Value Proposition
Value Proposition
Used by top enterprises and widely regarded as the industry leading e-commerce solution, IBM WebSphere Commerce provides a next-generation solution for all of a company's e-commerce needs. From a simple online store to a fully integrated, multi-channel sales network, WebSphere Commerce can be used for any or all of a company's business models and touchpoints. It is the single, unified platform you need to do business directly with consumers, with businesses, indirectly through channel partners - or all of the above simultaneously.
WebSphere Commerce helps companies of all sizes enable their customers to do business on demand — when they want, where they want and how they want. Unlike the competition, WebSphere Commerce:
1. Supports all of a company's business models and e-commerce sites — whether B2C or B2B — on a single instance of the software and its associated infrastructure
2. Achieves the best balance of out-of-box readiness and complete adaptability by delivering hundreds of out-of-the-box capabilities and accelerating the implementation of new ones
3. Delivers rich, contextual customer and partner experience across channels
4. Leverages the industry's most complete middleware platform for end-to-end integration across the value chain
5. Fully exploits the power of the underlying platform for maximum performance, scalability and adaptability
Leading analysts recently concluded what over 1000 customers like REI, MeadWestvaco, Panasonic, Abercrombie and Fitch and Staples already know: IBM is a leader in e-commerce. Whether a small or midmarket firm or a large multi-national corporation, IBM WebSphere Commerce has a solution for you.
High Level Differentiators
1. Supports all of a company's business models and e-commerce sites on a single platform
Not only does WebSphere Commerce support all the ways a company does business with their customers, it does so on a single, integrated platform. This means they only have to invest in one solution for all their e-commerce initiatives, whether they need to create multiple stores for different brands, subsidiaries or geographical regions; whether they want to sell to consumers, direct to businesses, or through channel partners; whether they want to sell online or via kiosk or telesales or b2b customer procurement sites. Not only can they do any or all of this with our solution, they can do it all within a single installation of the software and associated infrastructure.
No other competitor can support the range of “doing business” that WC supports out of the box. More importantly, no other competitor can do so on a single implementation of the software and associated infrastructure. ATG does B2C well and makes claims to B2B but does not support enough of the crucial aspects of B2B business models, such as RFQ and approval workflow, to be a true B2B solution, and does not support indirect channel commerce at all. SAP and Comergent are good B2B solutions but do not support core B2C capabilities. None have a real story around multichannel retail. Most offer some level of globalization, but none support the ability to deploy completely localized, regional sites within a single instance of the software and catalog. And that last point is key. Using our competitors, not only can you not support all of the business models -- to your exact specification -- you cannot support more than one initiative on a single installation. So even if you only sell B2C, if you need multiple storefronts (e.g. for different brands or regions) or you need other interactive channels such as kiosk or telesales, you have to make multiple, largely redundant investments.
Key business benefits:
▪ Lower your total cost of ownership
▪ Improve customer service & experience
▪ Ensure accurate & consistent brand experience across channels & touchpoints
▪ Do business more effectively by leveraging synergy between brands, channels and other autonomous stores
▪ Increase responsiveness & decrease time-to-value
▪ Protect investments
2. Achieves the best balance of out-of-box readiness and complete adaptability
WebSphere Commerce is a complete, end-to-end solution – virtually everything you need to create a world-class online and multichannel business is in the box. From the application foundation through the middleware, all the way up to packaged application functionality – plus the business, IT and developer tools to deploy and manage it all. Comprehensive, market-leading middleware underpins all of the components & capabilities of WebSphere Commerce – and expands them to create a solution much broader and deeper than traditional e-commerce. WebSphere Commerce provides the greatest value by including everything you need, from a single vendor, in a single solution – packaged, integrated and ready to deploy. And what’s more, this combination of tools, middleware and packaged application functionality give WebSphere Commerce a superior balance of out-of-the-box capability AND flexibility and adaptability.
NO other vendor has managed to provide a precise balance of both out-of-the-box readiness (i.e. packaged application functionality, pre-packaged business models, business user tools) and flexibility, adaptability, extensibility. While some competitors have lots of out-of-the-box app function, it is not process-oriented – it’s very rigid and cannot be configured or customized to fit the customer's unique needs/business models -- at least not without significant effort and expense. The more app-oriented competitors have no development environment or tools to customize and extend the solution. Those who do have development tools, do not have the application functionality. These limitations become exponentially compounded when a customer tries to deploy multiple initiatives or cross-channel integration. There has always been a debate in the e-commerce market about whether to go with a toolkit/platform vendor (traditionally IBM & BEA) or an application vendor (ATG, Blue Martini). We are making that choice unnecessary, combining the best aspects of both.
Key business benefits:
▪ Quicker time to value. Commerce is pre-integrated with the infrastructure. Preconfigured processes and business models and application functionality speed implementation. Integrated development environment speeds customization.
