Outsourcing major business processes to major providers, especially offshore outsourcing companies like Wipro and Mahindra Satyam, has been a common fix for decreasing IT budgets in a struggling economy. As these providers support more and more Fortune 1000 and Global 500 giants, many of who are direct competitors, the issue of overuse, and consequently, security, come into play. While working with a more experienced and renowned company may seem more safe, companies like Credit Suisse, who are dealing with very sensitive, private client information are turning to smaller, “less risky” providers to work on their projects.

Initiatives such as risk mitigation and working with niche suppliers is a part of Credit Suisse’s multi-year IT transformation, aimed at creating centers of excellence across India, China, US and Singapore. These centers will specialize in different set of capabilities in the banking domain, such as efficiency, productivity and support. Credit Suisse has been outsourcing its software application maintenance and development projects to Wipro and Cognizant for a few years, but from 2009 forward will work with almost eight smaller, niche firms, such as Headstrong, as the company seeks to mitigate risks associated with two large suppliers. The bank was also reevaluating their contract with HP in the middle of 2009 and was potentially looking to sign a contract with another company for managing their servers and desktops.

Divyesh Vithlani, managing director and chief information officer of Credit Suisse Asia Pacific said, “As part of our second phase of outsourcing, we plan to outsource almost 40 percent of niche projects to around six to eight smaller vendors,” he said. Some of the niche projects would include delivering solutions based on the banking software T24 offered by Temenos, apart from other specific applications. “We want redundancy and do not want to concentrate our risks,” he added.

So what does this mean? For reps at smaller outsourcing companies, this could be a huge opportunity to displace the outsourcing giants that continue to shadow over potential deals with big-time Fortune 1000 prospects. With this competitive insight, you could have a new value proposition to allow you to break into these accounts.  How will you make sure that enterprise IT budgets, like Credit Suisse’s will be spent on your company’s services? It’s all about the competition: these companies compete with each other just as much as you’re constantly looking for ways to gain the upper hand on your competitors. As soon as you mention that one of their competitors has taken action towards solutions like yours, their ears will be WIDE open.

For more current technology initiatives and free technology sales leads in the Fortune 1000 and Global 500, check out our Technology Business Drivers document.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Extractable, modifiable, clean, accurate, comprehensive: in an age of customization and automated analysis in mass quantities, these are qualities that we demand of the data we input so that the output is reliable and useful. Whether you’re running through lists of corporate contacts to add to a database for marketing programs or using metrics on consumer buying data to analyze buying trends to optimize your supply chain, we depend on data for so many different aspects of business.

As technology becomes more sophisticated, businesspeople are demanding speed and ease in their data gathering endeavors in order to save as much (precious) time as possible. In marketing and sales especially, there is strength in numbers; blasting a campaign to 80,000 contacts that may not be good prospects is faster and cheaper than handpicking singular people to spend your precious time calling to pitch your product. Dun & Bradstreet understands it’s customers’ need for fast and accurate data; they know that if they can’t provide a platform that is easy to use in order to extract their “commercial data,” which also needs to be kept clean and updated, they will lose market share.

The company expects to spend approximately $110 million to $130 million over the next two years to strengthen its leading position in commercial data and to improve its current technology platform. According to D&B president and CEO, Sara Mathew, “We will create a new data supply chain leveraging outside vendors who have state of the art technology.” The company has migrated its data management responsibilities to Acxiom, who will provide data center operations, technology help desk, and network management functions, which were formerly managed by CSC.

Acxiom was chosen to focus on increasing speed, data processing capacity and matching capabilities. D&B is investing huge amounts of money to provide customers with a seamless integration of higher quality, real time data through a range of “new age” work flows including mobile solutions, social networks, and text alerts. According to CEO Sara Mathew, “Our current infrastructure can be improved. It has impeded our ability to meet emerging customer needs at a time when customers are demanding an increased space of innovation to cope with the softer economy.”

Dun & Bradstreet is clearly tuned into the most recent changes in marketing and technology, and more importantly, how these things affect their customers’ business endeavors. They realize that they must invest in their platform, or their accurate and comprehensive data will be rendered useless. In this economy, people are choosing the easiest and quickest solutions in order to save money, and D&B knows that spending a little extra to optimize their user interface will more than make up for itself with customer renewals and new business.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

With tech spending finally on the rise again, business needs that may have been pushed aside due to cost cutting initiatives are finally starting to be addressed again. This, of course, means that companies, especially large enterprises and the Fortune 1000, will be investing in solutions that may not be crucial for the day-to-day functioning of the business, but that may increase profitability or ease a (less crucial) business pain.

Wholesale retailer BJ’s has formulated an entire technology revamp project that they call IT Roadmap, which is expected to cost them $20-30 million per year until 2013. The project is meant to pull the company out of the economic depression by capitalizing on opportunities for improvement and updates in their systems and processes, especially ones that may have fallen by the wayside over the last few years. These improvements include their sales reporting, financial and membership systems.

