New Market Opportunities: Bringing Last Year's Promises To Life

Now that so many corporations and businesses have an e-business strategy in place, solution providers may be wondering where they can look to find new market opportunities. The answer lies in fulfilling the Internet promise and finally bringing last year's Internet hype to this year's business reality.

Solution providers who know how to integrate Web applications with their clients' back-end infrastructures and legacy systems to create end-to-end solutions for their clients are in the best position for success, say industry experts. Part of that is recognizing and understanding your clients' unique needs and building solutions to match them.

In fact, according to exclusive VARBusiness research, released in our May 14 IT Spending and Strategy Guide issue, nearly half of the companies that have existing e-business strategies in place say they changed them at some point in 2000--primarily because their needs and policies are always changing. Other reasons cited include making them more functional/productive and because of changes in technology.

Though Navy Federal Credit Union has had a consumer Web site in operation for several years, its need to streamline internal operations turned into a new revenue opportunity for Sysinct, the e-business unit of Ikon Office Solutions. That's because the client called on the IBM business partner to help Web-enable its paper-based voucher system--part of the company's overall plan to embrace a thin-computing business model.

"We figured let's start with low-hanging fruit, so we outsourced that process to see how it would work," says John Charles Herzberg, manager of Navy Federal's e-commerce branch. "Then we could transfer some of that knowledge to our inside staff and start doing a hybrid approach where we work with the vendors and ourselves to migrate down a different path."

Herzberg says the company's only roughly 15 percent into its overall transformation to thin-client, Web-based computing. And he predicts the relationship with Sysinct will become a long-term partnership.

Rocco Polino, Sysinct's vice president of sales and marketing, says that while end users once looked to companies like Sysinct for technology fixes, they now look to integrators for help laying down the overall IT roadmap. That makes Sysinct a more strategic player.

"They look to us to know the priorities and what they should do first, given that it can have an impact on everything else they do," he says.

For more insight into how solution providers are finding opportunities in the next phase of e-business, read VARBusiness IT Spending and Strategy Guide.

Tweet

   

More Channel Programs