Showing posts with label ecommerce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ecommerce. Show all posts

Friday, May 16, 2014

Modern Supply Chains — How Leading Companies are Engaging Customers in Entirely New Ways

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how innovations in supply chain management are enabling companies to improve on indirect materials procurement.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the recent 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas. We’re here the week of March 17 to explore the latest in collaborative commerce and to learn how innovative companies are tapping into the networked economy.

Gardner
We’ll see how these companies are improving their real-time business productivity and sales, along with building far-reaching relationships with new business partners and customers.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.

 Our next innovator case study focuses on the new face of customer engagement and procurement modernization. We’ll see how MSC Industrial Supply is improving how they define and relate to their customers in the manufacturing sector.

We will learn how MSC has been using the Ariba Network to bolster customer engagements, and to provide new and innovative solutions to their customers as well.

So join me now in welcoming our guest, Erik Gershwind, President and CEO of MSC Industrial Supply in Melville, New York. Welcome.

Erik Gershwind: Good morning, Dana. Thank you for having me today. Great to be with you.

Gardner: What procurement pressures are your customers facing? Why are they looking to change things? What's wrong with the status quo?

Gershwind: Most of our customers are North American manufacturers. One of the sea changes that we have seen occur, particular since the 2008-2009 global recession, is if you look back for the past two decades, there was a heavy focus by procurement, supply chain, and finance organizations on price, on cost.

Of course, that's still critically important, but since the 2008-2009 recession, businesses around the world, and certainly manufacturers in North America, now have a much greater awareness on the importance of cash flow and speed through the supply chain.

Bigger priority

That's probably the biggest thing that we’ve seen in the past few years. Our customers are telling us that speed of the supply chain, getting to market faster, so they can have more of their products into their customers’ hands faster, is becoming a much bigger priority.

Gardner: So to be swift, agile, and lean in the way you go to market requires that you look at your internal processes, and get lean there. Is that right?

Gershwind: Dana, that’s exactly right. Leaner supply chains turn into shorter lead times. Shorter lead times mean faster speed to market. And all of that requires really tight dependency from every single link in the supply chain.

Gershwind
What we’ve found is that everything that’s happening in our supply chain right now is driven by the end-user, what's happening with the customer, but that customer’s needs are working their way back very quickly.

And collaboration, which is enabled by technology, is making it critically important in order to be effective in leaning things out.

Gardner: I certainly want to learn more about how you’re modernizing procurement and bringing benefits, but first, tell us a little bit about MSC, for those of our listeners and readers who are not familiar with you.

Gershwind: MSC is a distributor of industrial supplies. We sell over a million items, primarily into manufacturing or any maintenance environment. That could be anything from a safety glove, to an abrasive, to the most advanced metal cutting tools that are used in the manufacturing process.

We exist so that we can help businesses focus on their business. We do that by ensuring that supply chains run smoothly. Our small part in that bigger mission is around taking the complexity, the obstacles, and the inefficiencies out of maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) materials.

We were founded over 70 years ago in a tiny storefront on the lower East Side of Manhattan, and everybody at MSC, including myself, has been part of what's been an amazing growth story.

We focus on anything that's an indirect part of a production process. So not the raw materials, not the direct stuff, but all of the other things that keep plants running. That’s what we specialize in.

Hot topic

Gardner: Another thing that’s going on, in addition to business pressure to be lean and agile, are some technology improvements over the past several years. One of those is a topic of the day, a hot topic, big data and the analytics that you can derive from more and more types of content and gain more and more insight.

How do you get information or acquire insights or analysis that can allow you to then bring better approaches to your customers in helping them be lean and efficient?

Gershwind: Historically, when I look at the core assets of MSC as a distributor, there were three things I would highlight: our people, first and foremost; our inventory; and our distribution centers, our physical assets.

What we’re quickly realizing is that there's a fourth one that’s every bit as important as the other three assets. That's information. You’re absolutely right. With every transaction that occurs, especially because of technology now, there's learning in there.

To answer your question, we’re using technology to help us harvest that data, use it to drive improvements within our own four walls, but more importantly, with our customers and with our suppliers.
There were three things I would highlight: our people, first and foremost; our inventory; and our distribution centers, our physical assets.

I’ll give you two examples of how we’re employing technology. One is Ariba. Ariba is the perfect platform for connecting buyers and sellers. It's a network, but it's a network that leaves footprints. With every transaction, there’s a footprint left behind that’s waiting to be mined for operational improvements.

Another example is our vending initiative. We at MSC will take a little piece of ourselves and put a vending machine on the plant floor of our customers to store tools and let them take responsibility for procurement. Certainly, one advantage is security and inventory optimization, but there is information to be mined in each one of those machines, and we’re using that to help our customers.

Gardner: Tell me about your history of working with Ariba. How long have you been doing it, and what are some of the chief benefits that you see in using Ariba's Network and various cloud-based services to conduct your own procurement and tighten up your own processes?

Gershwind: MSC has been a seller on the Ariba Network for well over a decade. If you’ll bear with me, I’ll share a quick story, a trip down memory lane. One of our very first Ariba interactions was close to 15 years ago. One of our customers at the time, a big manufacturer, asked us if we could get up and running on the Ariba Network in less than a month's time.

The three partners together -- the customer, MSC, and Ariba -- rolled up our sleeves. We had teams working on the same side of the table for a month straight. It was a great example of collaboration.

First transaction

And I still remember us huddled around the computer screen, waiting for that first transaction to go through. I’m proud to say that that customer relationship is one of the best we have still today.

In terms of the benefits that we as a seller see, there are three things I would point to.

Number one is certainly enhanced revenue growth. Number two is cost savings, because transactions are now done electronically. But I would call out the third one as the most important. Ariba is helping us collaborate. It’s bringing business networking to happen faster, more efficiently, and more frequently. And those collaborations are resulting in innovations to our supply chains collectively and are driving improvements.

Gardner: Erik, I’d like to return to this notion of the vending machines that, as you said, was an extension of your business into the actual physical plant of your customers. This reminds me of what happens in technology on the Internet. For big bundles of objects and data, rather than going from the server of the originator down to the individual user, we have what we call content delivery networks (CDNs), where we put those objects out as far toward the last mile as possible.

It seems to me that this is an interesting development for physical goods, and you also, of course, get the data back on how they are used. Explain to me your rationale and how far you’ve taken this into the market, this concept of the extension of your physical distribution capabilities into the very physical plant of your customers.
By bringing inventory closer to where work is getting done, this company is saving time and they are translating that time savings into real dollar savings.

Gershwind: Vending and the idea of extending ourselves into our customers’ supply chains is a critical element of fulfilling our mission of helping supply chains run more effectively.

