The importance of Electronic Commerce continues to grow. EC product vendors weigh in on the future of the market and the best ways to get started with an implementation.

Written by John Ghrist

With Electronic Commerce (EC) seeming to increase its contribution to the bottom line at most companies year after year, its importance to enterprises is growing proportionally. Given the opportunities to do meaningful business at any hour, with customers or trading partners located anywhere on the globe, companies who ignore or shortchange EC as part of their business plan do so at their peril.

It's not free, and it's not easy, but if you want to grow and attract new customers, EDI is a requirement.

Written by David Shirey

The first thing I want to make clear is that the title for this article was chosen by my editor, a woman who lives in a villa surrounded by a pack of vicious dogs that she calls "my pets." Needless to say, her view of the world is a little harsher than mine. Actually, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is more like one of those 1940s road movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. There are ups and downs, a few chills, and some laughs. All in all, it's not that bad, you just have to make the right choices as you go along.

Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from the book Customer Experience Analytics published by MC Press.

Written by Dr. Arvind Sathi 

Large automation investments in customer touch points, products, and business processes are rapidly creating enormous volumes of data as well as capabilities to make changes at electronic speeds. This chapter explores these changes in "instrumentation" and how they provide an environment for Customer Experience Analytics (CEA).

IVR, kiosks, mobile devices, email, chat, corporate web sites, third-party applications, and social networks have generated a fair amount of event information about our customers. In addition, customer interaction via traditional media, such as call centers, can now be analyzed and organized.

You can build your own stable, modern, and easy-to-maintain information platform.

Written by Jan Jorgensen

Users want stable applications that just run and run. On the IBM i, it's not very hard to give them that, but they also want applications that look good, with fancy colors, pictures, and fonts. And they want combined information. Some information comes from the i, some from the SQL database, and some from a text file. And pictures are stored on Web servers around the world. How are you supposed to be the provider of all this?

Cloud computing is touted as the wave of the future for IT, promising better economies of scale for its users. The IBM i has its share of service providers in this arena.

Written by John Ghrist

Cloud computing is aptly likened to a power grid, in which the electricity you use in your business or home isn't produced where you use it. Rather, it's produced at a central location and parceled out according to need, which you then pay for. Going hand in hand with virtualization, roughly defined as the ability to produce a fully functional replica of a computer system's hardware and software at a different location, cloud computing services are a rapidly growing industry.

GS1 US and 1SYNC have made remarkable progress, and much more is yet to come.

Written by Jeff Holzman

This article provides an update on the status of GS1 standards-based initiatives from January 2011 to February 2012 and also looks at plans for the coming year. Special attention is given to the broadening focus of 1SYNC, which is now not only the world's leading Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) certified data pool, but also a leader in the area of Product Data Management. In line with this shift, I note the important improvement of GS1 US's capabilities in helping industries and enterprises benefit from the real world implementation of standards.  

IBM's betting big on social technologies and showing the world the benefits of becoming a "social" business.

Written by Bill Rice

Technology is continually evolving, which is why business operations must evolve along with technologies. Not only is IBM trying to be at the leading edge of business technology evolutions, but especially with this current wave of social media and social business technologies, Big Blue intends to be a leading example of how to use these technologies to create new, more efficient, and more transparent ways of doing business. The implications of this current technology and business evolution for every organization could be huge.

If you think it's a fad, don't bet your job or your company on it.

Written by Bill Rice

 If you watched the movie The Social Network, there was a story that was even bigger than the one about Mark Zuckerberg's entrepreneurial success, his jilted partner, his legal problems, and his self-absorbed personality. It was about how the Internet and basic social needs collided head-on and went mainstream. Since the advent of Facebook in 2005, the way humans compete for inclusion and validation in their social circles has been transformed forever.