Benefits from SaaS

These facts combined mean vast savings for the consumers. The lack of an initial license fee and hardware requirements can reduce the CAPEX significantly. It is also easier to plan the spending and adapt over time. The actual cost of ownership (TCO) depends on how much the applications are used at a particular time and not on future capacity. This flexibility and affordability of the model are especially vital for businesses in today’s economy.

As for the software vendors, the SaaS model offers equally valuable benefits. Initially lower, but recurring revenue streams are much more predictable and provide the ability to plan the budgets more effectively and precisely. Due to the centralized hosting, the software is also much easier to maintain and support. All upgrades are limited to one environment and have instant effect for all users. In addition, direct access to the application logs facilitates bug fixes. Finally, SaaS can help overcome sales difficulties in
a period when businesses reorganize and freeze their IT budgets, so they cannot afford the lack of flexibility and expenses of software based on EULA licensing models.

These advantages are clearly confirmed by good results of the market leaders and optimistic projections of its researchers. Contrary to mostly negative growth forecasts coming from all over the economy, the global SaaS market is expected to grow in 2009 by as much as 30% (Gartner) to 40% (IDC).

Billing and other challenges

The positive aspects of SaaS for software vendors are unquestionable. However, a number of topics need to be addressed before an application can be offered in this model.

The inevitable challenge faced by all Software as a Service providers is setting up the billing process. Whereas traditional IPR or EULA-based sales required simple license invoicing and handling of usually long-term maintenance contracts, the “pay-per-use” model and proper management of frequently recurring transactions impose a requirement for a rating and billing engine, as well as a set of procedures. This means additional analyses and investments need to be made in order to kick off the provision of SaaS.

The necessary infrastructure is offered by many vendors (e.g. Verax Systems with its OSS/BSS Billing). In order to achieve good results, software businesses are required to develop a profitable and competitive usage billing model. One of the first steps is defining the main billing units and UDRs (Usage Data Records) related with them or software license key limitations. The most commonly used aspects are:

Number of users and sessions per user
Number of concurrent sessions
Number of enabled modules / functionalities
Number of business artifacts generated by the application (e.g. reports, invoices etc.)
Number of objects created or stored in the application (e.g. articles, contacts etc.)
Number of emails sent

Obviously, the rating and billing must cater for the business value of the applications, service maintenance costs (like customer support and SLAs), as well as the hardware required to host it (e.g. CPU and storage capacity). The diversity of the parameters may be a difficulty alone. However, this is where another critical challenge occurs.

It is the scalability required to handle a varying number of customers and users. Obviously, a well-established business can make long-term customer base growth plans and set sales targets in order to adapt the infrastructure on time. However, the recent economic reality has made it increasingly difficult for companies to reach those targets. In addition, some of the services offered to customers have a very seasonal nature (e.g. consumer e-commerce usually booms in the Christmas season). This means businesses need to make upfront spending on hardware capacity which is likely to be redundant for extended periods of time. A related challenge is also the provisioning of the services, which also requires appropriate infrastructural solutions to be in place.

A conclusion from the above is that it is not easy for a specialized application provider to offer their software in the SaaS model on their own. Fortunately, the market is rich in solutions similar in the idea, but oriented on hardware infrastructure. It is usually referred to as Infrastructure (or Platform) as
a Service, and a combination of the services is commonly named Cloud Computing.

“Hardware as a Service”

The Infrastructure as a Service providers reduce most of the CAPEX required from software vendors in order to start offering SaaS. Their huge data centers cater for the flexibility allowing for instant multiplication of the hardware resources as the needs grow. The dynamic scalability and provisioning is achieved with the latest platform virtualization monitoring infrastructure (hypervisors), out of which the most commonly used are Cytrix Xen and VMWare (Information Week Analytics, Sept. 4, 2009). Costs are kept down to the minimum due to built-in load balancing mechanisms.

The dynamic growth of interest in SaaS had turned providing scalability, redundancy and provisioning for its purposes into a core business of many companies. Even though, as the concept is relatively new, the implementations and market offerings differ quite considerably. The most commonly listed three services – Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine and Microsoft’s Azure represent different philosophies, with hardly any platform restrictions and added services in the first case, very restrictive policies for a low price in the second, and single platform with value added services in the last example.

With specializations ranging from virtualized and scalable web hosting and disaster recovery through provision of SaaS and test environments for software vendors to leasing high-performance computing resources for research and industrial simulations, the leaders in the most common appliances include Amazon (EC2), Rackspace and GoGrid.

A majority of the providers impose a minimum service duration, although in most cases it is as low as monthly. The services are usually billed according to utility-based or availability models. The charges are commonly applied for the following parameters:

Hours of virtual machine availability (e.g. Amazon)
CPU cycles (e.g. Rackspace, Google)
RAM-hours (e.g. GoGrid)
Data transfer
Storage

Additional services, such as monitoring, load balancing, software license fees etc. are also offered and billed for as part of bundled plans or separately. Some providers offer pre-paid plans and monthly or annual subscriptions, although their practical aspect is a price discount or a fee for the “reservation” of
a machine (either virtual or physical) with additional per-use pricing on top of it.

One of the most frequently raised disadvantages of entrusting the hosting of applications to 3rd party companies is the aspect of data security and uptimes. This is addressed by most providers who offer suitable service level agreements (SLA) with uptime levels exceeding 99%. However, it is the small-print that matters. For example, Amazon’s SLA guarantee of 99.95% is calculated on an annual basis, which means a critical system may be down for a few hours within a week with no obligation from the provider. As another one, GoGrid’s 100% SLA level refers to availability as indicated by the operator’s proprietary monitoring tools.

Service separation model

In this model, the software vendor hosts its applications in a selected Data Center providing platform or infrastructure services. The software is offered and sold to end users directly by the application provider and the data center is not part of the process. The application provider is billed for the infrastructure usage. The application sends usage reports to the provider’s billing engine. The entire billing and invoicing process is also handled by the application provider.

The main advantage of this model for the application provider is that the scalability and provisioning is entirely taken care of by the data center. This means a significant cost reduction, as no hardware needs to be purchased and set up in order to provide the service. The sales is directly between the software vendor and the customers. Both the data center and the application provider offer their core business services only.

Despite offering undoubted advantages, this model is not without flaws from the software vendor’s perspective. The requirement of running dedicated sales & marketing departments has been enough of a struggle for many software engineering businesses. The billing and invoicing on top of that may be too much for some executives to handle in a short timeframe.

Revenue sharing model

This is why an alternative and less conservative model is proposed by Verax Systems. It is based on the assumption that it is easier for a large service provider (i.e. data center) with existing billing infrastructure and procedures in place to integrate additional application usage billing processes into it than setting up two separate engines.

The advantages of this model are clearly evident for both the data centers and the application providers. As the revenue is shared between the two parties, both of them have a common business goal, so there is an obvious synergy effect. Also the total cost of this model seems to be lower, so a more competitive and profitable offer can be directed to the customers.

Application providers without the need to handle billing, invoicing and collection processes can put more focus on what they do best. This should result in lower prices for the service, as well as in development of new features or applications. Many small and rather unheard of software companies can vastly benefit due to the service provider’s footprint and market recognition. It also means a safer business with less investments in expensive infrastructure and processes.

The data centers as service-as-a-whole providers gain an opportunity to increase their market share and recognition. First of all, they can expand their customer base by attracting more application providers due to a convenient business model. In a time of increasing competition among infrastructure providers, more of them aim to find market differentiators. This objective can be met by offering added value – clearly achieved by directly providing applications in the SaaS model. Value Added Services at a low expense combined with additional revenue from commission should provide a quick ROI and increase the company’s footprint.

Verax SaaS provisioning and billing infrastructure

Verax Systems positions itself as an infrastructure enabler for the provisioning and billing of SaaS applications supporting various business models, including the revenue sharing in particular. The Verax OSS/BSS Suite covers important areas of building SaaS infrastructure, including:

Defining new services (Product Catalogue)
Provisioning (Provisioning Service)
Customer self management (Self Care Portal)
Billing of both infrastructure and application usage (Billing)
Monitoring of the service infrastructure and measuring SLA compliance (NMS)

What is worth mentioning is that Verax Systems’ applications are not limited to the SaaS platform – all our products are oriented at carrier-grade services for IP-centered, convergent telecommunications.

Defining the services

In order to be able to efficiently handle the billing of any kind of services, they have to be precisely defined. What could be just a one-off exercise for a small business offering a limited number of rarely-changing services is usually not the case. Strong market competition enforces introducing new ways of attracting customers and thus, new services. This means that the configuration of new applications becomes a daily routine. The challenging economy is also a time when acquisitions or mergers become very common, resulting in an increase of the number and complexity of the product packages offered. In order to handle the product and service offerings in an efficient and error-free manner, a sophisticated product catalogue, capable of handing SaaS specifics is required.

The Verax Product Catalogue offers a flexible tool to define the SaaS services and means of their billing, such as:

Service name
Activation times
Eligibility criteria
Billing criteria: Platform usage, such as storage, CPU cycles, data transfers and others
Additional application criteria, resembling more a classic license, such as the number of users, sessions, modules enabled, etc.

The Product Catalogue offers an easy, intuitive interface for not only defining the technical details of the services, but also allowing to categorize them for easier browsing, create service bundles (with mandatory and optional products), provide descriptions and photos for the customers and define multi-currency pricing.

Provisioning the services

Provisioning of individual applications is likely the most complex process of a scalable and flexible SaaS infrastructure. In order to attract customers, the offering must be tailored to the needs to the maximum extent. The resulting wide range of pricing and licensing models needs to be reflected in the provisioning mechanism. An indication of the potential challenges is that the provisioning of various SaaS applications may include the following:

Instantiating a virtual machine from a template
Setting platform parameters such as storage, database and others
Setting DNS names
Managing HTTPS certificates
Configuring a default administrative account
Configuring the application license, e.g. three modules for five concurrent users
Activating the service and billing notification

Verax Systems has been working on a Provisioning Service solution to meet all the challenges faced by our current and potential customers.

