IBM is combining their various commerce products to create a more cohesive offering. I’m not the biggest expert but it’s obvious they are extending functionality and integrating capability. They held a session on Smarter Commerce and their offerings. From what they had a few years ago with just WebSphere Commerce, they’ve grown to cut across the entire set of needs during the entire commerce lifecycle.
Disruptive Trends
- Technology Adoption rates are accelerating
- Proliferation of modes and methods for commerce. Think mobile and social commerce
- Consumer buying behavior continues to evolve. Focus is on value and cohesive messaging across all your communication channels
- B2B and B2C commerce models are converging
Smart commerce is all about buying, marketing,, selling, and servicing your products/offerings and let it evolve around your customer.
Smarter Commerce Capabilities
So with the addition of a series of products across the entire commerce lifecycle, they have a comprehensive set of capabilities.
Buy
With a combination of Sterling Commerce, iLog Supply chain, and analytics, IBM can support a variety of needs.
- Trading partner management
- supplier management
- supply chain management
- supply chain visibility
- Logistics design and management
- inventory management
- procurement transformation
Marketing
Using Unica, you can manage marketing across multiple interaction channels. Coremetric can then track consumer actions and make recommendations.
They gave a great scenario where you may be in the middle of the winter selling system. If you have excess inventory of snowblower in Denver because of a warm winter and lack of inventory in Boston, iLog can modify your supply chain and then Unica can define a strategy on your web pages to target snowblowers in the right market.
Sell
There exists a number of processes that occur.
- Channel transformation
- Cross channel commerce
- Fulfillment
- Mobile commerce
- Retail Store
They are covered by
- WebSphere commerce for online commerce,
- Sterling commerce for order management, pricing, quote, warehouse, etc.
- iLog for optimization
- various retail solutions and POS for your stores.
Service
Service supports a variety of processes:
- Delivery and Scheduling
- Returns management
- After sales support
- Customer self service enablement
- Reverse logistics
- Case management
- Contact center optimization
- Channel transformation
To get all this you would:
- Sterling commerce for delivery, logistics, etc.
- IBM Case Manager
- Unica for communications and service notification
- analytics to help drive some of this.
Social Commerce
Now easier to create and control the customer experience including social participation. You can track review, analyze positive and negative reviews, etc. It’s part of a trigger and is in feature pack 3 available end of the 2nd quarter.
Strategic Architecture
