The IT Game Plan

The rush to embrace new technologies and new business models that started three years ago left solution providers and resellers with a whole new view of their customers. Customers became more sophisticated, demand was high for new technology, and the sheer variety of vendors and tools solution providers had to offer expanded exponentially. Now, as the economy slows, customers are going back to basics,yet they are also simultaneously trying to employ forward-looking technologies and strategies.

"Customers are still spending heavily on technology and IT, and even on e-business," says Bob Crowley, president and CEO of Portsmouth, N.H.-based Web services vendor Bowstreet. "But now the customers' emphasis is more on what is the right architecture to use."

Crowley says the economic slowdown is providing a chance for his customers to "catch their breath and decide what is the right way to go forward, to plan for the second half of this evolution of business."

For Crowley's customers, the most important change has been a move away from technology for technology's sake and toward a more business-based approach to IT spending. "Our customers want to apply new technology, but they are couching the decisions to use it in common sense," Crowley says. "There's not enough money out there to buy point solutions anymore, so customers are making technology decisions with return on investment in mind much more than in the past."

The Next Level

It's not enough anymore for a project to pay for itself quickly, Crowley says. "People are looking for multiple returns on investment. That means taking and leveraging one investment against another to yield much greater levels of functionality and much more integrated functionality," he says. "That's why we're seeing a renewed interest in systems architecture."

In many cases, this emphasis on architecture is being driven by the need for B2B collaboration.

"We see a lot of strengthening of systems and a lot of looking at what is the right platform to build a collaborative infrastructure," says Tony Westerlund, vice president of marketing at FrontStep, Columbus, Ohio.

The previous period of unfettered spending has presented FrontStep with some thorny problems. "We have a lot of situations where a customer has four or five facilities, each with a different ERP system," Westerlund says. "Our task in a lot of cases is to build the system that links those systems all together."

FrontStep's approach is to build what it calls hubs, which take data from various systems, capture the business intelligence information from those systems, and then apply some intelligence to distribute the information where it's needed.

FrontStep's arsenal of tools for building those systems includes Microsoft Exchange and Windows 2000-based servers. "Microsoft has figured out how to deliver collaborative information worldwide, and it can do it at good price points," Westerlund says.

A similar need is seen by BST, a Tampa, Fla.-based software developer that targets what it describes as professional services organizations, such as engineering consulting companies, architects' offices and IT services organizations.

"The two items that are raised constantly by our client base are the ability to collaborate and interact with clients, as well as within the internal organization in a distributed environment, and the security associated with collaborating and interacting in a distributed environment," says Delmar Warnock, director of business development at BST.

BST's Enterprise 7.0 suite of software tools provides its clientele with the ability to plan, deliver, manage and evaluate services. "The core elements that are required for a professional services company to be successful are centered around its ability to manage a process, to communicate to the client and to communicate to the internal organization," Warnock says.

Often, BST's customers have to make this communication happen across widely distributed networks. "The client and the company's internal organizations are typically distributed across cities, states and countries," Warnock says, noting that solutions for collaboration need to take into account everything from network speeds to differences in national currencies.

Locking down such a collaborative network provides a security challenge that can be met in several ways. Warnock says some security features are built "within the product itself, such as the use of ADO and SSL, and others through the management of your technical environment, such as firewalls and internal security practices."

Enterprise 7.0 provides an Internet-based architecture that allows clients and employees within the organization to interact with the software over the Internet. Bowstreet's Crowley sees this emphasis on architecture as the key to the evolution of collaboration.

"You want to provide Web services for collaboration in the form of software modules," Crowley says. "You want to give each customer a plug-and-play approach that fits its workflow."

Using this approach, the integration of new technologies like wireless will be made easier, Crowley says. "Wireless fits into the equation well because it's just another way of getting collaborative information to the people who need it and in the form that's right for the device in question. If you put the software needed for wireless into a modular form, you can deliver wireless when the customer's ready for it without suffering through a lot of integration headaches."

What About Those Hot Technologies of Yesteryear?

Wireless, predicted by pundits last year to be this year's hot technology, is finding a home in applications that are much less audacious than those promised during the technology's initial flush of excitement.

"A lot of customers have backed away from wireless over the last year, but where they are looking to use it is as an incremental tool," says Doug Murray, president of NoWalls, a solution provider based in Salt Lake City. "The interest has gone completely away from consumer-based applications to B2B and business-to-employee solutions where you need to get information out to the field or need to get updates from the field. The need for those services will be what

drives demand."

Another critical driver of customer demand is the emergence of standards for B2B information exchange, including XML and the UDDI directory system.

Satisfying Evolving Customer Demands

End-user customers are responding to these ideas enthusiastically. "One of our customers, a heating and ventilation company called Taco [pronounced TAY-co], had a lot of trouble with its channel functions," Westerlund says. "It had a lot of trouble getting data to channel partners and getting information back from them."

The one spot where data did pass between Taco and its channel partners was the call center. FrontStep built a solution that pulled all channel functions through a central hub, providing a repository of information the company could build decisions around and an efficient source of data for call-center staff.

This type of solution, focused around improving internal processes, is indicative of how customer demand has evolved.

"In many cases, we've moved away from using technology to generate new money for customers to using technology to realize savings in productivity," Westerlund says. "Customers are realizing that there's money on the ground,money they've already earned,but they're turning to us to find a way to bend over and pick it up."

Murray says that the slowdown has provided an opportunity to pay greater attention to his customers' needs, something that was impossible to do in the breakneck atmosphere of the past few months.

"The next 12 months are not going to be so much a matter of what's new, but a matter of taking things that are already out there and applying them in ways that are wiser and more widespread," Murray says.