I’ll share a quick example with you. This is a customer that uses vending machines for us. This customer has about 150 vending machines installed as part of an MSC system across 75 locations in North America, and that system is yielding tremendous benefits for them.

Recently their MRO category manager was in New York and shared with me that at one site in Alabama, one of this company’s locations, their people were doing a mile-long walk there and back just to get to a centralized storeroom and get a supply replacement or part of a tool.

Think about that for a second, a mile walk. If somebody is doing that just once a day, and by the way, many are doing it multiple times a day, they’re walking a marathon by the end of the month. So by bringing inventory closer to where work is getting done, this company is saving time and they are translating that time savings into real dollar savings.

Gardner: I suppose there is also a common thread here with mobility, where people can use their mobile devices or smartphones to conduct businesses, activities, and processes and allow for check-offs, okays, and so forth, reducing that last mile and compressing the distance.

It also reminds me of being able to, in a sense, cross organizational boundaries. They become fuzzy. Your organization is inside another, for example.

Let's take this to a theoretical level. As we look three, four, or five years down the road, is the nature of buyer and seller changing? Are we really combining them into a common supply-chain ecosystem, where there isn’t necessarily an adversarial relationship, but something different, more collaborative?

Collaboration

Gershwind: Dana, you just hit the keyword. It's collaboration. The way we look at it, we’re all part of one supply chain. There's no such thing anymore as "my" supply chain and "your" supply chain. It’s one supply chain, and we are all interdependent parts of the one bigger supply chain. The reality is that we can't be effective without each other, and that's how business is going to be run. The beauty of Ariba, more and more, is that it's making that collaboration happen faster, more efficiently, and more effectively.

Gardner: Now, what about the data, returning to that subject. It’s okay with you to share data with Ariba and Ariba to share data with you. Then, we extrapolate that across industries, verticals, and go global. The amount of information we’re gathering, even anonymized and private, gives us great insights. We can start to be more predictive. That is to say, you know your supply chain, what your customers will demand maybe quite a bit before, or we can identify risks when things go amiss, sooner rather than later.

So do you have any thoughts about the future of analysis and intelligence when we apply it to the supply chain equation?
The biggest change and trend is the idea that information is now being used beyond our own four walls.

Gershwind: It goes back to the idea that, as a distributor, we used to think of ourselves as being in the hard goods business, and of course, we still are, and always will be, but we’re also in the information business.

 At MSC, we always did a fairly decent job of mining our own data for supply chain improvements, forecasting, and understanding what to purchase.

What’s now happening, and it all starts because of our customers’ needs, that’s working its way back through the supply chain, is data and information is now being used to help our customers, and even our suppliers run their businesses better.

So the vending example I gave you is a great one. As I said, each one of those electronic transactions is a footprint. It’s the same thing with our website. E-commerce now represents nearly 50 percent of MSC’s revenues. Every single one of those transactions leaves behind little breadcrumbs that give us insights that we can then use and share with our customers and further back in the supply chain with our suppliers.

Gardner: It seems to me, Erik, that it requires a third party like the Ariba Network to aggregate and bring intelligence to bear on this massive data. I know that they’re leveraging the HANA platform from SAP more and more to do that sort of big-data analysis and intelligence gathering.

How important is it for you to look at that third party and see them in a trusted fashion? Could you do this alone, and are there many other organizations that can fill the role like Ariba Network is?

Bringing business together

Gershwind: I don't think anybody can do it alone anymore. That's really the nature of the supply chain that we just talked about. What Ariba does is bring businesses together.

Think of it as a virtual networking forum. It used to be that, in the old days, you were able to network when you got together maybe once a quarter. Ariba is letting that happen in real time, all the time.

Are there others doing it? Maybe, but none that we trust more than Ariba. As I said, we’ve been doing it for well over a decade with them and we view them as an extension of ourselves into our customers.

Gardner: We’re about out of time, but let’s look to the future. Do you have any ideas about what you’d like to see from your unique position in the supply chain business, in manufacturing, and in indirect goods? What would you like to see for the next revolution?
What we do know is that today, sitting in North American businesses, is $145 billion of MRO inventory alone, let alone broader indirect materials.

Gershwind: The one thing I would point to that we haven't talked about is the opportunity that’s sitting right in front of procurement and supply chain, when it comes to indirect materials. For the last decade or so, procurement has done a wonderful job cleaning up direct materials, getting clear line of sight, optimizing the supply chain, and taking cost out.

Earlier this morning, in the general session, I referred to direct materials as the garage of the house, because everybody goes in, it’s a high profile spot, everybody is in it, it’s core to your operations, and it’s gotten a lot of attention.

Indirect materials is like the attic of your house. If it's anything like my attic, it’s neglected, the light bulb hasn't been replaced. So it’s dark and you can't see what's going on.

What we do know is that today, sitting in North American businesses, is $145 billion of MRO inventory alone, let alone broader indirect materials. We also know that 70 percent of that is likely never to be used.

So sitting in front of procurement is a $100 billion opportunity. It's not just the job of procurement, but all of us as a supply chain. It's sitting there waiting for us.

Gardner: What do you mean? How do we attack this problem, clean up the attic, as it were? Do we need to have better inventory? Do we have just-in-time supply chain, ordering and fulfillment? What is it that we need to bring to indirect that’s missing?

Three things

Gershwind: There are three things that we want to bring to indirect procurement and get at the attic. Number one is looking for time. The natural bias is to focus on cost, but what we’ve come to learn with our customers who are doing it well is that, if you focus on time savings, the cost savings does follow. That's number one.

Number two, we need light. We need light up there and we need to bring a flashlight with us. That flashlight is technology -- technology like Ariba. Use technology as the flashlight.

And the third thing, and we’ve been hitting on it all morning here, is collaboration. Get another set of eyes. It's hard to see things by yourself. You can't be successful on your own. So bring partners in and help you attack that $100 billion.

Gardner: So we are really talking about modernizing indirect procurement in ways that we have already established. We know these things work and we just have to establish the will and then bring it into that part of the business.
You can't be successful on your own. So bring partners in and help you attack that $100 billion.

Gershwind: That’s it. It’s about taking what we have already done in the garage and applying it to the attic. That’s right.

Gardner: Well, very good, I am afraid we’ll have to leave it there. We’ve been talking about how MSC Industrial Supply is improving how they define and relate to their customers by bringing new innovations to the indirect procurement process. And by examining this user’s experiences, we’re learning how MSC has leveraged the Ariba Network to bolster their customer engagements with new insights, technology, and innovation.