As the economy stabilizes, the BJ’s knows it needs to capitalize on their customers’ imminent increase in spending by catering to them in the most efficient way possible. BJ’s plans to complete their HR system upgrade, pilot new store registers and launch a new e-commerce website in 2010. BJ’s expects these investments will cost approximately $68 million.

As part of the their focus on customer data, BJ’s is taking a close look at product and data management and will also be pursuing a master data management (MDM) initiative. They are looking to link customer “membership” data to their product data so that any patterns or inconsistencies can be analyzed (through an ERP system) and then use this information to optimize their supply chain, product offerings, and e-commerce/point-of-sale systems according to what their customers’ behaviors are.

There are two separate components to the initiative, according former CIO John Polizzi: a business and a tactical project. “We chose the membership and product data management system as the first two areas where we are going to look to externalize our master data from any application. Then, as we choose an ERP system, that will be the data source that feeds the ERP data.” BJ’s is currently in the process of selecting an ERP system, which is to be planned for implementation by 2012.

Clearly, BJ’s and other retailers are finally ready to spend again. They realize that in order to stay competitive, they must spend now. If your organization is already established in the retail vertical, now is the time to refocus your efforts on finding the business needs within these accounts and then aligning you product to become the solution. If you are looking to expand your target industries, retail is a ripe opportunity as consumers are beginning to spend again and retailers, more than ever, need to cater to their customers’ needs.

For more current technology initiatives and free technology sales leads in the Fortune 1000 and Global 500, check out our Technology Business Drivers document.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

It’s becoming apparent that technology budgets have finally increased after years of cost cutting and downsizing within the Fortune 1000 and Global 500. With spending finally on the rise, many companies are planning enterprise-wide initiatives to turn their focus back on the customer with hopes of generating more revenue and gaining a competitive advantage. Fortunately, for reps selling technology to the enterprise, countless different technological solutions can be easily aligned to these business needs and help win more business.

H&R Block is a great example of a company that has entirely turned around its strategy and is ready to fully engage with and focus on their customers. Improving issue resolution when clients call their contact centers will be a priority for them in 2010, as they plan to invest around $10 million in the project. The company’s call centers field approximately 90 million contacts annually with nine million of these contacts being fielded by live agents. They plan to:

• Improve functionality, access and connectivity, which will allow appointment setting and other important services at the call center.
• Invest in training and processing system improvements so that they can better solve client issues during the first call.
• Implement 32 initiatives to reduce the need for client calls in the first place.

If you are selling enterprise technology, chances are one of your offerings can help solve customer contact issues, whether it is routing technology, a CRM system or add on, or even something as broad as a customizable business process management solution. These customer-facing initiatives are huge business drivers for companies looking to make a turnaround after the economic downturn, which also makes it the perfect time to solve their business problems; they’re ready to spend money on your solution.

For more ways to solve business problems with technology, check out the free Technology Business Drivers document, complete with 20 free technology sales leads uncovered by Fortune 1000 market analysts.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Due to the turmoil surrounding President Obama’s new health care bill, one of the hottest topics of conversation in this country in 2010 has been healthcare. No matter what school of opinion you side with, both sides of the healthcare spectrum from insurance providers to pharmacies, are continuing to innovate, and therefore providing actionable opportunities to sell technology. This strive to keep a competitive advantage in their respective markets, in conjunction with the continuous industry and political buzz, makes now the perfect time to sell technology to businesses in the healthcare industry.

On the consumer-facing pharmaceutical side, CVS Caremark is taking huge strides and making big investments to improve the customer experience through personalization capabilities and simplification. Not only will it be more crucial than ever to have secure, reliable data storage to host customer and patient data, but CVS is connecting this information with a “customer engagement engine” in its stores. The project, called “RX Connect,” began rollout in the beginning of 2010, and CEO Thomas Ryan stated that CVS will “[make] investments in technology that will position [them] well for the evolving healthcare environment.”

http://seekingalpha.com/article/187379-cvs-caremark-corporation-q4-2009-earnings-call-transcript?page=-1

CVS Caremark CIO Stuart McGuigan said, “The vision behind the merger [with Caremark] was to bring together all the different touch-points in pharmacy care…to create one unified experience for the patient, providing the most cost-effective pharmacy solution for the client or payer. To help make this vision work, our IT organization was presented with the challenge to ensure that we could appropriately support this approach with reliable, scalable technology. This means that we still need to do everything that a good IT department does—doing things faster, better and for less money year over year—but we also need to continually invest in new capabilities to keep CVS Caremark’s competitive advantage.”

http://www.cioinsight-digital.com/cio/200912/?pg=22

It is clear that CVS’ focus for the near future is to create a comfortable, dependable, and personal environment for their customers both in their retail stores and online. Storing all of their patient data and translating it into a functional and personalized service will require huge investments in technology, and it appears that the company is more than ready to take these massive steps.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the health insurance side of the industry and the kinds of initiatives providers are making, and how enterprise technology sales reps can maximize on these opportunities.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.