Ron Kline -Part 3

--- SpeakerText Transcript of the Track: Another one in the United States is BJU Press. They're actually a publisher in the United States dealing with home schooling materials for kids in the K2-12 age group and they've got the research that shows that this is a big market growing at like five to ten percent a year and they developed a web store front end with a partner of IBM's called Crossview using webserve commerce and that was a website that allows them to dynamically bring to the front offerings and materials and sort of combining that with Coremetrics which is a web analytics application. They were able to provide customers an easier experience to screen products based on attributes or by publisher or by subject. By sort of metering each of those web pages and being able to quickly improve that search experience. So, those are of kind of two cases where IBM and their partners were able not only to improve the customer experience. But also, you know, improve the economics for the company as well. Those are some great examples. And it sounds like the Smarter Commerce initiative is a huge initiative and of course, IBM has a huge footprint in the large enterprise market. But how is IBM making Smarter Commerce accessible to the SMB market? Yeah so, so good question. I mean actually the two examples I gave you are mid-sized companies and you know, as I eluded to, they, you know, these companies have the same pinpoints, you know, as larger companies. They just happen to have the ability to address it. You know, in the past, because a lot of the technology and a lot of the solutions were out of reach. You know, IBM has bridged that gap really a couple ways, but you know, one way of course, you know, is to provide offerings that are built and designed for the mid-market. And so, we have a process in IBM to ensure that the offerings that we bring to market for this customer segment are built and priced appropriately for mid-sized companies. You know, example, Unica email optimization solution is 1500 dollars a month for running up to 25 events. I mean, it's a very affordable solution with a lot of really great technology in it. Unica Marketing Offices is another one. Marketing operations on-Demand is a $6000 per year for up to ten seats, you know. Very much within the range of a mid-sized company, but providing the kind of analytics and insight that really would help a company deliver this smarter commerce experience and then we do it with our partners. So in the mid-market one of the things that we've learned over the years is our customers is looking for local trusted advisers and that's. For IBM's investment in a very large partner ecosystem has helped bring the IBM technology through the trusted adviser of our business partners locally to these mid size companies. This sounds very interesting Ron. If I'm an SMB and I want to get started in looking at ways I can implement the smarter commerce and get more information. How do I get started? Where do I go? Is there a website that I can go to to get more information? Yeah, absolutely, so first of all, you could talk to your business partner because you know they are sort of the trusted adviser for you. They are locally, but clearly the first place I would start is IBM.com/smartercommerce and there you can learn about what Smarter Commerce is, get a bigger view of that whole Smarter Commerce, idea here and what other customers are doing in this area and how they are benefiting and of course what our offerings are. Ron, thanks so much for your time today in explaining today what Smarter Commerce is all about. Thanks again. My pleasure. Thank you very much. Review Transcript and Additional Download Options Right-click and choose 'Save As...' to download HTML for CaptionBox