So a big thanks to our guest, Erik Gershwind, President and CEO of MSC Industrial Supply. Thank you, Erik.

Gershwind: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the 2014 Ariba LIVE Conference in Las Vegas.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of Ariba-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba, an SAP company.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how innovations in supply chain management are enabling companies to improve on indirect materials procurement. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2014. All rights reserved.

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Friday, November 16, 2012

Market Confidence in Cloud Soars, Especially Among Providers, Says North Bridge Survey

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the state of cloud computing and its future outlook based on a recent survey of buyers and sellers.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Access the survey.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Dana Gardner
Today, we present a special podcast discussion that draws on a new survey about cloud computing and explores the business growth opportunities for buyers and consumers of cloud services alike.

First we'll hear the results of this multi-year annual survey on the cloud market and then explore some of the implications for where the growth opportunities are and where the inhibitors for the growth may be.

Here to share his insights into where the cloud business has been and where it’s going, we're very pleased to welcome Michael Skok, Partner at North Bridge Venture Partners.

For more details on the survey, go to:

Before joining North Bridge in 2002 to seek out great entrepreneurs and lead innovative software investments, Michael had himself been an entrepreneur and CEO in the software business for 21 years.
We'll hear the results of this multi-year annual survey on the cloud market.

He founded, led, and attracted more than $100 million in venture backing to his investments in multiple successful software companies. As a VC himself, Michael has invested in many entrepreneurs who have built more than a $1 billion of value, focusing on large market-changing technologies and disruptive business models such as software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, open source, and mobile.

Current representative investments include Acquia, Akiban, Apperian, Demandware (NYSE:DWRE), and Unidesk, as well as Actifio and Revolution Analytics.

Michael's passion for innovation and entrepreneurship is also fueling his work mentoring and developing the next generation of entrepreneurs. For example, he is currently developing and leading workshops such as the "Startup Secrets" series with the Harvard i Lab. You can follow him at www.mjskok.com and @mjskok.

I'm very happy to welcome you to the show, Michael.

Michael Skok: Great to be here.

Cloud hype curve

Gardner: I'm very intrigued by any survey on the cloud market nowadays, so let’s start at a fairly high level. I'd say we're probably now in about the third year of a fairly steep cloud-hype curve. Is there anything to indicate from your survey and your experience lately that there is a waning interest or enthusiasm for cloud? Are we past the peak? Are we still in a period of where people are still building up their enthusiasm for clouds?

Skok: That’s a great question, Dana, and it falls into two parts. Obviously, there's an increasing interest in understanding cloud, but as cloud has captured so much attention, there is also a respectful, significant actually, interest in understanding what the real applications and potential for it are. People are trying to get beyond the hype, at this stage, to understand the practical applications and opportunities.

Gardner: Is it fair to say that confidence is up because the perceived risks are down, or are we still working through how confident people are and whether there are significant risks here?

Skok: Maybe the best way to answer that is to give you some specific data from the survey, and rather than have my commentary, it will give you the market’s viewpoint on this. That’s one of the key reasons we run the survey -- to try to understand what vendors and customers believe are some of the key issues, both driving and inhibiting the cloud.

So I'll jump in and give you some of the inhibitors first to answer your question on risk, for example, and then perhaps we can talk about some of the drivers. Does that sound good?

Gardner: Yeah.

Skok: On the inhibitors, one of the things that’s interesting this year is that, if you look back to 2011, 10 percent of the survey respondents would have said that the cloud is just too risky, and they gave many reasons last year. This year, we're down to 3 percent. So that’s a significant drop.

Michael Skok
Now, I'd argue that 3 percent says that you're at a point where people are beginning to understand cloud better, because the issues that they are raising are things like data sovereignty and the Patriot Act. Those are very real issues that are unlikely to just disappear, and they are beyond just cloud. They have to do with the reality of how people have to run their businesses.

The good news is that 12 percent feel that the cloud still needs to mature. That's not so significant number, but it’s down from 26 percent in 2011. So again, people are starting to feel that the cloud is obviously meeting more of their needs.

When you look at the issues behind those 12 percent who are looking for greater maturity, there are things that again you would expect to see in an early-stage market -- things like security and compliance, and that’s very typical.

If you looked at any major trend that comes into the marketplace, if you looked at the initial early days of the web and eCommerce, people said things like, "We'll never put our credit cards on the web." Now, not only do we put our credit cards on the web, but we allow people to do Internet banking and take photos of the checks as a means to make deposits from their cellphones.

So things have come a long way, and that’s just the time-scale that it takes. It’s typically several years before things mature and get people confident in these kinds of applications.

Encouraged by results

So I'm encouraged by those results. The next obvious thing that comes out of the survey is how many people are still experimenting. About a third are experimenting, 34 percent to be precise, with concepts in the cloud, driving applications, and using the cloud in some innovative ways.

For example, you see companies like Bank of America, who do trials using the cloud, and if they are successful, they use the cloud’s elasticity to quickly expand their trials. If they're not, they just throw them away. That’s a great example of how the cloud is specifically enabling people to do trials and get to market faster and be more effective.

And the other side of the coin, the great news this year is the rapid growth in confidence overall in the marketplace. If you had asked how many people had complete confidence in 2011, you would have gotten an answer about 13 percent, and this year it was fully 50 percent.

So we're not quite at a tipping point, because you have to double-click on that 50 percent. You have to understand the split between vendors and customers, and vendors were over half. In fact, 56 percent of them have complete confidence in the cloud. So you're seeing net new development in cloud from independent software vendors (ISVs), absolutely the tipping point. You see very few companies starting up today that aren’t building in a cloud.
If you look at the customers, they're not quite at that same level of confidence.

But if you look at the customers, they're not quite at that same level of confidence. Just over a third, 37 percent in fact, have complete confidence. More of them are experimenting and waiting for it to mature, as we were just talking about, and some of them still feel it’s too risky.

So it’s a long answer to your question. I hope it gives you some substance backed up by the survey to get a sense of this, and I am happy to answer any questions behind that.

Gardner: It’s interesting that those who are in the cloud ecosystem themselves are very confident, and you'd think that they would have the most to lose. They're making their investments, but the longer tail toward the consumer side is still catching up to that.

It certainly seems optimistic for the market in general that those in the know -- those that are using these to build business -- that they themselves will be providing cloud services and are so confident.

Skok: It turns out that there’s an interesting representation of players in the survey here, in that we have got both vendors and users responding. There were over 785 in total, mostly C-suite, but more than a third of it are customers.

Of the vendors that are represented, we're covering everything from Amazon to Citrix, to some of the mid-tier players like Rackspace, Red Hat, and others, and also up-and-coming and emerging players, for example, Eucalyptus and Acquia.