▪ Increased productivity. Tools for every user, every role gives employees, partners, customers the access, authority, capabilities they need to do their jobs without IT
▪ Greater flexibility and adaptability. Wide range of deployment and integration options. Pre-packaged processes and capabilities are configurable not rigid. All components are open, based on industry standards. Solution supports unlimited customization and extensibility. Processes and components can be replaced by ISV, best-of-breed for ultimate choice.
3. Delivers rich, contextual customer and partner experience across channels
At every interaction, across every channel or touchpoint, WebSphere Commerce honors and enriches the full context that surrounds your relationship with the individual customer, employee or partner. The Business Context Engine is a layer of commerce-specific middleware you can configure to reflect, on the Web and other channels, all of the characteristics that define and differentiate your business – segmentation, business policies, supported roles and workflows, intercompany agreements, locales, etc. Every WebSphere Commerce-based initiative-- Web store(s), kiosk, B2B buyer site(s), telesales center, etc. – can leverage the same Business Context Engine to ensure that every thing known about a customer or partner comes into play in every interaction, regardless of channel.
No other competitor can deliver the depth of context behind interactions that WebSphere Commerce can, and certainly no other competitor can do so across business models and touchpoints. WebSphere Commerce is designed to leverage the complete range of information known about a customer with the goal of managing the entire customer experience in both B2C and B2B environments. The closest our competitors come is to implement personalization in an ad hoc way, leveraging only customer profiles and their behavior on the Web site to personalize interactions on the Web site (not other channels). WebSphere Commerce aims to manage the entire context in which the customer (and organization) interacts with the business and to do so consistently at every touchpoint.
Key business benefits:
▪ Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering a highly individualized and consistent experience across all of the channels customers use
▪ Streamline and improve the efficiency of B2B selling processes by automating the support for your policies, roles, approval processes, entitlements and contractual agreements -- at every transaction, in every channel
▪ Maximize marketing and sales effectiveness by treating each customer as a market-segment-of-one, using everything you know about a customer to create precisely tailored offers and content in every channel they use
▪ Capture the structure/roles of the extended enterprise to ensure that employees, customers and partners can do their jobs with the right data, access and authority
▪ Establish or improve your global presence by accommodating the unique business, cultural, language and legal requirements of an international or diverse customer set
▪ Learn from every interaction in every channel, and consolidate that data to gain new insights, make decisions and take effective action
4. Leverages the industry's most complete middleware platform for end-to-end integration across the value chain
IBM offers by far the widest breadth of leading products to satisfy the requirements of business on demand including application infrastructure, application and process integration, portal, commerce, collaboration, messaging, database integration, enterprise security, pervasive computing, and end-to-end application development. WebSphere Commerce leverages and integrates with these middleware products and technologies to deliver and amplify their value within an e-commerce and multichannel context. The key capability this middleware collectively enables through WebSphere Commerce is Business Integration. By leveraging and extending IBM middleware, WebSphere Commerce can support an unmatched breadth of integration options and capabilities – vertical and horizontal, front to back and beyond. Companies can integrate across touchpoints and sales channels, through back-end and legacy systems -- and beyond the four walls to suppliers, fulfillment partners, customers, the whole value chain. This is the level of integration required for a company to become an on demand business, and it is the level of integration WebSphere Commerce supports by leveraging the industry’s most complete middleware portfolio for Business Integration.
No other software vendor, let alone e-commerce vendor, offers as wide a breadth of middleware products or Business Integration capabilities. No other e-commerce vendor includes anything approaching equivalent middleware or Business Integration capabilities within their solutions, nor can they leverage this capability from other vendors to the extent that WebSphere Commerce does out of the box. By leveraging and integrating with this middleware stack, WebSphere Commerce provides the most comprehensive integration capabilities of any e-commerce solution on the market. While many vendors can support point-to-point integration with specific back-end systems -- and others leverage third party software for more comprehensive back-end integration options, and a couple of others can integrate across a couple of touchpoints or support some level of demand chain integration through Web Services, no single vendor can support the range of integration that defines an on demand business – except for WebSphere Commerce.
Key business benefits:
▪ Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty by integrating customer-facing processes across touchpoints and sales channels for a seamless experience
▪ Improve marketing and sales effectivess by leveraging a single, consolidated cross-channel view of customer data and analytics
▪ Make the most of existing investments by integrating Web & other interactive channels with back-end and legacy systems
▪ Streamline processes and increase visibility of processes by integrating them horizontally, end-to-end across the organization and with customers and channel partners
▪ Extend the value of WebSphere Commerce processes by making them available (thru Web Services) to other applications, affiliates, channels
5. Fully exploits the power of the underlying platform for maximum performance, scalability and adaptability
WebSphere Commerce was built from the ground up to take advantage of the award-winning WebSphere platform upon which it is built. WebSphere Commerce is the largest, most tightly integrated WebSphere solution on the market, and makes the fullest use of the superior development and deployment capabilities the WebSphere foundation provides. This enables WebSphere Commerce customers to enjoy maximum scalability, optimal site performance and workload management, ease of operations and powerful yet simplified development – right out of the box, without having to build, buy or integrate with those capabilities themselves. And since WebSphere Commerce and its underlying platform components are all developed by the same vendor, customers can be assured that every new release of the platform will be integrated, tested and shipped with WebSphere Commerce to ensure our customers can quickly, with little risk, take advantage of continuing advancements in WebSphere technology.