Managing the services

A wide range of applications and a large number of users make for an excellent business aspect, as they directly affect the revenue gained. However, the management of customer service becomes more difficult and expensive as the customer-base grows. It is not just a question of instantiating the particular applications, but also responding to the customers’ changing needs.

The easiest way of reducing the customer service costs and making it more manageable is providing the customers with a front-end, where they can manage the parameters of their services on their own. It not only helps to improve and reduce the call center costs, but also increases customer trust and loyalty.

The Verax Self Care Portal allows this and much more, by providing enhanced possibilities of customer communication (e.g. broadcasting news, events, new products), improving the service with a service rating feature and accelerating the cash flow by presenting outstanding payment information to the customers.

SLA compliance

The provider’s liability and proposed Service Level Agreements are one of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to managed services. Security concerns are the main argument against using SaaS for 30% of decision makers surveyed by Forrester in 2009. This is why it is essential for any SaaS provider to deploy the right tools and procedures to maintain the required level of availability and data security, as well as to demonstrate them to their current and potential customers.

It is not just the hardware infrastructure that matters. In order to avoid dropping below the SLA-declared parameters by reacting to problems before they become critical, the SaaS providers need to have
a proper monitoring system in place.

Verax Systems’ Network Management System is a perfect match to those needs, both for the platform as well as the applications. The Verax NMS provides proven SLA compliance and features full FCAPS (fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security) functionality to help maintain the highest level of availability and provide tools for fault prevention. Due to support of rules-based business logic and pluggable architecture, it can be integrated with any existing platforms and applications.

Integration challenges

SaaS applications are usually built on top of existing infrastructures and services. This means that there may likely already be some systems in place. Be it existing client databases, some forms of billing systems or other environments, Verax Systems can integrate with them via:

SOA-ready architecture with pluggable services – e.g. it is possible to replace the integrated Verax OSS/BSS database and modules with a custom plug-in connecting to an existing database
Verax mediation, which can be used to relay the UDRs to and from the existing billing system.

Verax Systems has broad experience as an integrator of applications for telecommunications (including Tier-1 operators) and financial markets.

Growing with the needs

It seems obvious that building a proper SaaS infrastructure is an investment. While some businesses can afford to create it within a short period of time, others may need to prioritize and get going with only the most essential parts in place in the start-up period.

Verax Systems understands this and offers delivery of a perfectly-suited solution over time. The suggested and most common order would be to first deploy the provisioning service, followed by automating the billing process, and finally improving SLAs with the NMS and the customer service with the Self Care Portal at a later stage. However, we are open to any needs and ideas.

Summary

Building a SaaS platform is undoubtedly a complex and demanding task. However, setting up the necessary infrastructure around it in order to provision and bill particular applications is also a challenge. Verax Systems with its OSS/BSS Suite offers a perfect set of applications to address these challenges.

For more information please visit our website www.veraxsystems.com or contact us.

In recent years, southeast Asia and eastern Europe in Mexico, Brazil and global electronics field capacity expansion rapidly. Among them, China’s huge market, are on their powers to industry from manufacturing power forward. This will inevitably promote the communication technology and products to multilateral and multivariate. According to the ministry data, work believe 2008 China’s electronic information industry sales revenue growth of 6.3 trillion, more than 1.5 trillion. China has become the largest exporters of electronic products and integrated circuit and components of the market.

In the multilateral relations between China and Europe, the electronic information, increasing exchanges and cooperation. Over the years, Shanghai electronics Munich just can reflect this. Of course this with a big background: the aleutians has replaced the us as China’s biggest trading partners, China is the second largest trading partner.

Two important industrial area

Headquarters in Munich, Munich international expo group is one of the top 10 exhibition company in worldwide each year, nearly 40 exposition hosted, including the ELECTRONICA – international electronic components, components, electronic equipment, photoelectric technology exposition. This exposition began in 1964, is held once every two years, is the largest European and world with the widest influence of professional exposition of electronic components. In recent years, more and more Chinese manufacturers in this stage in favour of Europe to global special display their potential customers.

Shanghai electronics and Munich ELECTRONICA can become central electronic information industry the main channel, two-way communication has become the important industrial area of two advantages. Even in the most economic downturn in the first quarter of this year, 17-19 March 2009 Munich was successfully held in Shanghai, still raging 306 home electronics production equipment and electronic components, including business for overseas exhibitors 40%. The event attracted more from 24 countries 28000 spectators, 10% increase continuously, the historic highs, thus the exhibition of China’s influence and charm of the market.

Exhibition gathering originative popularity of high quality symposium and can exchange technology. German industry is most proud of automobile naturally become Munich Shanghai electronics conference is one of the main topic series, “international advanced automotive electronic technology 2009 conference” has become the top cover automobile electronics industry event; downstream Europe is the most about global saving energy and environmental protection area, so green energy has become another Shanghai electron Munich feature. “Power electronic technology application development forum attracted infineon, Ericsson and stmicroelectronics, mitsubishi, fairchild semiconductors and plug meters of active participation in the company, and other conference is brilliant period.

Taking power industry speed recovery

According to global 61 Insight IC semiconductor company (represents 70% of global sales of the survey, the worst is over the past year, from the second quarter, semiconductor IC products order started to increase, overall industry is expected in the second quarter sales growth in the first quarter of at least 5% of 2009, IC Insight in the year expected – 17%. Gartner predict more prudent: global semiconductor revenues in 2009 will reach $ year-on-year decline in 1980 and 22.4%. In the second quarter of 2010 will bounce. Gartner said, not out of the global semiconductor market, only Chinese markets rebounded signs.

Both V type or u-shaped through touch bottom has rebounded, stereotype, but because of severe decline before too, the way to recovery will be long. Industry thinks generally, to 2010 even 2011 to end the basic situation of the growth is back.

By 2010, March 16-18 in Shanghai new exhibition center of Shanghai electronics is held in Munich will become a link node, which is by its own characteristics and advantages of the decision: first, exhibition universal coverage electronic components manufacturing, packaging, application, the assembly and so on each link, and display a complete supply chain, comprehensive and professional get the perfect combination, Second, the comprehensive advantages galleries (semiconductor area) and characteristic of electronic assembly section (SMT/special area, the passive components/connector zone, wire processing equipment, etc.) set each section, Third, high quality, and the cause of the conference of the latest technology brainstorming and prospect of trend, Fourth, the international exhibition and brand effect, semiconductor buyers and professional audience population hit record highs, distribution areas. Fifth, to realize high yield research interactive exhibition, exhibition of four specifications produced cluster scale effect and linkage.

It is reported that the ministry of industry and information economy under the guidance of Shanghai, and informatization commission and Shanghai pudong new area of Shanghai people’s government sponsored by 2010, Munich will unite electronics exhibition in Shanghai, photoelectric laser in Munich, international semiconductor equipment and materials exhibition and conference (China) and China international SEMICON CPCA (electronic circuit exhibition display), composed by 2010 Shanghai international expo informationization.

Why physical security is insufficient for laptop

computers

Evaluating the various data security options to protect your PCs can be challenging. This

paper examines the options, discusses why passwords alone are not sufficient and makes

the case for strong data encryption.

Is your data at risk?: Why physical security is

insufficient for laptop computers

New frontiers in computer security

The meaning of computer security continues to evolve. Physical security used to be the

main concern. Through the 1980s, expensive mainframe computers were locked in special

climate-controlled rooms within secure buildings.

Security costs, when they were considered at all, constituted a very small percentage of the

overall system costs. Today, such systems are called “server systems”; and although they are

important in their own right, they make up a small percentage of all computer shipments each

year. According to market researcher Gartner, 2.3 million server systems shipped worldwide in the

third quarter of 2008, compared to 80.6 million PCs that shipped in the same period.

The widespread use of PCs creates much greater vulnerability compared to yesterday’s mainframe

computers. Although desktop PCs are arguably less secure than centralized servers, such systems

probably have physical security identical to that of a company’s other on-premises assets. The

least secure computers are those that are mobile.

According to the Gartner estimate for 2008, worldwide mobile PC growth is 25% versus 1.2%

for desktops. According to its forecast, 293 million PCs would be shipped in 2008.

Whether you prefer the term “mobile PC,” “laptop” or “notebook,” the vulnerable systems

are those taken off-premises. In spite of employee diligence, mobile PCs do get lost and stolen. Not

convinced? Take a look at www.privacyrights.org, a website listing breaches in data security that

involve personally identifiable information (PII).

More than half of the states in the United States require disclosure of such breaches. Don’t let

your company’s name get added to this list; good solutions are available.

Attacks on laptop data security

To a casual observer, a laptop computer seems secure. To use a computer system, users must type

credentials into a window. If users do not provide the correct username and password, they cannot

access the system. Like someone who misplaces the keys to a car, someone who forgets a computer

password is locked out. Without the proper credentials, access is blocked. Or is it?

Passwords alone do not protect data The login process prevents unauthorized users

from running software. But a password does not, by itself, make the data on hard drives secure. A

user without a correct username and password cannot use the services of the operating system

as installed and configured on that particular hard drive. However, a tech-savvy person without the

appropriate credentials can still attack a computer.

There are three possible attack strategies:

•• Alternative boot device

•• Alternative boot device + alternative boot

program

•• Moving a hard drive to an alternative computer

system

Attack #1: Alternative boot device

One type of attack involves using an alternative boot device instead of the hard drive. Every

computer system supports this option. Over many years and many versions, the Microsoft Windows

setup disks have been distributed on bootable CD-ROM or DVD discs. A simple way to access a

system’s data is to boot to a Windows setup disk and install a new copy of the operating system.

This approach makes available any data that resides on a hard drive.

Attack #2: Alternative boot device + alternative boot program

A second attack combines the first attack with special boot programs. For example, many IT

professionals use bootable CD-ROMs with software like BartPE (Bart’s Preinstalled Environment) as an aid in fixing systems with boot problems.

