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viral marketing:
what is it and how do you do it?
i've been hearing more and more about viral marketing on the internet. What is
it? Should i know about it? Should i just stick to SEO and PPC? Is it legal? Can
i still sleep on both ears?
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02.15.06
Users Speak Out About SAP NetWeaver
 By
Louis Columbus
Starting around August of last year I started tracking down SAP users who were
early adopters of the NetWeaver platform, and I found an interesting dynamic happening
that lead me to continue researching what was going on.
What I found was that SAP was attracting entirely new customers based on the NetWeaver
platform.
What makes this unique in the SAP world is that the vast majority of SAP applications
get sold because there is an ERP instance somewhere in the organization to tie
back to. Rarely if ever in the years of doing primary research on their customer
base would I find a reference who had just come onboard for their channel management
applications for example. NetWeaver on the other hand is starting to show up as
the architecture for future Web Services in some companies who were not multi-decade
ERP customers for example. This finding contradicted many people's perceptions
(including my own) of just how SAP goes about selling their applications. I decided
to go all out and complete a research study of SAP NetWeaver early adopters, mostly
out of personal interest but also because I love doing primary research and wanted
to see what could be learned from NetWeaver early adopters.
What I Found Out
It's a good thing I started this project in August as a hobby of sorts because
the effort to get people to respond to a survey on this topic takes a fair amount
of work. Also I attended SAP user group meetings in my area and continued to work
at getting the Zoomerang survey to people who were kind enough to provide their
e-mail addresses. The big break in getting connected with NetWeaver users came
from a friend at Disney who introduced me to several and the networking started
working from there. From that point I was able to complete a decent sample size
of 300 companies distributed globally, and visited many companies locally through
user group meetings and buying lunches. The result is a report published in December
titled Users Speak Out About SAP NetWeaver.
Here are some of the key take-aways from the research:
* The majority of manufacturing companies start out with the vision of unifying
databases that had been siloed nearly out of existence in the past so channel
strategies can be more aggressively pursued. This focus on creating competitive
advantage through better integration pervaded the conversations with users.
* Integration to support growth strategies was by far the largest driver of investment.
Companies are looking to turn their data warehouses into a competitive advantage
outnumbered those looking to consolidate databases in general. There is a definite
atmosphere of using NetWeaver as a platform to stimulate revenue growth over simply
completing database consolidations.
* Consolidating portals onto a single platform is where Halliburton and others
are both moving towards in their NetWeaver strategy. This is a common theme in
many of the early adopters; they want to have a single portal for the majority,
if not all, applications in specific business units.
* In manufacturing industries the challenge of handling Engineering Change Orders
ECOs) and order change sequencing between Oracle and SAP systems is an area that
causes shared customers much pain. Intermediating between both systems for their
change order numbering sequence took custom development to resolve for example.
* One high tech manufacturer uses SAP NetWeaver as the integration hub for their
order capture, order management and fulfilment systems, including integration
to an Oracle supply chain system. The pay-off for this manufacturer is the elimination
of manual product option updates that was previously done at the director level
of the company as these senior managers are the only ones with the interrelationships
of products in their heads. Instead of having to work one weekend a month to update
the order capture systems, directors can have a Saturday off.
Read
the rest of the article.
About the Author:
www.lwcresearch.com
To get a copy of the study: Go
Here |