Bridge the gap

So it’s a very good breadth of players to drill one level beneath this, and we did that. We tried to understand what’s going to bridge the gap between vendor’s confidence and user’s confidence and we heard five specific things.

Number one, people want more complete value propositions. A lot of what’s being sold at the moment is technology and what people really want is the second key thing, which is clear business benefits. And they want that in the form of case studies, which is the third thing that would help people.

The fourth thing is more proof of specific opportunities that are being addressed in their industry, the vertical specific applications if you will. The bottom line, the fifth thing, is that people want greater return-on-investment (ROI) case studies to be presented to them so that they can put that forward as they champion this on an economic basis.

So to answer your question in summary, Dana, what we'll see is this gap between the confidence in the cloud the vendors are seeing and what users are seeing it is going to get bridged, as we become more able to deliver on the benefits with specific examples that drop right to the bottom line.

Gardner: Just to allow our audience to evaluate the data that we're presenting, tell us a little bit about the survey -- how it was sponsored, when it took place. You've told us already about the participants being C-suite level folks in both the sell and buy side, but tell us a bit more, just so we have a better sense of the quality of this data?
The beauty of the survey is that it represents a broad swath, about 40 of the key vendors.

Skok: Sure and by the way, the full results of the survey, as you may have already pointed out, are available on our site at mjskok.com. Just look under the "Industry for Cloud," and you'll see "Future Cloud."

This year’s survey is an opportunity to get a level set as to what’s going on in the industry, where are we, and to understand what’s going on in the key drivers and inhibitors, because everybody in the ecosystem is trying to understand how to better address the tsunami that’s rolling over the industry in cloud computing.

So the beauty of the survey is that it represents a broad swath, about 40 of the key vendors, both driving and enabling cloud, and also key buyers and C-suite members who are trying to evaluate and deploy cloud.

The idea behind the survey obviously is to enable both sides to get a better understanding of how to take actionable steps toward implementing what might be the next generation of IT. Pretty much everybody recognizes cloud as the platform on which not just applications and solutions are going to get built, but IT is going to transform to the next generation of providing itself as a service in an effective form.

Gardner: When were the results gathered?

Skok: The results were gathered in the summer of 2012, and they're continuously updated.

Independent survey

For example, we're in constant conversations with these vendors and also with the CIOs to continue to keep them fresh. But while we sponsor it, 40 collaborators are driving it. Again, the details of that are on the web, but the point is that it’s an independent survey so that no one vendor is driving it, it’s a collaboration of the industry as a whole to ensure that it's an independent survey.

Gardner: One of the things that jumped out at me, as you were trying to define what we could start to call loosely "killer applications of the cloud," where this is going to get traction, clearly one of the areas was platform as a service (PaaS). So let’s address that. Then, there's also big data -- fast data, analytics in the cloud. How prominent were they in the survey in terms of the priorities or the endgame for these two types of uses?

Skok: That’s a great question. You only skipped one, so I'll cover it briefly. The most surprising thing is just how much SaaS has gained in the survey since last year.

We also worked with Goldman Sachs, to give credit to them, and some of the information is also pulled from the industry as a whole. We found that 67 percent of the survey respondents are already deploying SaaS applications, and the value that people are seeing is in the application solving real business problems.
Respondents were saying that 75 percent of them thought that they would be building software with PaaS in the next five years, which is a big jump.

Of course, SaaS is built on PaaS and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) too. The important thing that you are pointing out is that there was a significant jump of interest in PaaS this year. In fact, looking forward to the future, the respondents were saying that 75 percent of them thought that they would be building software with PaaS in the next five years, which is a big jump.

We have a viewpoint on that, and I'll come back at it in a second, but what’s interesting here is that people recognize that they're going to be building applications. Why would they build them in anything other than in a cloud-based manner? That’s what’s so interesting here.

Now, I'll come back to that, because there’s some interesting controversy around how PaaS will play out and that came out of the survey too. But to talk a little bit about what you were describing as key application areas, big data was certainly one of them. It was top of the list on what people thought would be changed by cloud. As far as which application categories would be disrupted most, big data was at the top of the list.

Beneath that, were others that wouldn't surprise you, for example, customer relationship management (CRM). With Salesforce having led that charge, it’s not surprising that people see that continue to be a key area.

What was exciting to me was that number three was eCommerce. In our own portfolio, for example, we saw one of my investments, Demandware, go public this year and that was real evidence to me that you're going to be able to build confidence in mission-critical applications.

eCommerce applications, like Demandware, are the front door representing major vendors and brands, and people can track the nature of their business literally second by second and measure how much revenue would be lost if eCommerce applications were down.

Mature and strong

So the fact that major retailers and brands now bet billion of dollars on eCommerce as a service gives you a sense that people feel like the technology is in place and mature, strong, and reliable enough for them to back it with their brand and have it at their front door. That was very interesting.

Gardner: Just to expand on that a bit, in addition to retail and consumer side eCommerce, we saw SAP acquire Ariba. So there is obviously some interest in the B2B side as well.

Skok: Exactly. The B2B side is very early, and there is tremendous potential there too. We think that’s relatively untapped and that there's great white space there. You're quite right.

Gardner: So continuing down your list.

Skok: The list obviously is long, but what we did was to look forward and try to understand some of the key areas that are driving cloud and some of the opportunities. I'll cover what we talked about as the future cloud formations and the potential opportunities for applications. Would that be helpful?

Gardner: Yes, please.

Skok: They fall into what we call five cloud formations, and we're specific in talking about formations, as opposed to cloud-washed opportunities. What we mean by that is that you've seen a lot of vendors try to bring out just another level of their application and host it in some shape or form and deliver it via the cloud. That’s really not what we're talking about here.
We think the future is in applications that have been built specifically for the cloud.

Those kinds of things that aren’t true multi-tenant applications that are born in the cloud, and we think they're not the real future here. We think the future is in applications that have been built specifically for the cloud and enable you to do things that you wouldn’t find possible should you not have had the cloud available to you.

The formations we talk about first are media and entertainment. People have gotten used to that with iTunes and their music and Netflix to get their movies online. That was a major revolution and it started initially with web ordering where Netflix was delivering physical DVDs. As the pipes got fatter, we could just physically deliver over the web, and you're seeing more and more of those opportunities.

If you look at gaming, it has also all gone online, and people are taking it for granted. That’s actually a lot of what drove the cloud initially. This media and entertainment formation is very real, here to stay, and we think has tremendous opportunity, especially as the mobile platform expands too.