Aside from legitimate uses, unauthorized persons can use this type of tool to mount an attack.

In addition to accessing normal user data files, such tools allow access to operating system files that are not available when the operating system is running. Of particular interest is the SecurityAccounts Manager (SAM) database, an encrypted

file with password hashes. Although this is an encrypted file, techniques are widely available to decrypt the SAM and read password hashes. While different from plain-text passwords, a password hash is the result produced when a password is run through a security algorithm. By replacing a password hash for an existing account—maybe one with administrator privileges—a data thief can boot and run the original operating system and any installed software.

Guarding Against Attacks #1 and #2

Support for alternative boot devices enables operating system installation. After the OS has

been installed, the use of alternative boot devices can be disabled in the basic input/output system (BIOS). In the same way that you can lock

the front door of your house, you can lock out alternative boot devices with the proper BIOS settings. To keep those settings in place, you also

need to enable password protection on the BIOS itself. A third step, locking the computer’s case, prevents a reset of the BIOS and failure of the

above measures.

Attack #3: Moving a hard drive to an alternative computer system

An individual with physical access to a laptop computer can remove the laptop’s hard drive using a screwdriver. Once removed from the original

system, the laptop’s hard drive can be attached to another computer—one on which the individual has valid login credentials. When installed on another computer, the laptop hard drive is not the bootable system drive. Instead, the laptop hard drive appears as a secondary data drive (drive D,E, etc.). When attached to another system like this, the laptop’s data is just as readily accessible

as if an authorized user had logged on to the original laptop. At this point, all data is readable;

only encrypted data is hidden from view. What can an intruder use to enable this type of unauthorized access? There are several choices,

but the simplest is a hard disk enclosure kit. These kits are available from computer retailers. Hard disk enclosures have a very reasonable and legitimate purpose: to create a portable storage device. A hard disk enclosure allows any hard drive to be portable between computer systems. Such enclosures support both USB connections and 1394 (i.e., FireWire) connections. The cost is nominal—typically less than US (€15).

Therefore, this legitimate product can have illegitimate uses. A hard disk enclosure enables unauthorized users to read the data on a hard

drive taken from a lost or stolen laptop computer.

By using this tool, anyone who has physical access to a hard drive can gain full access to the data on that drive. Hard disk enclosure kits also include a screwdriver, which is often the only tool needed to remove a hard drive from a laptop computer.

Securing data requires encryption

True data security requires making data unreadable to persons who are not authorized to access the

data. And because file system permissions can be overridden using schemes like the ones described earlier, data encryption is the only truly secure way to hide sensitive data. To unauthorized users, encrypted data is meaningless. Only authorized

users with valid credentials can access the encryption keys needed to decrypt and use data.

This section reviews encryption support in Microsoft Windows, and the encryption support in three popular data encryption products from Sophos.

A look inside encrypted files

To understand the protection that data encryption provides, you must understand the difference

between data in an unencrypted state and an encrypted state. In both states, the data appears

in two forms: (1) numeric values and (2) character data. Software engineers commonly use both types

of displays when they need to understand the exact location of each bit and byte of data. In an unencrypted “plain-text” display, the text data

is clearly readable. Interestingly, even the most sophisticated word processing programs typically store text data in a very readable form. Of course, this helps software engineers when writing the

sophisticated programs. From a security standpoint, this practice also makes it easy for anyone—friend or foe—to read data on a hard drive.

It’s a different situation when the same file is saved on a hard drive that is fully encrypted.

By comparing an encrypted display with an unencrypted display, it becomes obvious that the

two are different. The encrypted data contains nothing that seems even vaguely understandable.

And that is the essence of encryption—to make some piece of data unintelligible and unusable to all except those who are authorized to use the data.

Data encryption in Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows supports some data encryption. Starting with Windows 2000, Microsoft made

available support for the Encrypting File System (EFS), a built-in mechanism for encrypting specific files or entire folders that reside on NTFS partitions. Note that FAT partitions are not supported, which means that files stored on USB memory sticks cannot be encrypted.

Encrypting File System (EFS)

When an individual file is encrypted using EFS, modifications made to that file may result in

the creation of unencrypted, or “plain-text,” copies. When a user opens an encrypted file using Microsoft Word, the file is decrypted by the operating system and copied to a temporary location. The plain-text file is used during the editing process, and the contents get encrypted

again only when the file is closed. This process can leave unencrypted remnants on disk, opening the possibility that sensitive information may be revealed.

The greater vulnerability of EFS comes from the fact that access is tied to a user’s logon account.

For example, a data thief could reset a user’s password on systems that are vulnerable to the attacks described earlier in this paper. A thief can impersonate a legitimate user, thereby gaining access to the EFS files for which the compromised

user ID has access rights. Paradoxically, the use of EFS in such situations has a negative effect on data security. A thief would probably examine

EFS-enabled files first, based on the assumption that encrypted files are likely to be the ones withsensitive data.

BitLocker full-drive encryption

A more secure alternative to EFS is full-drive encryption. Full-drive encryption protects against

both types of attacks described in this paper. When alternative boot media is used, the contents of the encrypted drive are gibberish. When an

encrypted hard drive is connected as a secondary drive (see Attack #3), the contents are still not readable.

A central benefit of full-drive encryption is that the choice of what data to encrypt and what to leave unprotected is taken away from the user.

All data on encrypted partitions is encrypted without exception. Microsoft’s full-drive encryption

solution is BitLocker. Sophos’s full-drive encryption solutions are SafeGuard Easy and its successor SafeGuard Enterprise. Let’s consider BitLocker. On Windows Vista, BitLocker can encrypt one disk partition: the one with the operating system (typically the C drive). Compared to EFS, BitLocker provides a more secure way to protect data. On a BitLocker-enabled system, data on the boot partition is unavailable unless a valid password is entered during system boot.

As we have described, Microsoft has built in some support for data encryption, starting with Windows 2000. When you need more than what comes with the operating system, we invite you to look at

Sophos’s line of data encryption products.

Conclusion

Is your data at risk? Unless your data is encrypted,

the answer is yes. Although you must secure all

computer systems, those that leave a company’s

physical security perimeter are the most

vulnerable. Such computers include laptops used

by sales professionals, or those that executives

take on visits to remote company sites. Without

encryption, your company’s data is at risk. Don’t

become the next lost laptop headline.

security solutions that do more

The complexity of dealing with enterprise security continues to grow, placing increasingly heavy

demands on the IT department. Vendors have attempted to meet the challenge with solutions

that strive to let the IT administrator do more with constrained resources and less time. But these

have turned out to be at best only partial solutions. This paper introduces the concept of the

managed appliance, highlighting how they serve a specific purpose (i.e. email or web security),

and how they free up time while providing improved security, visibility and peace of mind better

than any other type of security solution available today. It explains how managed appliances score

over conventional appliances in the fundamental principles of efficient security management:

reduced daily administration, an enhanced overall user experience, and proactive vendor support.

Managed appliances: security solutions that do more

Managed appliances:security solutions that do more

In today’s increasingly connected world, the challenges to maintaining business continuity

seem never-ending. Shifting operational priorities, complex and evolving networks, and mounting

internal and external security risks have led to an increasingly volatile environment. Nowhere is this

more evident than in the IT department where success is expected despite daunting project

scopes, tight timeframes, and perpetually strained resources – money, staff, and most significantly,

time.

So how are today’s IT administrators addressing the challenge of providing cost-effective, fullscope

security while ensuring that administrators have time for other, more strategic priorities? The answer is that they are increasingly choosing appliance-based security solutions on the assumption (based on vendor promises) that appliances are easier to set up and use than software.

Easily adaptable to any network infrastructure, and built on a maintenance-free operating system,

appliances are, indeed, a natural form-factor for security solutions. But do they actually fulfill the promise of effective security with less effort?

Do they enable better strategic management by providing better visibility and control? Or are they

simply software on a box, offering no realizable benefit beyond a hardened operating system? Are

they, in fact, simply a modern-day version of the emperor’s new clothes?

Appliances defined

According to Gartner, an appliance is “a computing entity that delivers predefined service(s) through

an application-specific interface, with no accessible operating software.”2

True appliances require a high level of integration between the hardware and software on a

dedicated device. An appliance is not simply pre-installed software imaged onto a generic or

re-branded server. It is a single package that is straightforward to acquire and deploy, minimizes

the degree of configuration required during installation, requires minimal IT support and

alleviates the need to manually patch, configure, and maintain the underlying operating system.

Just 7.91% of the overall IT budget in North

American and European enterprises will go

to security in 2007. 48% of respondents

also identified security initiatives as a major

theme for the IT organization.

Forrester Research, Jan 20071

Managed appliances: security solutions that do more

Conventional appliances: a promise broken

In response to the growing demand for simpler security solutions, vast numbers of appliances have

flooded the market. However, most are not fulfilling the promises of overall time and resource savings.

Further, not all devices marketed as appliances are actually appliances. They fall short of Gartner’s

definition offering neither the predefined service(s) through an application-specific interface nor the

vendor-maintained infrastructure – in many cases, the vendor simply pastes the software onto the

hardware. These appliance-like solutions in reality require substantial time to install, configure and

manage.

Those solutions which try to solve non-specific

problems or pull together non-integrated fragments

of solutions, frequently lack simplicity. As vendors

work to get product to market quickly, they invest

little thought in developing solutions that will

reduce administrator effort, bringing together

disparate functionality, delivering it on a single

server and calling it an appliance. The absence of

integrated design impacts the manageability of the

device and usability suffers dramatically.

However, the ultimate criticism of today’s

appliances is their failure to build confidence that

they are doing what they should. So although the

burden of installation might be reduced to some

degree, and although some appliances do offer

some flexibility if traffic, quarantining, or archiving

requirements change, this does not constitute a

promise fulfilled. Unless the administrator can also

have confidence in the appliance’s performance

and availability, it has not delivered its true

potential.

