business (LoB) executives are embracing Cloud to accelerate business transformation. In fact, IDC predicts that by 2016, line-of-business (LoB) executives will be involved in 80% of all new IT investments and will function as the lead decision makers in more than half of those investments.

And, while the Cloud certainly offers a cost advantage, the real benefit the Cloud brings to business comes in two flavors: innovation and agility. With easy configuration and advanced development platforms, the Cloud gives companies the agility they need to quickly adapt processes to capitalize on changing market dynamics and stay ahead of the competition. More importantly, businesses are tapping the Cloud to enable new processes, gain new insights, and unlock new value. According to IDC, “Over the next several years, the primary driver for cloud adoption will shift from economics to innovation as leading-edge companies invest in cloud services as the foundation for new competitive offerings.”

Myth: You’re either on premise or in the Cloud. You can’t be both.

Reality: The Cloud is no longer an either/or proposition. It’s not even an “and” proposition. It’s an “and better” one. The Cloud gives businesses both flexibility and choice. And with the right vendor, you can mix public cloud applications and services, private cloud managed services, and on-premise technology to meet your company’s specific needs. In fact, a Wakefield Research study found that more than two-thirds of CIOs have adopted hybrid Cloud models – i.e., extending their on-premise applications and infrastructures with the Cloud. In other words, you can get your cloud, your way and extend your existing infrastructure or apps to enable new processes, gain new insights, and unlock new value for your enterprise.

Myth: The Cloud isn’t a proven platform for business

Reality: The Cloud has transformed the very nature of business and engagement. Just as consumers use social tools and networks to shop, share and consume better, companies are leveraging cloud-based apps and business networks to collaborate more efficiently, connecting and interacting with ever-expanding communities of customers, suppliers and peers. Businesses of all sizes – from Fortune 10 to SMBs – are using the Cloud not only to accelerate process efficiency and productivity but to gain new insights, engage customers and partners in new ways, and, even, to unleash a new operating and business models that drive profitability and advantage in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace. In fact, Saugatuk projects that by 2016, 75 percent of new IT expenditures will be for cloud or hybrid systems.

Myth: The Cloud isn’t secure

Reality: Leading cloud applications are developed with the same security mindset as on-premise software and maintained with frequent updates to ensure that the latest security standards are always in place. Leading Cloud service providers ascribe to international security standards, such as SAS-70 Type II, ISO 27001, SSAE, PCI, and more. They also employ measures to prevent attacks from the Internet and attempted theft of customer data, including physical security.

Cloud solutions are in use by some of the most security-conscious organizations in the world – from government and military to R&D and financial institutions. And many companies have found that the Cloud can provide an even more secure and up-to-date application and transaction environment than they could maintain on their own. According to IDC, “a cloud-based solution can deliver consistent, universal security policies for users wherever they are located — inside the office, at home, or in a hotel room — at any time.”

Myth: The Cloud Can’t Adapt to My Business

Reality: The beauty of the Cloud lies in its scalability and flexibility. With easy configuration, public and private delivery options, and advanced development platforms, the Cloud gives companies the ability to innovate quickly and design and deploy new applications and business processes that meet their unique requirements even faster to capitalize on changing market dynamics and stay ahead of the competition.

Some companies view the Cloud as just another deployment option. But savvy organizations see it for what it really is: a requirement for success in today’s fast-moving world where agility and innovation determine winners and losers.

The Convergance of CRM with the Ecommerce Platform

The evolution of product development often follows an all-too-familiar pattern. Countless point solutions, developed to solve a single business challenge arise to meet market needs, only to wind up siloed and disconnected from one another. With time, some of those solutions gradually find their perfect match and become connected to achieve a more powerful, integrated solution.
As we look to the next evolution in technology, there is a clear case to be made that customer relationship management (CRM) systems will logically converge with the Ecommerce platform. It seems inherently obvious that a company would want to have a single system of record for customer information and interactions as well as the customer’s commerce transactions
In B2C ecommerce, the convergence of CRM and the ecommerce platform introduces a wealth of new possibilities to monitor and measure everything that happens online. Combining interaction and order data in a single repository will enable the ability to drive dynamic and personalized merchandising and offers online.

Traditional sales force automation (SFA) in B2B markets can also benefit from a commerce-aware customer system. Certainly a sales representative managing a portfolio of accounts does not have the bandwidth to consistently communicate with every customer and prospect. When CRM capabilities are added to B2B websites, sales reps have much greater visibility into products or services an individual may be investigating on the website, improving sales effectiveness.