The second key area is what we call social and collaboration. The social and collaborative cloud is very much understood by people who use Facebook in the consumer world. What's interesting is that it has moved into the enterprise with applications important to supply chain management that are enabling things like tighter inventory control.

Also, there's collaboration all the way down to the customer, so that people can get better service and support, and in many instances self-service, which has a great cost savings and ROI payback.

Easier to collaborate

You're seeing that now start to play out. People are getting used to the fact that it's so much easier to collaborate in the cloud than it is to try to send people on-premise applications to work with, when you want to collaborate with them. We'll see a great expansion of that going forward, too.

The third key area, which I would describe as almost a platform shift, is identified as mobile and that includes location data, too. Mobile, if you think about it, is not possible without the cloud. Again, it goes to a real, true cloud application.

These devices that we carry with us, smart as they are, are nothing without the connections back to the cloud, to be able to do everything from synchronizing our contacts, calendars, and email, to much more important and significant things, such as to connect back to business processes and provide such key information as price lists and contracts for the people in the field to be able to do their job in situ.

That’s a really important shift, and the incredible rise, it's unparalleled, of new devices like the iPad, which has been the fastest growing device ever, in both consumer and enterprise, are giving rise to new demands and new services.
eCommerce has really become something that people take for granted that they can do over the web.

What's perhaps obvious when you think about it, but less obvious in this context, is how much location data is being generated from that. We'll talk about that in terms of the big data formation in a second, but location data is providing new opportunities for new applications. That links nicely to the fourth key cloud formation that we think about. That's commerce and that includes payments.

eCommerce, as we were just talking about, has really become something that people take for granted that they can do over the web. It's not just Amazon anymore, as you said, it's even B2B commerce, for example, that companies are taking a lot of the supply chain, collapsing it, and taking out cost.

That’s being enabled by the cloud. As mobile payments and the payment system in general become more accessible by the cloud, which is more of a political challenge than it is a technical one, that will become a very interesting opportunity for new applications that will be spawned and connected back to the cloud.

All of those applications, as I started to hint at with location data, are generating a huge amount of data, and that’s giving rise to the big data cloud. Big data is interesting on two fronts. It's interesting because with every click and step we take we're creating information that is being collected in the cloud, in a form that you can consider part of the big-data opportunity.

What's interesting on the second side of the coin is that the cloud itself provides the kind of scale, indeed economy of scale, for crunching that data, analyzing it, and providing insight from it.

The fact that you can spin out an analysis of anything from the human genome to a click stream in the cloud, and then provide insight, in some cases in real time, to drive applications wherever they may be and reach them with things like your mobile devices, is really changing the game.

Cloud formations

So these five cloud formations: media and entertainment, social collaboration, mobile and location, eCommerce and payments, big data and analytics, are where we think cloud is dramatically changing the scope of the landscape.

When you look at them, what's really exciting here is what's happening at the intersection. I'd be happy to give you an example of that, if it's useful to you.

Gardner: What's very fascinating to me, Michael, is not just these impressive arenas that you have described on their own, but how they intersect and in many ways multiply each other -- being mobile, having the big data to crunch, relating that data into a commerce activity, and bringing that back out through collaboration or social activities. It's really the whole greater than the sum of the parts here. Please explain a bit where you think that is going or where the survey tells you it's going?

Skok: You said it very well. The sum is greater than the parts here, and you've obviously picked right up on it. We could give you many examples, but I'll take one that’s simple, so that everybody can relate to it.

It used to be that if you thought about going to see a movie, you would have to go and check your local listings, but obviously people are way beyond that today. We can go right online and if it's not available to you at Netflix, you can quickly check to see where it is available on your local cinema from your cellphone geo tag where you are and it can quickly tell you that the closest place to go to see the movie.

Of course, you can use commerce in the cloud to buy it on something like Fandango. Then what's interesting is that you can choose at that time to check out what your friends think of the movie, see the collaboration that’s been going on of reviews from people that you know, and decide whether it's that movie or something else you should see.
At the application level, the big game changer is going to be what I call social commerce.

So you're using all of the things we are just talking about, media and entertainment, social collaboration, mobile and location, commerce and payment, to do all of that.

What gets to be exciting is all that data that’s being generated, if you go and see the movie, or if you rate it yourself, it gets fed back to you in things like recommendations for the next movie you might want to see, or if you take your kids, the kind of merchandizing that follows up with offers to you, and payments that can drive you to make further additional purchases.

And that’s just a simple example. There are many others I can think of that are, exactly as you say, the whole being much greater than the sum of these individual client formations. It's really quite game changing.

Gardner: So who are the beneficiaries? Clearly there is a business to be had providing cloud services and in integrating process benefits across some of these domains. You can sell hardware and software. You can build new business models by either giving consumers things they couldn't get before or making what they had done before far more efficient and productive. But where is the margin?

This gets to the business of cloud. We see Amazon being very aggressive on price, maybe racing to the bottom on some of the commodity services for IaaS for example. And we certainly expect a lot of competition between the likes of Google and Microsoft for cloud and PaaS types of services. Salesforce of course is in there.

But where is the point in all of this where you could say, "Here is another Apple with the iPad. Here is the margin. Here is the place where the business is as revolutionary as the productive benefits of cloud activities?"

Three examples

Skok: Very good question. I'm going to give you three examples at the different levels: so one at the application level, one at the PaaS level, and then one at the infrastructure level. I hope that will be helpful.

At the application level, the big game changer is going to be what I call social commerce. It's the intersection of two of those cloud formations, if not three of them, which is social connections and recommendations, connected with eCommerce, and potentially mobile within there too.

You're going to see there is tremendous opportunity, because what people most rely on when they are actually buying things is their friends and trusted recommendations, and we're very early in that. Surely, people have begun to recognize the power of the like button, but we haven’t yet seen that translate into commerce. We're early in Facebook trying to realize that.

The other extreme, the eCommerce companies, are taking off doing what we call omni-channel commerce, connecting everything from bricks and mortar, and are also recognizing the power of being able to do that as people are out and about with the mobile devices and gaining data on, for example, local offers and so forth.

The next great opportunity is going to come in the combination between social and commerce, and it might involve mobile and local as well. We haven’t seen the next great company emerge from that, but we're certainly seeing many opportunities. At the application level, that’s probably a good example.
People are looking for more analytics, and more of the capabilities that are going to be specifically taking advantage of cloud scale.

To deliver on all of that, one of the things we're taking for granted is that the infrastructure is going to be in place to do all that. A part of the survey that we always take time to ensure we cover is to understand the things that people are actually spending money on right now.

If we look at the intersection between vendors and users, and in the survey it's a slide called "Rainmakers," at the bottom of the infrastructure stack there's still a tremendous amount to do to enable the kinds of applications that you and I are talking about here.

