Solutions

Social and Business Networks are web-enabled communities that create value by promoting active user participation and member communication. This user interaction comes in a countless number of forms, including social interaction (collegefanz.com), user enrichment of and contribution of data (wikipedia.org) and user feedback and recommendations (amazon.com, tripadvisor.com).

Social and business networks create value for users through shared experiences, viewpoints and ideas. They create value for business owners through brand loyalty, direct customer feedback and often from the existence of the community itself.

Workstations bring together the capabilities smart user interfaces, enterprise integration, and enterprise widgets to improve workflow throughout your organization. Unlike traditional workstations, these tools offer real-time user interaction with ‘mashed-up’ data from across underlying applications and offer the ability to update and manage data from a central application.

Workstations that effectively combine RIA and Web 2.0 functionality allow firms to build effective, task-centric tools and offer improved identification, routing and investigation of process exceptions. Data from underlying systems and cross-regional collaboration tools embedded in these workstations promote opportunities to collapse communications to a single channel and reduce your firm’s reliance on email. This can dramatically reduce issues resolution by keeping co-workers focused. Workstations can also be made available to external clients and business partners to maximize cross-entity process efficiency and data sharing.

Advanced Dashboards bring together the capabilities of visualization tools, smart user interfaces and data aggregation across systems to give you better insight into how your business is performing. Real-time dashboards give you an up to date view and interaction capabilities with ‘mashed-up’ data from across core data sources and drill down into system details. They offer the ability manage you organization from a central application without having to navigate through separate systems and re-enter key values as you drill down.

Advanced Dashboard using best practice RIA and Web 2.0 functionality reduces time to recognize, isolate, and diagnose issues. Data analytics built on top of data source and using mashed data from additional systems helps to correlate data points and recognize dependencies and bottlenecks. Advanced dashboard can be turned into self service tools for business partners and external customers to give them better insight into improving their efficiency and increases data transparency. Tighter collaboration with business partners and customers can be key aspect of building a deeper working relationship.

Cloud Computing represents a titanic shift in enterprise infrastructure and application delivery allowing IT to reduce costs and better align cost structure to business demands via a subscription or usage based cost model for application infrastructure and software. Pioneers, such as Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3 services, allow companies to buy compute and storage capacity based on usage while SaaS vendor SalesForce.com is a pioneer in subscription based, hosted application delivery. These services provide additional benefits to enterprises: significant reduction in provisioning and setup time, ability to try and experiment without major outlays, and ability to use resources temporarily for resource intensive processes.

Several forces have combined to enable Cloud Computing to become the next big paradigm for enterprise IT. Virtualization technologies and improvements in infrastructure management tools have greatly improved data center efficiency. Internet company's mass computing infrastructure needs have led them to optimize data center locations to minimize energy costs and provide a clean separation of application development tasks from infrastructure and operations management functions. Fast, cheap bandwidth allows enterprises to access and integrate remote resources while delivering an effective user interface. Continued frustration with software licensing models has led more enterprises to utilize more open source software and SaaS applications to reduce costs and try using new software without substantial investment.

Self assembled applications have been taken to a new level by several Web 2.0 service providers. Directories of light-weight, mini-applications that offer the power of a customized user desktop which users can choose from, customize and reorganize are the latest innovation. Widget can be built quickly leveraging your SOA services. With enough intelligence, they can morph and change throughout the day to focus on the most relevant capabilities and information needed to perform a specific functions.

Unlike traditional Portal products, these platforms are built using lightweight integration and do not have the heavy dependency on the server side of Portals for the user interface. By making putting a new widget into a directory very easy and largely self service there is little governance overhead to launching new services. Using a distributed approach toward directory management makes it easier for enterprises to break down silos and use valuable functionality and information across business units they are entitled to access. This approach also breaks down barriers among development teams who may use different server side technologies and don't depend on using a Portal server.

Gated Business Communities are networks of pre-screened individuals or firms, actively permissioned into the network based on pre-agreed standards, who share information for a common good of all those in the network. Gated business communities are often anonymous networks that promote open sharing of information without disclosing proprietary positioning and may even include direct competitors within or across markets.

While they require a tightly controlled framework, Gated Business Communities open a world of new opportunity for sharing business critical thinking, data, analyses and proprietary services with a selected set of clients and business partners.