The managed appliance: the ideal solution

Into this field of incomplete solutions enters the managed appliance, bridging the entire spectrum

of IT concerns and delivering clear benefits in measurable time savings and peace of mind.

It adds value in critical areas such as system health monitoring, tracking of and assisting with

anomalous traffic behavior, and one of the most time-consuming administrative tasks – internal

help desk support.

The ‘managed’ part of a managed appliance becomes apparent when one looks at two

aspects of its design: how it reduces day-to-day administrative overhead and saves time, and how

it is supported by the vendor both proactively and reactively.

Day-to-day administration

Determining the time saved in any IT process

can be difficult to measure. Yet such assessment

becomes important when evaluating the added

value of a security solution. All aspects of an

appliance’s design contribute toward its overall

impact on administration and an experienced

security vendor’s insight into the latest network

security issues can translate into more effective

policy creation and deployment and better overall

user experience.

Streamlined installation

An appliance should be ready to perform within minutes of being taken out of the box, without the administrator having to read tomes of documentation. A well-designed managed appliance provides easy access to an array of

features that makes this possible. For example:

Configuration wizards can save a great deal of time and effort, minimizing data entry and

offering access to targeted help topics when relevant.

Automatic verification of network settings will ensure that the appliance is configured

correctly the first time.

Automatic detection of user authentication systems such as Active Directory® servers

help pre-configure the appliance for the local environment and reduce the amount of time

needed for installation and configuration.

Finally, many administrators want clear confirmation that the appliance is indeed in

regular, scheduled contact with the vendor’s security and software update services.

Instant policy set-up

Security policy optimization is a balance between efficiency and control. Achieving the right

balance should be the vendor’s challenge, not the administrator’s. Vendors with extensive expertise in

dealing with threats and who truly understand the challenges currently faced by IT departments will

offer the optimal combination of powerful default settings and easily accessible (but not excessive)

customization options, available through a wizard-based interface.

Task automation/elimination

There are myriad tasks and events that

administrators should never have to do manually:

download threat definition updates, back up

configuration data, archive logs, upgrade software,

synchronize with LDAP servers for authentication

and policy enforcement, and many more. Yet

most security solutions, including appliances,

fail to deliver even these most basic time-saving

functions. One of the key differentiators of

managed appliances is that they are designed

to reduce or eliminate as many of these tasks as

possible, without forcing compromises in other

areas, such as acceptable use policies, protection

of confidential business data and overall visibility

and control.

Easier access to information

Easy access to relevant, actionable information is the critical foundation to any appliance interface.

The administrator should only require a single graphic user interface (GUI) to manage all

functions of the appliance, and should never need command line access for any task. Frequently

accessed information – such as protection status, traffic patterns, throughput and system health –

should be visible from a central dashboard. When more detail is required, the administrator should

also be able to navigate the interface quickly using as few clicks as possible, regardless of the starting

point or desired destination.

By providing quick, intuitive access to information, through a point-and-click interface with drill-down

capabilities, and separate off-box archiving, a managed appliance makes it easy to carry out

in depth investigation.

Managed appliances do more than simply

cut down on administrative overhead – they

engender the sense of confidence that comes

from knowing that they are operating as

expected and will continue to do so.

Managed appliances: security solutions that do more

Better reporting and visibility

When done properly, a good reporting system helps paint a clear picture of network traffic and

enables better enforcement of security policies. A good reporting system also helps administrators

plan for the future, by watching and predicting the impact of traffic on the overall network, not just

the appliance. A managed appliance goes beyond the narrower scope of functionality addressed by

traditional appliances by providing visibility into how it is affecting or being affected by upstream

and downstream components.

Ongoing vendor support

A key area in which managed appliances score over other solutions, whether hardware- or

software-based, is in the redefinition of the role of the vendor as an extension of an organization’s IT

department. Managed appliances do more than simply cut down on administrative overhead – they

engender the sense of confidence that comes from knowing that they are operating as expected

and will continue to do so. This is achieved by the vendor committing to both local and remote monitoring, and offering high standards of proactive and reactive support – offering an

agreed service level that provides the clearest differentiation between a traditional appliance and

a managed appliance.

Local monitoring and alerting

In order to focus valuable time on other more

mission-critical activities, administrators should be

able to avoid interacting with non-strategic systems

such as security appliances unless a condition exists

that cannot be resolved automatically.

To achieve this goal, the role of the managed

appliance is clear:

Keep track of what’s going on – a comprehensive array of built-in sensors will monitor system

performance and availability and should cover traffic anomalies, security updates and hardware

performance (e.g. temperature or capacity), and more.

Try to fix the problem if one arises – e.g. initiate an FTP backup of logs or quarantine to make

space for new traffic.

Alert the administrator to take some action if necessary – e.g. investigate downstream mail

servers for queue delays, or isolate a spywareinfected client computer for cleanup.

Proactive support

Where managed appliances really stand apart from the crowd is in the domain of proactive support.

With alerts being sent to the vendor as well as the administrator, the vendor is able to confirm that

appliances are being updated on schedule and remotely monitor the health and performance of the

appliance.

In addition, the ability to initiate contact and offer high-quality technical support even before the

customer is aware there might be a problem, means that the vendor is able to prevent costly service

interruptions, stop important data from being lost and avert critical failures that might occur at a

later time if the condition were to go unnoticed. For example, if the FTP server that archives log and

configuration data becomes unavailable, the vendor can contact the administrator directly.

appliances: security solutions that do more

Similarly, if a condition occurs that can fatally interrupt system performance or availability (e.g.

failing hard drive or defective power supply), the normal operating environment can be

rapidly restored with the vendor dispatching a replacement part or unit as soon as possible.

Reactive support

As well as looking for proactive support, appliance

users will have many occasions where they look

to the vendor to react quickly to specific requests.

Changes to the network infrastructure, evolution of

policy, or training a new administrator unfamiliar

with the appliance, might lead the administrator

to want help and guidance from the vendor and it

is in the response to this type of request that the

vendor of a managed appliance again differs from

other appliance vendors.

Traditional support can come in different forms: built into the appliance and accessible via the

GUI, in an online knowledgebase on the vendor’s website, via email, or via live online or telephone

contact with support engineers. But for a managed appliance vendor, there is an additional layer of

reactive support that surpasses the speed and quality of support associated with traditional

appliances and represents the responsibility assumed by the vendor for ensuring appliance

uptime and availability.

This extra layer involves on-demand remote assistance, through which the vendor can log

onto the customer’s appliance and troubleshoot it remotely. Naturally, this service should be heavily

guarded by security, leaving the customer with ongoing control over the remote session and giving

them access to detailed logs of any modification made by the vendor.

Summary

The challenges faced by organizations in maintaining network security while protecting

business information and client confidentiality have become increasingly complex and timeconsuming.

Dealing with emerging security issues while trying to accomplish more strategic

initiatives is an increasingly fine balancing act for IT administrators. Organizations that seek reduced

administrative effort without compromising security or business practices now have a new

choice: managed appliance solutions. Retaining insight and control, avoiding costly down-time,

and ensuring efficient, effective and reliable security can only be achieved by working with

vendors that understand the challenges facing IT departments, and offer solutions that add real

value beyond security.

The Sophos solution

Sophos managed appliances for email and web

security provide the performance, reliability,

insight and support that IT administrators need,

freeing up time to focus on their business and not

on their infrastructure. Every Sophos appliance

is built on a robust, easy-to-install platform

that features a highly intuitive, easy-to-use

management console for quick access to relevant,

actionable information. They include timesaving

features such as automated installation

and configuration, automatic updates to threat

definitions and software every five minutes, an

advanced alerting system, remote heartbeat

monitoring and on-demand remote assistance. In

addition, all appliances come with 24/7 proactive

technical support.

This article was provided by Sophos and is published here with their full permission. Sophos provides full data protection services including: security software, encryption software, antivirus, and malware protection.

Going beyond a paradigm shift, mobile computing essentially shatters the distinction between office and home with the proliferation of mobile computing gadgets. 8-hour work shifts are replaced by the entire waking hours of employees working at home as they don’t need to be supervised within the traditional work hours. Soon every person on earth will have a laptop as an indispensable tool for making a living, whether employed or self-employed, in the office, at home or anywhere on the planet.

Overtaking the Desktop PC

Computer laptops and notebooks have been outselling desktop PCs in the US starting in 2005. Statistical data from the Gartner Group reveal that they enjoy an 18% annual growth rate in worldwide sales while desktops hovered in the 7% growth in the same period. At this rate, laptops will soon account for 50% of all consumer PCs sold to homes by 2011. This year, the Gartner group sees laptops eating 40% of all PC shipments around the planet.

Nearly half of the workforce in many organizations work at home or while on the road. Sales people don’t need office space as they are on the road most of the time visiting and selling to clients. Programmers and analysts, as well as executives can do what they do in the office.

There are virtual secretaries and clerks that do the same work remotely and transparently. About the only people who need office space are lab researchers, engineers and scientists who still work on centralized facilities unique to their work and can’t be accessed from their homes.

Popularity of Laptops

What’s causing this shift from desktop to laptops? It’s really a no-brainer when you consider that laptops have been increasingly approaching the computing power of desktop PCs. This is basically what’s needed in mobile computing that has redefined the way employees work. With a smaller footprint, its portability and decreasing prices factored in, laptops are sure to capture more market shares both in the office and in homes.

- Cost

Laptops used to be more expensive than desktops of the same power. Today, while both desktops and laptops prices have reached mass prices, differences in prices cover a mere 0 to 0 gaps, giving both a nearly level playing field.

- Power

Computing power differences have narrowed down for most models though high end desktop PCs still command a processing power edge, especially among power users in the animation and graphics industries. Data storage capacities between the two have likewise narrowed.