Some things are very basic, the things like single sign-on on authentication to enable this collaboration across the supply chain. More specifically, in mission-critical businesses, it's things like backup, archiving, and business continuity to ensure that all this information is being stored and managed on a significantly scalable basis.

When we looked at all that, the thing that stood out, which is not going to surprise you probably, given that we talked about big data, is that people expect one of their greatest areas of spend to be analytics.

So at the infrastructure level, I think we are going to see some of the things that I talked about that are basic, like next generation of single sign-on. But the big thing that came out was that people are looking for more analytics, and more of the capabilities that are going to be specifically taking advantage of cloud scale.

Insights in real time

Whether that’s using things like Hadoop or next generation NoSQL or NewSQL, our capability is to get those kind of insights in real-time. In the end, the more data that’s being generated, the more we're going to have to step up the scale of analytics to provide insight in an effective time scale.

Those two would exemplify the application opportunities and the infrastructure opportunities. In the middle, as we talked about earlier, there’s a great deal of interest in PaaS, and it's less clear to me what the opportunity is for a specific breakout.

I'll say both what the survey revealed and what it didn’t reveal, which is interesting. We talked about how it revealed that there is a strong interest in PaaS, but when we dig in with vendors, what we see is that the vendors are actually at the bottom of the stack. The IaaS vendors, people like Amazon, VMware, and others, are actually trying to add more capabilities to their IaaS platform, to enable them to feel more like a PaaS.

If you look at Amazon, they've added numerous new services to make themselves more platform like, and they have become the de facto standard there. So they are moving from the bottom upward.

But you also see the SaaS vendors, exemplified by Salesforce.com, introducing their PaaS, like Force.com, to extend the use of their infrastructure or their applications to be more platform like too. There's a pretty big squeeze from the top and the bottom that’s making it difficult to see what will be the white space for a PaaS vendor.
People have historically very rarely made money out of tools. I don't think it will be any different in the cloud.

The honest truth is that I can describe the first two, what the opportunities for the SaaS and IaaS are, but it's not clear to me where the white space is in PaaS, and it feels like it's getting squeezed, if that makes sense.

Gardner: So to sum up, perhaps there is a significant business to be had up and down the spectrum, infrastructure, hardware-software, facilities, management, building out the applications, but perhaps one of the larger two opportunities that's yet to be solidified or clear is in the analytics and in PaaS.

Now, in the past, development was often a tricky market to make money in -- tools, frameworks, IDEs, but in many cases there was a deferment involved. You might break even or even lose money on some of those areas in order to capitalize on the deployment side or even gain lock-in for those applications on a platform, and that's where you would have a very good business.

I think what we're seeing with cloud is something a bit different. When it comes to lock-in, and you have had experience of course in open source software, what are some of the good things and some of the more risky things when it comes to this desire, as we've seen in the past, to lock people in to either a platform, a service, a standard, or even a toolset?

Skok: You're on the money on a number of different fronts. First of all, as you say, people have historically very rarely made money out of tools. I don't think it will be any different in the cloud. The interesting piece in the cloud is you have the runtime potential to make money, but even then, it's an economy of scale game, so it's not a place that's easy for startups to play.

Platform lock-in

The second key point you're making is that people traditionally have looked at it as a means to get lock-in to a platform, and that is the exact thing that people are worried about in this cloud revolution too. The third biggest item of what's inhibiting cloud adoption in the survey is lock-in, and the fourth was interoperability. They were both very high on the ranking.

What people are worried about there is very simple. If we double-click on it, they're looking for three things to avoid lock-in. They want to avoid data lock-in, they want to avoid programmatic lock-in with application programming interfaces (APIs), and they want to avoid being locked into proprietary services or features that can't be transparently supported on other platforms.

That's a real challenge for the PaaS players at this point, because the giant here is Amazon, and they've got a series of de-facto standards. There are some companies like Eucalyptus who have been very smart and are reverse engineering or making sure they are compatible with those standards.

But those that are trying to compete on new grounds are certainly going to have to struggle with gaining critical mass and then answer the question about how they'll provide that interoperability on those three layers we just talked about, to get over that inhibitor of an adoption that people are worried about around lock-in.
People will have open access to the source to modify, adopt, and even change to create their own abstraction layers.

Gardner: So perhaps there's a de-facto standard around Amazon, but being challenged by OpenStack and CloudStack as well. Is there any inference in the survey as to whether the OpenStack and CloudStack approaches would mitigate a de-facto standard evolving rapidly, and how do you view that?

Skok: I'm going to slightly branch outside of the survey and mention that for several years, we've run an equivalent industry survey on open source. It's very widely adopted now, but when we started several years ago, it was early.

We've seen that cloud has very much become a part of open source, not just because a lot of cloud is built on open source, but because, as you say, people are looking at open source as a means to answer this lock-in. It answers one of the key areas, which is certainly programmatic, an API type lock-in.

People will have open access to the source to modify, adopt, and even change to create their own abstraction layers, but that will potentially enable this kind of interoperability.

Things like OpenStack, CloudStack, OpenShift, and other platforms are potentially an answer to that. The challenge there is that they're relatively young and early in their adoption. While they've got significant backing, you have yet to see broad deployment of them yet.

I'm hopeful that open source will provide some of the answer to vendor lock-in. It's certainly being proposed that way and it's being supported that way. If you talk to a certain segment of the user population, they would tell you that it's exactly what they're relying on, but in reality, we're too early to call that one.

Making good money

Gardner: One observation from me would be that the folks that are in a position to make good money on infrastructure, hardware or software facilities, and management, seem to be a natural affinity environment with the OpenStack, CloudStack approach, but those higher up the food chain in cloud that have more of a pure-services business model might be interested in having the de facto standard land in their particular data center. It will be interesting to see how that pans out.

Tell us once again, Michael, how people can get more information on your survey. Where could they go to get the nitty-gritty?

Skok: They can just go to mjskok.com under Industry, Future of Cloud Computing, and the full survey is available from that site on a slideshow for people to click through. Also, it's being covered in many different places by many of the vendors who have supported it. There's a lot of information being disseminated by the collaborators. You have full access to it.

Just to answer your question, because it's too good a question, who has what interest to go where? It's best exemplified by Oracle. Oracle took a long time to enter the cloud market. Of course, they have benefit all the way from hardware out to the applications because of the acquisition of Sun.

That's how they're pushing their cloud approach as a series of applications that are totally integrated from hardware, all the way through to software. That's certainly going to suit some class of buyers.
If you look at major waves like this, it's always a while before people can afford to have best of breed at various different layers.

