As part of a program to cut costs and guarantee the lowest prices on the market, the big retailer seeks to boost its reliance on direct sourcing. But the change will require a major overhaul of its IT supply-chain infrastructure for dealing with key suppliers.
Aberdeen Group has published a slue of new reports from its various practices on such topics as sales and marketing effectiveness, IT infrastructure/storage and virtualization, and supply chain management.
All companies great and small will eventually work with a SaaS provider. In most cases, the standard contract should suffice, but CIOs will never know what they can add (or subtract) if they don't ask.
Mobility is important to retailers, but it is not mobility for the sake of mobility. Instead, the focus is convergence of e-commerce, mobility and social. And despite the doomsayers on the concepts of social commerce, the greatest increase in the intended use of mobile is to fuel efforts in social commerce.
You can learn a lot by monitoring consumer conversations in social media. It can predict political elections, the Oscars and even the next reality show winner. If you are a CPG marketer, social media can also be a real-time predictor of your new product's success.
Just when you thought cloud computing couldn't get any more complicated and fraught with hidden gotchas, the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue has jumped in to sprinkle taxation magic on your cloud business cases. What the Keystone State did - and other states are likely to follow - doesn't make cloud any less profitable, but the specifics of the cloud deployment could now impact tax costs.
Webgistix Corp., a provider of order-fulfillment technology for electronic commerce, has integrated its SmartFill platform with the online shopping cart of BigCommerce. As a result, the vendor said, retailers can build online stores in BigCommerce environments with two-day ground delivery of e-commerce orders to more than 98 percent of U.S. consumers.