- Portability/Mobility

Given the nearly level playing field for power and price, the laptop’s portability and smaller footprint give it the edge that the market finds increasingly practical for mobile computing that is fast becoming the norm in their employment situation these days. GP

Going beyond a paradigm shift, mobile computing essentially shatters the distinction between office and home with the proliferation of mobile computing gadgets. 8-hour work shifts are replaced by the entire waking hours of employees working at home as they don’t need to be supervised within the traditional work hours. Soon every person on earth will have a laptop as an indispensable tool for making a living, whether employed or self-employed, in the office, at home or anywhere on the planet.

Overtaking the Desktop PC

Computer laptops and notebooks have been outselling desktop PCs in the US starting in 2005. Statistical data from the Gartner Group reveal that they enjoy an 18% annual growth rate in worldwide sales while desktops hovered in the 7% growth in the same period. At this rate, laptops will soon account for 50% of all consumer PCs sold to homes by 2011. This year, the Gartner group sees laptops eating 40% of all PC shipments around the planet.

Nearly half of the workforce in many organizations work at home or while on the road. Sales people don’t need office space as they are on the road most of the time visiting and selling to clients. Programmers and analysts, as well as executives can do what they do in the office.

There are virtual secretaries and clerks that do the same work remotely and transparently. About the only people who need office space are lab researchers, engineers and scientists who still work on centralized facilities unique to their work and can’t be accessed from their homes.

Popularity of Laptops

What’s causing this shift from desktop to laptops? It’s really a no-brainer when you consider that laptops have been increasingly approaching the computing power of desktop PCs. This is basically what’s needed in mobile computing that has redefined the way employees work. With a smaller footprint, its portability and decreasing prices factored in, laptops are sure to capture more market shares both in the office and in homes.

- Cost

Laptops used to be more expensive than desktops of the same power. Today, while both desktops and laptops prices have reached mass prices, differences in prices cover a mere 0 to 0 gaps, giving both a nearly level playing field.

- Power

Computing power differences have narrowed down for most models though high end desktop PCs still command a processing power edge, especially among power users in the animation and graphics industries. Data storage capacities between the two have likewise narrowed.

- Portability/Mobility

Given the nearly level playing field for power and price, the laptop’s portability and smaller footprint give it the edge that the market finds increasingly practical for mobile computing that is fast becoming the norm in their employment situation these days. GP

In 2000, the following prediction was made by IDC and reported by PR Newswire:

“According to the CRM Market Forecast and Analysis prepared by IDC, the world’s leading provider of information technology data and analysis, the total CRM market will reach .1 billion by 2004, representing an annual growth rate of 29.9%.”(1)

Hindsight is such an eye opener and although we have not completed 2009 data, it is highly unlikely that the customer relationship management (CRM) market will reach anywhere close to .1 billion dollars in 2009, much less 2004.  In a recent study available by Gartner Group it was concluded that “Most CRM initiatives fail to deliver the expected value because enterprises have not mastered this rapidly evolving business competency at a strategic level.” (2) CFO.com reported in 2003 that in 85% of all cases, CRM users could not show any quantifiable results and 12% of all CRM installations were complete failures (3) CRM is extremely challenging and to justify CRM’s multi-billion dollar price tag users of CRM will need to treat CRM as both a “discipline” and as a predictive tool.

CRM in the Beginning and “Middle Ages”

Customer Relationship Management is as old as business itself.  Legend has it that Herbert Marcus of Neiman Marcus once said, “There is never a good sale for Neiman-Marcus unless it’s a good buy for the customer.”  In order to understand the current shortcomings of CRM, we need to evaluate the strengths of previous incarnations of CRM systems.  One story from what some of us would consider the Middle Ages (the 1960’s), regarding CRM will show how history puts the capacities of CRM today to shame.  Consider this case analysis from the personal observations and experience of one of the authors:

The setting is a shoe department in a large successful retail store of upscale clothing.  There were no computers.  The store had no electronic databases.  Inventory was taken on paper.  The salespersons kept small notepads which had information on their best customers.  The notepads included rudimentary information including name, address, phone number and shoe size.

Every few weeks a new style of shoes would arrive.  The shipments of 36, 48 or 64 pairs of a style only included a few pairs per size/width in order to allow the shoe to stock as many styles as possible.  When the shoes came to the store, the shoe salespersons, who had state of the art customer relationship management systems in their little notepads, did the following:

They studied the product (often they were not told in advance what was ordered by management or when it would arrive) They looked over their list of customers in their little notebooks They decided which customers from their list might like this pair of shoes They pulled the size from the shelf (or even pulled it while the shoes were still in the carton from the factory or shipper and before the shoes were put into “inventory’) They called the customer and told them about the shoes and asked if they could personally deliver the shoes to their house They put a slip of paper with their own name on it in the place where the shoe would go into inventory that stated that the shoe was being “shown” to a customer They did not charge the shoes at this time to the customer They drove the shoes to the customer and left them there for a few days They called the customer and asked if the customer wanted the shoes and if she said no, they arranged to pick up the shoes the next day.  If the customer said, yes, they asked if the customer wanted to put the shoes on “lay-a-way,” pay cash, or charge the shoes to the company credit account (This was before the days of bank credit cards). Then, the shoe salespersons either booked the sale or put the shoes back into inventory

That was CRM in the 1960’s.  Now you can see one reason the CRM of today is greatly inferior to the CRM of the 1960’s.  The CRM of the 1960’s was all about direct service.  Today, it is more about management analysis.  Analysis does not sell anything, never did and never will.  Service sells.  Analysis can predict what will be sold, but in the 1960’s it was very rare to be able to do predictive analysis with customer data, especially individual customer data, since it was impossible to compile the data or run mathematical formulas on the data.

While this 1960’s CRM system was great in terms of service, it had severe shortcomings, especially from management’s perspective.  First, only the salesperson was deploying CRM.  Management had no idea what was going on at the customer interface level.  Second, management did not use the knowledge of the salespersons in figuring out what shoes to order, since in the 1960’s management did not ask the salespersons what kinds of shoes their customers wanted or in what quantity.  Third, the retail store level management, above the shoe department level of management, was totally clueless about the knowledge the sales people had and thus, they could never predict accurately what the sales figures would be for the shoe department in upcoming months for particular styles of shoes.

This led to substantial waste and when shoes could not be sold, even at half-off sales prices, they would be jobbed out at less than 10 cents on the dollar of their cost.  And, at the corporate level, above the retail store level, no information from a CRM system like this was of any use in determining how to allocate resources across stores.  All in all, while this CRM system was great for the shoe salesperson and their lucky customers, it was useless for management in making buying and financial decisions.  And since all of the information in this CRM system was in the heads of the salespersons and their little notepads, it was what we call “wetware,” that knowledge that exists only in people’s minds.  (Wetware is the grey matter between our ears).  No surprise, then, that when the salesperson left the company, the customers followed the salesperson to the next shoe store.

From Wetware to Software

One of the goals of the current versions of CRM is to change valuable customer related data from wetware to software and from software to corporate knowledge. This knowledge can only now exist in a written, stored, accessible and analyzable format that allows management and the sales teams to use it to understand more fully the past and current business environment and to shape and predict future business results.  CRM today is so much more than the tool that one buys off the shelf or the tool that one develops using expensive software consultants who integrate it into an enterprise wide data collection and analysis system.

CRM software when used properly helps create a playing field for good business practices.  In order for CRM to be an integrated part of a very successful business model it requires serious players, just like any other winning game played at the professional level. This human component needed to plan, design, tweak, deploy, organize and analyze CRM software and generate data requires a discipline.

CRM systems can never be just an “add-on.”  Management’s involvement in bringing a CRM software system to a company, or large non-profit, must start well before any “go/no go” decision is made to buy the software tool.  Management must understand what it takes to use technology to increase profits and change the business paradigm. Months before the decision to integrate a CRM system is made, management must agree on the exact results it wants the CRM system to produce.  Management must quantify these results.  Management must know exactly where it wants the company to expand sales. Management must know exactly what the company’s niche is or will be.  Management must carefully carve out the description of the most ideal customers, those customers worthy of tracking and analyzing through a CRM system.

Thus, a CRM system, in the planning stage, must be based on accurate answers to such key questions as:

Who can best benefit NOW from the special skills, services and products that the company has to offer? What is the best way to approach them?

Defining Your Customer – The Key Questions

Who are your ideal customers? Who are your ideal prospects? How big and numerous are these customers or prospects? How many offices do these customers or prospects have? What is the management team’s style? When were they last in the press? Do you get their company newsletter? Who are their customers and what products do they offer? What are their pain points? What are their business goals? Who is their ideal customer? What does their strategic plan (either written or still stuck in wetware) suggest they will buy from you in the foreseeable future?

Training – The Key Questions

What training and appreciation for CRM will be required by our sales persons and management in order to maximize the likelihood of a CRM system implementation contributing positively to the organization’s bottom line?  How will our sales persons, armed with this system, know how to approach a client or potential client and bring back the data we need find to put into the CRM system and at the same time do what it takes to close the sale?  How will the added duties of putting all potential clients and their data into our CRM system impact our employee’s workload and how can we prevent it from overwhelming them?  How will the need required by many CRM systems for all of our employees to log all sales and service be met? What about related scheduled appointments, impromptu meetings, input written comments on all appointments and the “status” of all clients and potential clients?  How will all of this new data entry work impact the “real job” of selling and servicing the client or prospect?  How do we get the “buy in” of all key users of the system?  How do we insure that the system rapidly dispenses information to all key users that is a 5x or 10x return on the time, energy and pain that a CRM system causes them to deploy in the name of “working for the system”.

How do we properly train employees to use and benefit from the CRM system and what is the right budget for this training? How will the CRM system we deploy compare with the system our competitors will be using in six months or a year?  How will our customers be impacted if we ask them for significant data for input into our CRM system? Will our customers or clients require training and does our company have either the market power or relationship capital to get our customers to comply with our requests rather than merely going to a competitor with less onerous “customer requirements?

CRM – Data Requirements

It is essential for an organization planning to use a CRM system, to determine exactly what data constitute the most important inputs into the CRM system.  The answers to this question will vary across industries, companies, customer sub-segments, and salespersons. The answers will also vary across products that have different sales cycles and require different sales approaches.