But if you look at major waves like this, it's always a while before people can afford to have best of breed at various different layers. If you started building application, as we did in some of our investments like Demandware eight or nine years ago, there was no IaaS, there was no real depth of Amazon and no service-level agreements (SLAs) that you could have built a mission-critical eCommerce application on.

That is evolving, and the more stable and capable the IaaS and PaaS players become, new applications will be to take advantage of those, and new vendors will potentially be able to take advantage of best of breed. That's what's interesting about the surveys, but it's all about verifying and tagging the state of the industry to see where we are and benchmark how the future is going to play out.

Gardner: Perhaps what we're seeing is a flip from best of breed being a technology to best of breed being a service or ecosystem approach. And if you can perhaps sweeten the offer of moving your best of breed mentality in that direction by not locking people in, or at least giving them an option to have interoperability, or mobility of their services, then that might be an irresistible offer that the market can't refuse. We just don't know who is going to make it, right?

Skok: That's exactly right. That's perfectly said. A good example to highlight how this is still playing out is Zynga, who reverse burst to their own zCloud because the economies of scale made it worth their while to do that.

If you look forward, people are even talking about cloud brokerages. I think it's too early to do that. Forrester had some thoughts about that and was talking about cloud brokers like travel agents. I think we are a ways off from that.

But in the ultimate scenario, exactly as you were talking about it, you might see a place where you have best of breed, cloud services, and all kinds of cloud formations that we were talking about.

Best of breed

Applications will effectively be an amalgamation of the best-of-breed cloud services and cloud formations that will enable new classes of applications that have interoperability, or at the bare minimum of things like data that's passed up and down supply chains or along applications streams. The consumer is the ultimate benefactor, because they're getting those, not only at best of breed, but hopefully at the lowest cost and at highest value.

Gardner: Then, perhaps it would be embedded services across those best of breed processes that would include widespread analytics, mobility, and location services, so those become more sweeteners to the offer. There would be a race to who can put together the best banquets of services under the best interoperability terms and licensing terms. So again, it could be a very interesting next five years.

I assume that over the next several years, you're going to be continuing to do this survey each summer and therefore get the gravitas that we have seen with your open-source survey.

Skok: Indeed. There's been unbelievable response to it. In fact, just to give you a sense of it, the open-source survey took a number of years to gain the kind of momentum that it's now enjoying in its seventh year here.
This survey gained such incredible popularity that within the first couple of years, it already has as much support from the industry as the entire open-source survey does.

This survey gained such incredible popularity that within the first couple of years, it already has as much support from the industry as the entire open-source survey does. And we have got tremendous demand to continue doing it, from both vendors and customers alike.

We're continuing to use it to keep dialogue between vendors and customers and enhance the industry’s ability to respond to what they see as the future. So  with your support, we will continue to do it.

Gardner: I look forward to periodically dropping in and learning more about the survey results and, of course, some of the insights and inferences that we can draw.

Skok: Thanks.

Gardner: You've been listening to a special BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the cloud-computing market and how a recent survey at North Bridge Venture Partners helps define the business growth opportunities for buyers and consumers of cloud services alike.

I want to extend a huge thank you to our special guest, Michael Skok, a partner at North Bridge Venture Partners. You can follow him at www.mjskok.com and @mjskok. Thank you so much, Michael.

Skok: Pleasure. Great being with you here, Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to you also our audience for joining us, and don't forget to come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Access the survey.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on the state of cloud computing and its future outlook based on a recent survey of buyers and sellers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Cloud-Based Commerce Network Helps Florida Manufacturer MarkMaster Reach New Markets, Streamline Transactions

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on using cloud computing as a two-way street between suppliers and buyers.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Welcome to a sponsored podcast discussion on ways that businesses are using cloud and e-commerce to improve how they do sales, marketing, and online transactions.

We'll examine how one company, Tampa-based MarkMaster, has quickly moved to nearly all-paperless sales transactions, found new customers via online networks, and increased the amount of product it sells to its existing clients. This was accomplished without a lot of additional IT or business-process spending by using cloud-based collaborative business commerce solutions.

To learn more about how MarkMaster is conducting its business better, please join me now in welcoming Kevin Govin, the CEO at MarkMaster.

Kevin Govin: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: Kevin, we're hearing a lot these days about cloud computing and online commerce. How is that having an impact? How is that changing your business?

Govin: It's totally changed our business. I laughed a little bit at your intro, when you talked about going "paperless." One of our main product lines is rubber stamps, and it seems counterproductive to go paperless with what we do.

Yet we have changed a lot. Now, 95 percent of our orders come electronically. We have one location in the United States that services all of the US and Europe. How could we do that without some kind of cloud transacting? It just makes the most sense. Over the last 10 years, I think 99 percent of our new customers have been coming through those kinds of systems.

Gardner: Tell me about MarkMaster. You've been around since 1933. That’s a long heritage. I am sure the company has adjusted to the realities as time has gone on, but tell me about the company now, your reach, and what you do.

Govin: We deal mostly with Fortune 500 companies. We sell what my brother, who is our sales manager, calls necessary needed nuisances. We sell rubber stamps, name badges, name plates, and interior/exterior signage. It's a unique field, kind of a niche market, as rubber stamps are a mature market. But, we seem to be gaining market share, so that’s been great for us.

Changed our reach

E-commerce has definitely changed our reach, which is, as I said, national and international. We have a plant in Birmingham, England, that we fulfill from as well for our American-based companies. We service 9 of the top 10 banks in United States. We do 8 of the top 10 insurance companies. Without cloud computing, there's just no way we would have even considered doing that.

Everything we do is personalized. Because I'm dealing with people’s names, even the fax -- which sounds like it would be a great thing -- was bad, because of the legibility and the readability. So, this all has been just a godsend for us.

Gardner: Tell me how things have changed in terms of how you've found your customers or allowed them to find you? Is there a different way in which this intersection of your value and their need is happening?

Govin: Sure. A lot has changed. We definitely use the cloud-computing models to go out and sell. Our products are products. There is nothing jazzy about a rubber stamp. Name badges are pretty much specified by the customers. So, we are not out there selling anything new or exciting as far as that’s concerned.

We have changed our model, and our salespeople don’t travel with the product. They travel with the computer and they show what we can do online and what kinds of services we can provide.

The investment in hardware has actually come down over time, but we do like to keep up today with the current technologies.



Obviously, we work heavily within the Ariba network, and because of that, now we are an Ariba Silver supplier. So, there's a lot of pluses that go with that, and we use a lot of banner ads and things like that.

