Business Systems and Infrastructure

In our experience working with a large number of customers in the Global 2000 and mid market, we have witnessed the adoption of plethora of technology platforms supporting various business processes inorganically. Large enterprises support software from major providers like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, EMC, Google, Salesforce.com among others, whereas medium size organizations are primarily on the Microsoft platforms in the collaboration, communications and office productivity space with ERP & CRM software from various preferred software vendors for the mid-market.
In simple terms, the need is not to implement a few new systems, but to make these systems work together and provide services beyond transactional support to the business users.

At Optimus BT, we have come to believe that the core platform that we need to help adopt to resolve these issues is the SharePoint platform - as the Orchestration, Business Intelligence and Workflow platform along with being the platform that addresses key functionality gaps in business systems with Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration and Social features that are absent in current transactional systems.

CRM and Marketing

When it comes to CRM and Marketing infrastructure we find much of the same conundrum when we work with customers.  CRM systems mostly act as databases and systems of record for customer data but hardly have all of the capabilities needed to drive the Customer Relationship and Marketing Processes within an organization.  For instance, email marketing, Content Management, Document Generation, eCommerce and Catalog Management features among so many other features are not part of current CRM systems as they have come to be.
We also notice the rapid adoption of the Internet as a major marketing and customer service platform for a large number of companies.  This trend is being driven by the Internet’s unique features of the ability to micro target customers, reach a large audience [local, national and international], track and measure end to end customer experience and most importantly the availability of cost effective marketing and infrastructure platforms freely available on the internet including the various social platforms, search platforms and of course the open source platforms.

We believe that it is very essential for organizations to adopt to technologies that not only help bring in the latest trends in marketing, but also enable the marketing and sales teams to easily transition and work in synchronization to reap the maximum benefits. we support various technology platforms for implementing Marketing and CRM infrastructure for an organizations including supporting Salesforce.com and MS CRM technologies along with Open Source platforms and Online SAAS services and their extensions.

The Rise and Adoption of Enterprise 2.0

The success of Social Platforms is changing the way we design and implement solutions for the enterprise.  There are several key trends that can be noticed some obvious and some not so obvious –

• Use of communities and peers by customers to provide self help around your products and services
• Use of Social Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Slideshare by marketing to increase word of mouth marketing and spark loyal fan groups for your products and services
• The desire to increase participation of employees to gather valuable operational input that can help drive productivity across all critical business processes within an organization from customer acquisition and service lifecycle processes, to product and supplier lifecycle processes and engineering/manufacturing processes
• The desire to package applications and platforms as a SAAS offering with continuous innovation and improvement being part of the value sell of these solutions

Also, there is a increase in the research on best practices and approaches by organizations to provide innovative solutions with better personalization features and “bubble up” of information in a contextual manner within the business applications. There are currently efforts made to provide an environment to the end users to allow for the capture and dissemination of informal and spontaneous information. In the same lines, the development of governance best practices and policies along with actionable statistics are also underway that can allow for the seamless integration “Enterprise 2.0” applications within enterprise workplace.

We believe that Enterprise 2.0 as a design philosophy and approach is here to stay. Concepts of Wikis, Content Management and other self service features will be subsumed into main stay applications, in contrast to the current trend of treating them as a different category of application or service. Also with the support of mash ups, widgets in Enterprise 2.0  platforms like SharePoint, applications built with Enterprise 2.0 platforms will start to resemble the paradigm of “built to order” versus the “shrink wrap” paradigm of the previous generation of applications.