There are still a few competitors (MSFT, BEA) whose commerce offerings do not support the WebSphere platform at all. As a result these competitors provide inferior site deployment and development capabilities leading to sub-optimal scalability, availability, performance, time-to-market, adaptability, etc. But even those vendors who do support WebSphere Application Server only do so as one of multiple application servers. Every J2EE implementation is different, and no vendor can afford to optimize their products for every application server they support. For a vendor to leverage all of the unique, native features (such as fault tolerance, load balancing, caching) of multiple application servers would require costly development, test and migration effort, so they simply do not do it – instead, integrating with only the most basic services and merely tolerating the coexistence of WebSphere as a “supported” application server. This approach fails to derive the fullest value of the platform, and leaves customers with the burden of implementing, maintaining, migrating the other services they want to use. Not only is WebSphere Commerce optimized to use the native features of WAS, it includes WAS in the box with integrated, automated migration, installation and configuration – and is committed to do so within 90 days of new WAS releases, unlike competitors who must wait for WAS availability and then port or reengineer their own products to run on top of it.
In addition, no other vendor yet supports the WebSphere Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for developing, customizing and extending functionality, nor do they offer an equivalent. This makes their solutions more rigid and much more difficult and time-consuming to tailor or extend. WC has extended the WS development environment to give it integrated support for WebSphere Commerce specific assets. Customers can use the WebSphere IDE to develop and customize WebSphere Commerce sites, greatly improving developer productivity.
Key business benefits (see Details for complete descriptions):
▪ Superior quality of service enabling maximum performance & availability, vertical & horizontal scalability and improved problem determination
▪ Lower total cost of ownership through investment protection, reduced development effort and consolidated software, education and maintenance costs
▪ Quicker time to market & greater agility through pre-packaged integration with the platform plus improved developer productivity, leveraging of existing skills and reuse of assets
▪ Lower overall risk through working with a single vendor – collaboration, access, collective experience
Other points of differentiation
▪ Differentiated, sophisticated out-of-box capabilities such as multi-channel gift registry, search engine optimization, sales center interface, guided selling tools, advanced B2B functionality and highly flexble order capture options for customers
▪ Support for multi-channel retailing (architecture as a customer interaction platform for multiple touchpoints, buy online pickup in store, endless aisle kiosk, consolidated order capture and processing)
▪ Operating System Support: IBM provides the broadest platform support spanning Windows, Linux, i5/OS, UNIX, and enterprise System z.
▪ Web Server Support: IBM supports the leading Web servers and includes one with its product.
▪ Load Balancing and Caching: IBM provides native load balancing and end-to-end workload management. Caching is implemented at all 4 tiers, from data access through the application server to caching at the edge of the network.
▪ Clustering: WAS provides superior clustering capabilities. WebSphere Commerce Version 6.0 utilizes a new simplified clustering feature that promotes maintenance of applications with easier installation in a clustered environment.
▪ For the above 2 reasons, Commerce implementations typically take at least 20% fewer CPU resources
▪ XML/Web Services: WebSphere family provides more comprehensive and broad support for Web services. IBM has been at the forefront of Web services standards development and adoption for SOA applications and is an active founding member of WS-I. Enhancements like WS-N, WS-I BSP, WS-BA and a new web services runtime framework in WebSphere Commerce Version 6.0 help to give it a solid lead in this area.
▪ Java Support: IBM leads the Java initiative through its support of international standards and committees. IBM WAS provides a far more mature implementation for J2EE development – especially with out-of-box support for J2EE 1.4 and additional support for J2SE 5.0.
▪ Ability to host multiple business models from a single installation, including B2C and complex B2B implementations.
▪ A single, extensible, open-source based IDE framework (used by over 1m developers).
▪ Deployment tools and wizards (e.g. store creation wizard).
▪ IBM provides more capable and sophisticated reporting and analysis through preferred integration with Coremetrics.
▪ IBM delivers a more complete and truly end-to-end solution, all out-of-the-box, for e-commerce in a single package, simplifying licensing and installation. IBM provides a database, application server and web server in its offering.
▪ Strong international support (both through product features and expert multi-lingual customer service). IBM provides a more extensive offering for multicultural commerce functionality out-of-the-box, with support for many locales, including custom locales.
▪ Financial Strength: IBM is an extremely profitable company with a long history of strong financial performance. While successful, Comergent is much smaller, private and could be considered a ripe acquisition target.
▪ WebSphere Commerce is backed by one of the largest, most experienced services organizations in the world (IGS), offering 24/7 support around in the world in a variety of languages.
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