We're also a minority-owned business. People are surprised when a minority-owned business comes up to them, says, "Look, I can transact on these, and this works just like anybody else that you are dealing with now."

Most of our products are considered office supplies. So, I have to look like the big Office Maxes, Office Depots, and that kind of thing. That’s how we present ourselves. Even though we're the biggest in our industry we're still a small company.

Gardner: And you're doing this without a whole lot of your own IT, I am taking it, and/or you haven’t had to invest significantly in more IT resources or facilities in order to do this?

Govin: We do it all ourselves. My background was in IT. Maybe that’s just a fallacy of mine, but we do most everything ourselves. It's all internal. We don’t have a large staff. We only have four people that work on IT systems. The investment in hardware has actually come down over time, but we do like to keep up today with the current technologies even in our web catalogs, etc.

Gardner: I guess the point is that with cloud computing, folks like Ariba are supplying a lot of what is intermediary between you and your prospects, rather than you have to build that all out yourself?

Quick turnaround

Govin: Absolutely. We can turn around on a customer in two days, because it's just all uploading something. There are no ports to connect or anything highly technical at all.

Gardner: What was it about the previous ways that things were done that may have been an inhibitor not only to your ability to find, but also to execute or to satisfy? Has there been some sort of process enhancement that you could point to that has allowed you to scale to grow your business or perhaps just be more flexible?

Govin: Because both on the buyer and the supplier supply side we are having hosted solutions or in the cloud it makes it a lot easier. There used to be a real reluctance from the customers to want to put us on board, because I might only be $100,000 year in spend, and they were going to outlay a lot of IT to connect me.

Now, with the cloud solutions, there is very little IT on either end. I'd imagine that it's even easier now than it was with the paper system before, because we can communicate to their end-users that we’re out here, and we’re ready to be bought from.

Gardner: It's interesting, Kevin, that we’re really talking about a two-way street here. You're putting your goods up on a network, a cloud, Ariba, and saying, "Here, come and get me." But, there's also that way in which someone in the field has a need, and they say, "How do I find the supplier that can get this to me fast?" That’s what's new and interesting about this cloud.

That’s huge for us, because it puts us in front of all those users that are looking for somebody like us.



Perhaps you could tell me a bit about Ariba as one specific way in which this two-way street is now a bit more flexible, but also something that gets the job done faster, better, cheaper.

Govin: Obviously we’re posted out on Ariba’s Discovery area, so they can find us very easily, and when they look at that, they see number of connections, and we get instant credibility on top of that. Then, of course, we even use the Ariba LIVE event. That’s huge for us, because it puts us in front of all those users that are looking for somebody like us.

Gardner: Maybe we can look at some examples. We have been talking about this at a fairly abstract level. Any specific customers? You don’t have to name them necessarily, but maybe you can tell the story of how this has worked, what the metrics of success may have been, and how others might learn from the way in which you’ve been doing this commerce?

Govin: One of the larger banks that we deal with, when we originally started with them, weren’t even considering us as a supplier, but they found us on the Ariba Discovery network. They called us and said, "Can you really do all of this. You're a small supplier?"

We showed them our list of what we have, where we’d already made Silver. So they knew we were vetted already by the supplier and we ended up with the business. It wasn't necessarily in a RFQ kind of environment either. It was "Wow. You can do this, and you’re the supplier we want and, in our case, you’re a minority supplier." So, it was just having that all together.

Can't always be there

But, they found us on Ariba. We didn’t solicit them. I mean, we had been soliciting them, and they knew of us, but we can't always be there when the customers need these products now. It's just too hard, because our products are needed everyday. So, that came out very well for us.

Gardner: I suppose that’s every salesperson’s dream is to be there right at that point of need.

Govin: It is.

Gardner: And you don’t have to do the heavy-lifting, but you want to be responsive as well.

Govin: Our salespeople have always worked in an environment of just continuing to keep contact with the customer. Hopefully, they remember us or that particular buyer hasn’t been moved to another commodity, which is one of the issues that we were into with the large corporations as well. This definitely keeps our face out there, especially when they know that Ariba is a resource to find a supplier.

Gardner: Now, what are the metrics? I see from some of your information that there have been some growth patterns, new clients, and even your existing clients seem to be using more of your products as a result of this. Your transactions are more swift. So, give me some meat? How is this really impacting your top-line and your bottom-line? What's the result?

Govin: Well, top-line, our sales are growing at least 10 to 15 percent a year for the last 10 years, and that’s the same time-frame that we’ve been on e-commerce and computing that way. So we have to believe that that’s a lot of it. Our industry is shrinking as well. There were 1,200 rubber stamp makers, now there are 400. None are of our caliber -- of course I’d say that, but that has made a big change.

Bottom-line, we had that year-over-year growth, and our customer service department has not grown, or added anybody to that staff.



Bottom-line, we had that year-over-year growth, and our customer service department has not grown, or added anybody to that staff. How does that work, because we've grown exponentially? The reality is online systems.

We proactively give them the information as to the status of their order, and they can actually see it go through our plan step-by-step. Does everybody need that information? No, but it does keep them from calling customer service. So it’s definitely changed.

Now, 10 years ago, we were 95 percent paper, and it's just totally flipped. So, you can count on your hand the overhead that this gets rid of.

Gardner: Let's go to the future. How do you see things panning out? Is there another step that you can take in terms of how you would exploit or use cloud? How do you see cloud coming to your aid as a business?

Govin: One of the things we’re always talking about is transacting in the cloud and getting orders and billing. The billing part is where we want our customers to go next, because it seems like the front-end integration is great, but on the back end there are 100,000 different ways that people want us to bill them and get paid -- EDIs or ACH or whatever.

We see it coming. People are migrating to the pay element, so that everything is integrated, and that’s great for us. It turns money faster. I don’t deal with credit cards as much, all of which cost me a lot of overhead.

Remember, my products are $5 or $6. People buy one at a time. So, handling invoices is just a nightmare. I get 20,000 invoices every day. We need to upload them, link them, and know the bill is okay.

My clients are not the kind of clients that aren’t paying me because they don’t have the money. They're the kind of clients that aren’t paying because I didn’t do the paperwork correctly. So having that end-to-end order-to-pay integration is where we see it's coming next for us in integrating the whole cycle. Some of my larger banks have definitely gotten on-board with that and it's great, and for a small company, it changed my cash-flow as well.

Gardner: We’ve been talking about how one company -- Tampa, Florida based MarkMaster -- has been moving to sales transactions online, and finding new customers. We’ve been joined by Kevin Govin, CEO with MarkMaster. Thanks so much.

Govin: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Ariba.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on using cloud computing as a two-way street between suppliers and buyers. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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