For example, one of the authors learned some time ago that the Lane Furniture Company in the 1960’s used a unique analytical system to predict future sales of furniture.  With its stable and growing market share, the Lane Company needed to predict the overall level of sales of furniture in the US market six months in advance.  Through “data mining” of data on many industries that it purchased and obtained from publicly available sources, the company’s statisticians (the data miners of their day) figured out that the strongest predictor of furniture sales six months in the future was the current month’s national, regional and local new car sales figures.  The relationship was a negative one.  That is, the lower the car sales were for the current month, the higher furniture sales would be in six months.  Armed with these data properly interpreted, Lane consistently make the right moves about what to stock in inventory, when to buy other companies with excess supply or capacity and when to advertise to a receptive market.  Lane used data that would comprise part of a comprehensive and well thought out CRM system, broadly defined, as a predictive tool that gave it an “insight advantage” over their competitors.  By Lane feeding this data analysis to employees and managers, their sales force had the intelligence to know when to hit the pedal pushing sales with advertising and sales force expansion and when to hit the brakes with their sales efforts.  This information was critical to a company like Lane, because it could not get customer level data that allowed it to predict which customers would be buying furniture in the next six months or allow it to predict, using customer level data, how much furniture would be bought in the aggregate in the coming six months.

Conversely, EMC, the data storage company, is able to get significant customer level data.  EMC gets the proposed IT budgets of some of its major customers three years in advance.  This allows EMC to know, or at least accurately predict, exactly what each of its major customers is planning for IT and storage requirements over the next three years.  This gives EMC a strong advantage over other data storage companies who are not able to get their hands on such intelligence from their customers.  And, while Wal-Mart does not ask for any data from its shoppers, it demands huge amounts of data from its “real customers,” the vendors who think they are selling to Wal-Mart, but who are actually buying a sales opportunity from Wal-Mart.  Both EMC and Wal-Mart have significant market power. Lane had great statisticians analyzing national sales data from every conceivable vantage point, well before other furniture companies were contemplating augmenting their sales force with national level sales predicting analysis.  CRM augments the sales force with predicting analysis.

CRM Today

CRM today is about tracking and analyzing explicit information about current customers and sales prospects. The software products require a hard cash investment and significant time, as shown above, which must be budgeted accurately over several years.  Unlike many other software products, CRM software needs to be deployed in a rigorous, disciplined, coordinated manner to achieve any promised potential. The collection of data and the storage of such CRM data are not beneficial unless the data collected are accurate and the right data, collected at a reasonable cost, analyzed diligently, reported in a clear and timely manner, and kept secret from the competition.  The value of the CRM generated data is like the value of any intelligence the CIA might get.  The data and their analysis are worthless unless one has the capability to develop and execute winning strategies based on the data analysis.

Thus, an organization must, at the outset of considering using a CRM system, decide whether the main goal of the CRM system is to guide future behavior of the employees of the organization to shape the future (increase sales, number of satisfied customers, number of new leads generated, reduced turnover of key sales personnel, etc.) or to predict future sales so that the company can position itself appropriately to meet the expected demand.  For a CRM system to provide both types of services (predicting the future and helping shape the future) to a company or large non-profit a huge undertaking must take place and one that understands that these two uses of CRM are separate.  Using CRM in both of these ways at once, (predicting and shaping the future of sales for the organization) may even require separate, but integrated planning teams to pull off this type of “daily double.”

CRM – At Midlife

Once a CRM system has been implemented and is being used with some success in an organization, there is no “cruising.”  Like in car racing, there are walls and opportunities to crash at every turn.  Once CRM has reached a midlife, which may be three years from conception and two years from the original implementation of a major CRM package, the entire CRM software and processes need to be reassessed.

Some companies at this stage have run utilities to clear fields of certain data within a CRM database and start over in the clean collection of such data because of misunderstandings and changes around the definition of a given field. Certainly user defined fields are the most susceptible to miscommunication and are important to check, but other fields can also be interrupted differently by different people. There is a tendency of data to become more and more corrupted and inaccurate as the process gets older and employees learn how to cut corners and cut the data input costs of the onerous system.  Without rigorous oversight over data input, a CRM system can easily go awry and lose its power either to predict the future or help a company use this strategic intelligence to shape the future.

CRM – Examples of the State of the Art

Hallmark used its CRM system to track credit card purchases by shoppers.  When a shopper purchased a product on March 15th of any given year using their credit card, this purchase was recorded. In the following year as March 15th approached a note was sent to the customer thanking that shopper for last year’s purchase. This note gave Hallmark an additional sales opportunity to offer similar products to that specific shopper using appropriate timing. Many people who shop at Hallmark have annual needs to purchase date sensitive gifts. This predictive model allowed Hallmark to predict these annual buying sprees as well as help push potential customers into the actual customer category.  This system of CRM shows a thorough understanding of both uses of high level CRM systems using easily available customer level data.

Another example of using customer level data includes a large insurance company that had a corporate rule preventing customers from changing agents. This rule was developed to avoid fostering a culture where there was competition among insurance agents within the same company over current clients.  This insurance company was extremely good at cross reference data. Then they had a need to review “failure to renew” rates when they noticed that their renew rate trend was way below industry norms. The company looked through its CRM data to find any relationship it could to understand more fully why customers were leaving their agents and buying insurance with another company.  The company found, to its great surprise, that the best predictor of whether a customer would renew or not was the age difference between the customer and the agent.  The wider the age difference, the more likely the customer would not renew the policy.

Armed with this knowledge, the insurance company then developed a number of new policies. These policies were sensitive to age discrimination laws and were designed to find the best ways for the company to match customers and agents of similar ages. This newly found knowledge also supported creating age specific marketing messages and marketing placement based on age specific niches.

CRM – Uses beyond Tracking and Promoting

Predictive Capability

For large companies, millions of records can be processed in the blink of the eye and sophisticated analytical formulas can be run in mere seconds. Storage and retrieval technology including data warehousing and OLAP routines are providing analysis on a daily basis to companies with offices or stores all over the world. Newer technologies are moving to instant or real time analysis.  Data access at remote locations and 24×7 time frames now yield insights at an ever accelerating rate.  Technology is now available so that years of data properly analyzed can yield patterns and trends that were not available to the human mind just a decade ago. Such patters are being used in the music industry to predict hits and are especially important when a sales period for a product can be merely months, if not weeks.  Fewer mistakes are being made in predicting sales forecasts by the state of the art firms because of CRM technology. This is the true potential of state of the art CRM systems — forecasting based on years of pattern and unknown, but predicted variables.

CRM as a Discipline

It is well known that the development of every hour of stand up training or education, properly done, takes 40 hours of development time.  And for e-learning systems properly created, (not talking heads or simple PowerPoint or word presentations that offer little over giving a student a book), it takes 125 hours of development time for each hour of an e-learning presentation.  This is the discipline that is behind state of the art training.

A similar level of discipline must lie behind each CRM application.  CRM is an easily corruptible, hard to maintain, focused approach to information gathering and analysis.  CRM can have opponents who will actively seek to destroy not only its value within a company, but its entire basis for validity.  It will cause dissention within every organization that tries to deploy it.  And, unless an organization is capable of mustering and sustaining the discipline to spend millions and wait for months or even years to see positive results, then high level CRM software may not be right at this time for your organization.

CRM’s Potential Impact on Users

When purchasing a CRM system beware of the “OBNU” phenomenon – “Owned But Not Used.”  There may be numerous elements of any CRM system that are irrelevant to your organization;  however, OBNU is a warning sign that you may be buying more horsepower than you will ever use.  A court recently upheld a ,000 license fee charge by PeopleSoft to a customer who never opened the software or installed it and informed PeopleSoft a day after the software arrived that it did not meet its needs.

Plans for CRM systems must be comprehensive.  They must chart the move of every person in the organization who will touch or will be touched by the data going in, the information coming out and the customer who is the ultimate beneficiary of such a system.  In fact, each CRM system must have the customer’s interests in mind.  It does not do any good to identify the customer who might buy the shoes as soon as they arrive at the store, if there is not a salesperson or delivery service able to get the shoes to the customer’s house the same day as the phone call comes from the salesperson.  Without a marriage of a customer service system to a customer relationship system, a company could easily have great insights and no ability to act on them with the speed required in our fast-paced world today.

Conclusion

There are success stories to CRM system implementation. CRM Software is but a tool and the implementation and use of a good tool is as important as good equipment in any professional endeavor. As with most endeavors, this particular tool requires a total immersion from management down through all the players on the team and a discipline that produces winning results.

(1) IDC PRNEWS Wire, (2000, October 3) Analysts Predict Demand for Integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions Will Continue, Market Will Reach .1 Billion by 2004 retrieved January 4, 2004 from http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m4PRN/2000_Oct_3/65697626/p1/article.jhtml

(2) Kirkby, J and Nelson, S (2003, March) Key Issues for Customer Relationship Management Strategy retrieved January 4, 2004 from http://www3.gartner.com/1_researchanalysis/rc/b1/b1_main.jsp

(3) Krass, P (2003, March) CRM: Once More, Without Reeling Customer relationship management has stumbled, but the next round of products may produce better results retrieved January 4, 2004 from http://www.cfo.com/article/1,5309,8948||BS||4,00.html?f=insidecfo

In 2000, the following prediction was made by IDC and reported by PR Newswire:

“According to the CRM Market Forecast and Analysis prepared by IDC, the world’s leading provider of information technology data and analysis, the total CRM market will reach .1 billion by 2004, representing an annual growth rate of 29.9%.”(1)

Hindsight is such an eye opener and although we have not completed 2009 data, it is highly unlikely that the customer relationship management (CRM) market will reach anywhere close to .1 billion dollars in 2009, much less 2004.  In a recent study available by Gartner Group it was concluded that “Most CRM initiatives fail to deliver the expected value because enterprises have not mastered this rapidly evolving business competency at a strategic level.” (2) CFO.com reported in 2003 that in 85% of all cases, CRM users could not show any quantifiable results and 12% of all CRM installations were complete failures (3) CRM is extremely challenging and to justify CRM’s multi-billion dollar price tag users of CRM will need to treat CRM as both a “discipline” and as a predictive tool.