Taking this a step further, the integration of CRM and Ecommerce provides a foundation for customer self-service. This self-service capability has traditionally been challenging to implement because the necessary information usually lives partly in the Ecommerce system and partly in the CRM system. An integrated system obviates the need to reconcile data across two applications while improving the customer experience and, likely, sales.

Another factor that is driving towards integrated CRM and Ecommerce is increasing awareness that the traditional linear transaction funnel is obsolete. In the old world of commerce, where transactions were driven through sales people, each interaction was focused and time consuming. In today’s digital, mobile and social world, customer interactions with a brand leading up to a sale are far too frequent, haphazard and variable to fit that old-school linear model. A CRM system needs to adapt to these micro-interactions. Without an integrated platform that interaction will likely never be captured.

Despite the undeniable value of capturing and analyzing as much customer information as possible, the traditionally separate worlds of ecommerce and CRM have made integration economically unviable. Most companies would agree that recording all customer actions on an Ecommerce site is useful, yet few are willing to make the investment to replicate that data into a separate CRM system.

What is more likely to happen is for Ecommerce platforms to start moving beyond being a purely transactional system toward a system that provides the foundation of the customer relationship. The only way to achieve this goal is to build CRM and Ecommerce directly on the same platform, creating a single data source.

CRM capabilities embedded in an Ecommerce platform are greater than the sum of the two separate products. While the technology challenges presented when integrating standalone CRM and Ecommerce can be daunting, finding a vendor that offers both capabilities natively integrated will multiply your returns.

Hr and The Cloud

Study after study shows strong correlations between employee engagement and key business metrics like profitability, innovation and growth. A recent Gallup report linked companies with engaged workforces to higher earnings per share (EPS). These companies have also recovered from the recession at a faster rate.

Still, many organizations are failing to connect with workers in a meaningful way. According to a national study by Dale Carnegie Training, nearly three-quarters of employees are not fully engaged.

Cloud computing can help bridge gaps in employee satisfaction. The following trends are leading the charge:

1. Liability protection
For resource-strapped start-ups and small businesses, the task of simply running an HR department is a challenge.

“Many business owners act as their own HR department because they either cannot afford to hire a full-time, qualified HR manager, or they believe they do not need that position,” explained Jenette L. Pokorny, VP of Marketing at EverNext. “Often a business owner will try to handle HR issues themselves or have an under-qualified person fill the position for less money.”

Without HR, business owners face potential liability. Something as seemingly innocuous as using the wrong form or having an incorrect statement in a handbook can open the door to thousands of dollars in fines.

Record-keeping is critical to HR.

“Most often there are a set of files somewhere in the building,” said Pokorny. “Are they secure? Are they accurately reflecting that employees history? Are they organized? Unfortunately, the answer to this question is most often no.”

Cloud-based HR platforms help organizations maintain comprehensive, reliable, and accessible records.

“This software allows a business owner to run their HR department independently, without the need to outsource their entire department to an outside company,” said Pokorny.

Cloud technology can help ease the stress on business owners as well as employees.

“Gone are the days that an employee has to nag their boss day in and day out to handle an HR matter or to simply update important information,” said Pokorny. “When a business runs the right way, employees become more relaxed, happier and, in turn, more productive in their work.”

2. Salary intelligence
Large organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars on compensation each year. Obviously, salaries are a huge factor in how competitive companies are in the talent market. If you underpay, recruitment and retention will suffer.

“Compensation adjustments upward of just one percent can cost a company millions, [while] a downward modification means likely attrition of valuable employees,” explained Tim Low, Vice President of Marketing at PayScale.com.

Despite how much is at stake, HR teams are often throwing darts in the dark when it comes to determining employee compensation.

“Many of these companies rely on old-style consulting firms to conduct expensive surveys that determine salary ranges,” said Low. “Conducted annually through interviews, the data from these surveys is very limited and becomes obsolete almost as soon as it’s collected in today’s volatile economy.”

Real-time salary intelligence can help HR teams stay competitive in the talent market.

“Business leaders can now take control of their own recruiting and hiring decisions by slicing up-to-the-minute compensation data themselves to meet the unique requirements of their business,” said Low.

3. Unified data
A simple benefit to cloud-based HR technology is that all employee data ends up in one central place.

“With cloud technology, all of your employee information is in one central, secure location available anytime and anywhere,” explained Jennifer Aubin, president & co-founder at OrganizeYourPeople. “It can save your designated HR person hours per week so that they can focus on the human aspect within your corporate environment.”

That empowers HR teams to focus on the employees they serve.

“Managers need to retain employee information securely and centrally, and ensure they are not spending their limited time on administrative busywork,” explained Aubin.

By embracing the cloud, HR teams will find themselves wasting less time wading through data, and more time helping build strong, dynamic teams.