CRM in the Beginning and “Middle Ages”

Customer Relationship Management is as old as business itself.  Legend has it that Herbert Marcus of Neiman Marcus once said, “There is never a good sale for Neiman-Marcus unless it’s a good buy for the customer.”  In order to understand the current shortcomings of CRM, we need to evaluate the strengths of previous incarnations of CRM systems.  One story from what some of us would consider the Middle Ages (the 1960’s), regarding CRM will show how history puts the capacities of CRM today to shame.  Consider this case analysis from the personal observations and experience of one of the authors:

The setting is a shoe department in a large successful retail store of upscale clothing.  There were no computers.  The store had no electronic databases.  Inventory was taken on paper.  The salespersons kept small notepads which had information on their best customers.  The notepads included rudimentary information including name, address, phone number and shoe size.

Every few weeks a new style of shoes would arrive.  The shipments of 36, 48 or 64 pairs of a style only included a few pairs per size/width in order to allow the shoe to stock as many styles as possible.  When the shoes came to the store, the shoe salespersons, who had state of the art customer relationship management systems in their little notepads, did the following:

They studied the product (often they were not told in advance what was ordered by management or when it would arrive) They looked over their list of customers in their little notebooks They decided which customers from their list might like this pair of shoes They pulled the size from the shelf (or even pulled it while the shoes were still in the carton from the factory or shipper and before the shoes were put into “inventory’) They called the customer and told them about the shoes and asked if they could personally deliver the shoes to their house They put a slip of paper with their own name on it in the place where the shoe would go into inventory that stated that the shoe was being “shown” to a customer They did not charge the shoes at this time to the customer They drove the shoes to the customer and left them there for a few days They called the customer and asked if the customer wanted the shoes and if she said no, they arranged to pick up the shoes the next day.  If the customer said, yes, they asked if the customer wanted to put the shoes on “lay-a-way,” pay cash, or charge the shoes to the company credit account (This was before the days of bank credit cards). Then, the shoe salespersons either booked the sale or put the shoes back into inventory

That was CRM in the 1960’s.  Now you can see one reason the CRM of today is greatly inferior to the CRM of the 1960’s.  The CRM of the 1960’s was all about direct service.  Today, it is more about management analysis.  Analysis does not sell anything, never did and never will.  Service sells.  Analysis can predict what will be sold, but in the 1960’s it was very rare to be able to do predictive analysis with customer data, especially individual customer data, since it was impossible to compile the data or run mathematical formulas on the data.

While this 1960’s CRM system was great in terms of service, it had severe shortcomings, especially from management’s perspective.  First, only the salesperson was deploying CRM.  Management had no idea what was going on at the customer interface level.  Second, management did not use the knowledge of the salespersons in figuring out what shoes to order, since in the 1960’s management did not ask the salespersons what kinds of shoes their customers wanted or in what quantity.  Third, the retail store level management, above the shoe department level of management, was totally clueless about the knowledge the sales people had and thus, they could never predict accurately what the sales figures would be for the shoe department in upcoming months for particular styles of shoes.

This led to substantial waste and when shoes could not be sold, even at half-off sales prices, they would be jobbed out at less than 10 cents on the dollar of their cost.  And, at the corporate level, above the retail store level, no information from a CRM system like this was of any use in determining how to allocate resources across stores.  All in all, while this CRM system was great for the shoe salesperson and their lucky customers, it was useless for management in making buying and financial decisions.  And since all of the information in this CRM system was in the heads of the salespersons and their little notepads, it was what we call “wetware,” that knowledge that exists only in people’s minds.  (Wetware is the grey matter between our ears).  No surprise, then, that when the salesperson left the company, the customers followed the salesperson to the next shoe store.

From Wetware to Software

One of the goals of the current versions of CRM is to change valuable customer related data from wetware to software and from software to corporate knowledge. This knowledge can only now exist in a written, stored, accessible and analyzable format that allows management and the sales teams to use it to understand more fully the past and current business environment and to shape and predict future business results.  CRM today is so much more than the tool that one buys off the shelf or the tool that one develops using expensive software consultants who integrate it into an enterprise wide data collection and analysis system.

CRM software when used properly helps create a playing field for good business practices.  In order for CRM to be an integrated part of a very successful business model it requires serious players, just like any other winning game played at the professional level. This human component needed to plan, design, tweak, deploy, organize and analyze CRM software and generate data requires a discipline.

CRM systems can never be just an “add-on.”  Management’s involvement in bringing a CRM software system to a company, or large non-profit, must start well before any “go/no go” decision is made to buy the software tool.  Management must understand what it takes to use technology to increase profits and change the business paradigm. Months before the decision to integrate a CRM system is made, management must agree on the exact results it wants the CRM system to produce.  Management must quantify these results.  Management must know exactly where it wants the company to expand sales. Management must know exactly what the company’s niche is or will be.  Management must carefully carve out the description of the most ideal customers, those customers worthy of tracking and analyzing through a CRM system.

Thus, a CRM system, in the planning stage, must be based on accurate answers to such key questions as:

Who can best benefit NOW from the special skills, services and products that the company has to offer? What is the best way to approach them?

Defining Your Customer – The Key Questions

Who are your ideal customers? Who are your ideal prospects? How big and numerous are these customers or prospects? How many offices do these customers or prospects have? What is the management team’s style? When were they last in the press? Do you get their company newsletter? Who are their customers and what products do they offer? What are their pain points? What are their business goals? Who is their ideal customer? What does their strategic plan (either written or still stuck in wetware) suggest they will buy from you in the foreseeable future?

Training – The Key Questions

What training and appreciation for CRM will be required by our sales persons and management in order to maximize the likelihood of a CRM system implementation contributing positively to the organization’s bottom line?  How will our sales persons, armed with this system, know how to approach a client or potential client and bring back the data we need find to put into the CRM system and at the same time do what it takes to close the sale?  How will the added duties of putting all potential clients and their data into our CRM system impact our employee’s workload and how can we prevent it from overwhelming them?  How will the need required by many CRM systems for all of our employees to log all sales and service be met? What about related scheduled appointments, impromptu meetings, input written comments on all appointments and the “status” of all clients and potential clients?  How will all of this new data entry work impact the “real job” of selling and servicing the client or prospect?  How do we get the “buy in” of all key users of the system?  How do we insure that the system rapidly dispenses information to all key users that is a 5x or 10x return on the time, energy and pain that a CRM system causes them to deploy in the name of “working for the system”.

How do we properly train employees to use and benefit from the CRM system and what is the right budget for this training? How will the CRM system we deploy compare with the system our competitors will be using in six months or a year?  How will our customers be impacted if we ask them for significant data for input into our CRM system? Will our customers or clients require training and does our company have either the market power or relationship capital to get our customers to comply with our requests rather than merely going to a competitor with less onerous “customer requirements?

CRM – Data Requirements

It is essential for an organization planning to use a CRM system, to determine exactly what data constitute the most important inputs into the CRM system.  The answers to this question will vary across industries, companies, customer sub-segments, and salespersons. The answers will also vary across products that have different sales cycles and require different sales approaches.

For example, one of the authors learned some time ago that the Lane Furniture Company in the 1960’s used a unique analytical system to predict future sales of furniture.  With its stable and growing market share, the Lane Company needed to predict the overall level of sales of furniture in the US market six months in advance.  Through “data mining” of data on many industries that it purchased and obtained from publicly available sources, the company’s statisticians (the data miners of their day) figured out that the strongest predictor of furniture sales six months in the future was the current month’s national, regional and local new car sales figures.  The relationship was a negative one.  That is, the lower the car sales were for the current month, the higher furniture sales would be in six months.  Armed with these data properly interpreted, Lane consistently make the right moves about what to stock in inventory, when to buy other companies with excess supply or capacity and when to advertise to a receptive market.  Lane used data that would comprise part of a comprehensive and well thought out CRM system, broadly defined, as a predictive tool that gave it an “insight advantage” over their competitors.  By Lane feeding this data analysis to employees and managers, their sales force had the intelligence to know when to hit the pedal pushing sales with advertising and sales force expansion and when to hit the brakes with their sales efforts.  This information was critical to a company like Lane, because it could not get customer level data that allowed it to predict which customers would be buying furniture in the next six months or allow it to predict, using customer level data, how much furniture would be bought in the aggregate in the coming six months.

Conversely, EMC, the data storage company, is able to get significant customer level data.  EMC gets the proposed IT budgets of some of its major customers three years in advance.  This allows EMC to know, or at least accurately predict, exactly what each of its major customers is planning for IT and storage requirements over the next three years.  This gives EMC a strong advantage over other data storage companies who are not able to get their hands on such intelligence from their customers.  And, while Wal-Mart does not ask for any data from its shoppers, it demands huge amounts of data from its “real customers,” the vendors who think they are selling to Wal-Mart, but who are actually buying a sales opportunity from Wal-Mart.  Both EMC and Wal-Mart have significant market power. Lane had great statisticians analyzing national sales data from every conceivable vantage point, well before other furniture companies were contemplating augmenting their sales force with national level sales predicting analysis.  CRM augments the sales force with predicting analysis.

CRM Today

CRM today is about tracking and analyzing explicit information about current customers and sales prospects. The software products require a hard cash investment and significant time, as shown above, which must be budgeted accurately over several years.  Unlike many other software products, CRM software needs to be deployed in a rigorous, disciplined, coordinated manner to achieve any promised potential. The collection of data and the storage of such CRM data are not beneficial unless the data collected are accurate and the right data, collected at a reasonable cost, analyzed diligently, reported in a clear and timely manner, and kept secret from the competition.  The value of the CRM generated data is like the value of any intelligence the CIA might get.  The data and their analysis are worthless unless one has the capability to develop and execute winning strategies based on the data analysis.

Thus, an organization must, at the outset of considering using a CRM system, decide whether the main goal of the CRM system is to guide future behavior of the employees of the organization to shape the future (increase sales, number of satisfied customers, number of new leads generated, reduced turnover of key sales personnel, etc.) or to predict future sales so that the company can position itself appropriately to meet the expected demand.  For a CRM system to provide both types of services (predicting the future and helping shape the future) to a company or large non-profit a huge undertaking must take place and one that understands that these two uses of CRM are separate.  Using CRM in both of these ways at once, (predicting and shaping the future of sales for the organization) may even require separate, but integrated planning teams to pull off this type of “daily double.”

CRM – At Midlife

Once a CRM system has been implemented and is being used with some success in an organization, there is no “cruising.”  Like in car racing, there are walls and opportunities to crash at every turn.  Once CRM has reached a midlife, which may be three years from conception and two years from the original implementation of a major CRM package, the entire CRM software and processes need to be reassessed.

Some companies at this stage have run utilities to clear fields of certain data within a CRM database and start over in the clean collection of such data because of misunderstandings and changes around the definition of a given field. Certainly user defined fields are the most susceptible to miscommunication and are important to check, but other fields can also be interrupted differently by different people. There is a tendency of data to become more and more corrupted and inaccurate as the process gets older and employees learn how to cut corners and cut the data input costs of the onerous system.  Without rigorous oversight over data input, a CRM system can easily go awry and lose its power either to predict the future or help a company use this strategic intelligence to shape the future.

CRM – Examples of the State of the Art

Hallmark used its CRM system to track credit card purchases by shoppers.  When a shopper purchased a product on March 15th of any given year using their credit card, this purchase was recorded. In the following year as March 15th approached a note was sent to the customer thanking that shopper for last year’s purchase. This note gave Hallmark an additional sales opportunity to offer similar products to that specific shopper using appropriate timing. Many people who shop at Hallmark have annual needs to purchase date sensitive gifts. This predictive model allowed Hallmark to predict these annual buying sprees as well as help push potential customers into the actual customer category.  This system of CRM shows a thorough understanding of both uses of high level CRM systems using easily available customer level data.

Another example of using customer level data includes a large insurance company that had a corporate rule preventing customers from changing agents. This rule was developed to avoid fostering a culture where there was competition among insurance agents within the same company over current clients.  This insurance company was extremely good at cross reference data. Then they had a need to review “failure to renew” rates when they noticed that their renew rate trend was way below industry norms. The company looked through its CRM data to find any relationship it could to understand more fully why customers were leaving their agents and buying insurance with another company.  The company found, to its great surprise, that the best predictor of whether a customer would renew or not was the age difference between the customer and the agent.  The wider the age difference, the more likely the customer would not renew the policy.

Armed with this knowledge, the insurance company then developed a number of new policies. These policies were sensitive to age discrimination laws and were designed to find the best ways for the company to match customers and agents of similar ages. This newly found knowledge also supported creating age specific marketing messages and marketing placement based on age specific niches.

CRM – Uses beyond Tracking and Promoting

Predictive Capability

For large companies, millions of records can be processed in the blink of the eye and sophisticated analytical formulas can be run in mere seconds. Storage and retrieval technology including data warehousing and OLAP routines are providing analysis on a daily basis to companies with offices or stores all over the world. Newer technologies are moving to instant or real time analysis.  Data access at remote locations and 24×7 time frames now yield insights at an ever accelerating rate.  Technology is now available so that years of data properly analyzed can yield patterns and trends that were not available to the human mind just a decade ago. Such patters are being used in the music industry to predict hits and are especially important when a sales period for a product can be merely months, if not weeks.  Fewer mistakes are being made in predicting sales forecasts by the state of the art firms because of CRM technology. This is the true potential of state of the art CRM systems — forecasting based on years of pattern and unknown, but predicted variables.

CRM as a Discipline

It is well known that the development of every hour of stand up training or education, properly done, takes 40 hours of development time.  And for e-learning systems properly created, (not talking heads or simple PowerPoint or word presentations that offer little over giving a student a book), it takes 125 hours of development time for each hour of an e-learning presentation.  This is the discipline that is behind state of the art training.

A similar level of discipline must lie behind each CRM application.  CRM is an easily corruptible, hard to maintain, focused approach to information gathering and analysis.  CRM can have opponents who will actively seek to destroy not only its value within a company, but its entire basis for validity.  It will cause dissention within every organization that tries to deploy it.  And, unless an organization is capable of mustering and sustaining the discipline to spend millions and wait for months or even years to see positive results, then high level CRM software may not be right at this time for your organization.

CRM’s Potential Impact on Users

When purchasing a CRM system beware of the “OBNU” phenomenon – “Owned But Not Used.”  There may be numerous elements of any CRM system that are irrelevant to your organization;  however, OBNU is a warning sign that you may be buying more horsepower than you will ever use.  A court recently upheld a ,000 license fee charge by PeopleSoft to a customer who never opened the software or installed it and informed PeopleSoft a day after the software arrived that it did not meet its needs.

Plans for CRM systems must be comprehensive.  They must chart the move of every person in the organization who will touch or will be touched by the data going in, the information coming out and the customer who is the ultimate beneficiary of such a system.  In fact, each CRM system must have the customer’s interests in mind.  It does not do any good to identify the customer who might buy the shoes as soon as they arrive at the store, if there is not a salesperson or delivery service able to get the shoes to the customer’s house the same day as the phone call comes from the salesperson.  Without a marriage of a customer service system to a customer relationship system, a company could easily have great insights and no ability to act on them with the speed required in our fast-paced world today.

Conclusion

There are success stories to CRM system implementation. CRM Software is but a tool and the implementation and use of a good tool is as important as good equipment in any professional endeavor. As with most endeavors, this particular tool requires a total immersion from management down through all the players on the team and a discipline that produces winning results.

(1) IDC PRNEWS Wire, (2000, October 3) Analysts Predict Demand for Integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions Will Continue, Market Will Reach .1 Billion by 2004 retrieved January 4, 2004 from http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m4PRN/2000_Oct_3/65697626/p1/article.jhtml

(2) Kirkby, J and Nelson, S (2003, March) Key Issues for Customer Relationship Management Strategy retrieved January 4, 2004 from http://www3.gartner.com/1_researchanalysis/rc/b1/b1_main.jsp

(3) Krass, P (2003, March) CRM: Once More, Without Reeling Customer relationship management has stumbled, but the next round of products may produce better results retrieved January 4, 2004 from http://www.cfo.com/article/1,5309,8948||BS||4,00.html?f=insidecfo

New times bring new realities, and thus, new business models and concepts. Business Intelligence, or BI, is one such concept. It’s a new year, a new decade, and in a previously shaky but hopefully on-the-mend economic climate, businesses and organizations in every industry are finding themselves more pressed to find a competitive edge within their markets in order to not only succeed, but simply survive. In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a GartnerGroup analyst) proposed this umbrella term to describe “concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.” The term was not popularized until almost ten years later. Its usage is now widespread, but still in its infancy as far as implementation.

Business or competitive intelligence projects can take many forms. Some of these projects might include the implementation of industry-specific analytic applications delivered via software with business intelligence capabilities. According to a paper entitled “Gartner Reveals Five Business Intelligence Predictions for 2009 and Beyond,” by 2012, business units will control at least 40% of their total budget for business intelligence. Other BI projects might include implementing events like summits and conferences, such as through services offered by the Marcus Evans group, to encourage the spread of information and the enforcement of data access for the entire organization.

Also referred to as competitive intelligence, BI is one model executives and managers can use to help them strategize after they have gathered information – in ways that are ethical and legal – from the external business environment (i.e., analyzing the competition) and converted that information into usable intelligence to help them raise their own competitive standards. It’s important to recognize, however, that competitive intelligence is about more than just analyzing competitors, it’s about channeling data-gathering efforts toward the end goal of making the organization more competitive relative to its environment.

The following are just a few critical factors needed for the successful implementation of a business intelligence system: a clear vision & planning, committed management support & sponsorship, business driven methodology & project management, data management & quality issues, performance considerations, mapping the solutions to user requirements, robust & extensible framework, brain-storming and information gathering. A business event such as those coordinated by corporate hospitality and production specialists at the Marcus Evans group is one such medium which can be highly conducive to the dispersion of such knowledge throughout the ranks of an organization.

First, companies must appoint “enterprise architects” to head up intelligence gathering and analytic efforts. Then, it’s up to decision-makers to form strategies based on this information, ultimately dispersing them through appropriate channels via business events and gatherings such as those offered by Marcus Evans. According to the same Gartner paper previously referenced, through 2012, more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets, simply because of lack of information, processes, and tools.

Market research institute Gartner’s research report pointed out on March 4th, 2010 touch screen phones sales will increase 96.8% than 2009, reaching 362.7 million. It expected in 2013, touch screen phones will account for a half of global mobile phones sales, reaching 58%, furthermore, the proportion of North America and Western Europe’s developed market is expected to pass 80%.

Touch screen phones is bullish, the report also indicated, in 2010, Asia Pacific market’s multi-finger cell phones sales will surpass 129.1 million, accounting for 35.6% of global market, and wins the largest scale. Furthermore, the touch screen technology’s permeability will create new high, Western Europe has the highest proportion, is 49%; followed by the North America of 46.65%, however, Asia Pacific market permeability only reaches 23.4%.

Even so, Gartner expressed, price is still the main reason that block the touch screen phones reaching real univesalness, especially emerging market regions.

According to the statistics, the yearly mobile phones sales of last year reduced 0.9% than 2008. However, smart mobile phones inversely increased 23.8% with sales of 172.4 million, accounting for about 14% of the whole mobile phones sales.

As a professional cellphone wholesale dropshipping company, cellphone-china.com is pleased to see the market as touch screen phone is one of the main products of its online store. Cellphone-china.com releases various styles of touch screen phone at a low price.