Dell's Manifest Destiny
InformationWeek: Dell is planning to expand in the corporate sector. The company, which still makes the lion's share of its money by selling PCs and laptops, will expand more aggressively into servers, storage, networking, and imaging and printing. The company also hopes that IBM's decision to sell its PC business will further drive sales in that area. PCs and laptops are a good base to work from because companies' need to refresh and update their computing gear is relatively resistant to fluctuations in the economy. Dell is planning to address businesses with the same strategy that has made it a powerhouse on the consumer side: It will offer low-cost, standardized products. A possible stumbling block is that enterprises don't use the Intel processors that form the bedrock of its platforms for mission-critical applications. Regardless, CIOs and IT staffs must be aware that Dell is a determined and financially sound company that aims to become a force in the enterprise market. The company has no plans to follow EDS and IBM Global Services and offer IT outsourcing services.

Mission Critical, Not Mission Impossible
META Group: Increasing emphasis on high-availability and disaster preparedness means CIOs must educate their C-level peers on the cost of providing continuous operations and hardy applications. IT will also work with business units to identify which applications will receive the highest priority in the event that only mission-critical apps will remain functional. This in-depth look at the financial ramifications of improperly planning for continuity includes the jarring conclusion that in virtually all cases, if IT doesn't keep e-mail up and running, it will lose credibility in regards to its ability to keep any other application functioning. Bottom line: Keep e-mail up. (Free registration required)

Voice-Enabled Transaction Solutions Drive Growth in Voice Applications Market, Says Datamonitor
Tekrati: Strides in user satisfaction and comfort with voice-enabled technologies will lead to big growth in these technologies, according to research firm Datamonitor. Revenues will grow from $56 million this year to $377 by 2008. Account management, order processing, pay-as-you-go top-up (especially for mobile phones) and reservations solutions are the most popular. Industries taking the most advantage of the efficiencies of voice solutions are retail banking, investments, telcos and utilities.

Question: With customer-facing speech applications, how do you help someone find that sweet spot between maximizing the profit opportunity that's available without hurting customer service and experience?
Mahoney: You mentioned one key trend that we're trying to help people with through some product capability, which is a shift that customers are going through over the last few years in their objectives for deploying speech technology in their apps. I think if you looked in 1999, people were just looking for something that was kind of cool. Something that would generate some excitement or potentially generate some revenue for them. Then when the economy got a little bit softer, the shift moved quite sharply over to an objective of purely saving costs. People were looking at all potential ways to get costs out of their organization. And they used automation, including speech and touch tone and Web-based apps, to replace people in their organizations. So that was a clear driving factor in some speech investment and objectives. Probably, 2001 through 2002-ish, maybe into 2003. What we've seen over the last year or so is an increasing shift in really trying to balance the customer satisfaction with the cost savings. Ultimately, we're seeing now more people looking at ways to increase revenue or increase profitability with the result of deploying speech apps.

Question: So are people approaching it more from growth than cost savings, or is this not an area that has hit yet?
Mahoney: There clearly are areas where people are looking at growth, so one way to think about that is there have been speech-enabled apps for some time that have been focused on revenue creation, but I think if you look at the bulk of the investment, it's around providing customer service in a more efficient way that seems to work for customers. We see more and more of that stuff getting integrated together, because it's like when the Web world made a big investment toward CRM over the last several years, taking a whole view of the customer. When you have a contact with a customer, you want to obviously service their need, but there's also a revenue opportunity. We're seeing more of that. As an example, Virgin Mobile recently deployed a really interesting application, where they provide customer service to users of their wireless phones, and they have a very large pre-paid business. They actually have a lot of service questions, where people want to make an inquiry about their bill, etc., but they also look at it as an opportunity for them to renew and buy more minutes. So there's a mixture of objectives, and whenever they get someone on a call, their app, at the right time, based on what they know about the people, what they know about how many minutes they may have left, can offer them an easy way to do what they call topping-up their minutes, which is basically adding more minutes to their pre-paid cell phone account.

Question: Tell me more about what metrics you would use to help customers make financial determinations on the TCO and ROI for implementation of a customer-facing voice app. What direct benefits can they put in, and are there indirect benefits that can be considered at the same time, and how will they avoid affecting the customer experience negatively?
Mahoney: Absolutely. I liken this to back in the 80s, when desktop publishing came out. Everybody in the world was a publisher all of a sudden because they were empowered with these new tools, but if you weren't very talented or creative, then you were able to publish not very interesting stuff. Just because people may have the right tools doesn't mean they're going to create a strong app. And there are obviously companies like ours, we've deployed over 600 customer implementations, so we've got a lot of experience. But someone could obviously deploy an app that really didn't take advantage of the technology the right way and wouldn't do the right thing by their customers. So we're realists and we understand that not everything is done the right way all the time. But the correct deployment involves a clear understanding of not only your customers' goals, your callers' goals, but also the business objectives. So we go through a fairly well-defined process, where we take people through application discovery, integrating a number of data points that we've derived from the hundreds of implementations that we've done, looking at apps and considerations to make where we can find savings opportunity for people. And then we mix that in with our understanding of the caller objectives, our experience on how to make callers happy, as well as the unique caller objectives that they may have for their population. We mix those all together and come up with a final determination that balances making the customer happy with driving the highest return on investment for the app. The returns come from things like cost savings in some cases, around not having to hire as many operators to handle increased demand, as an example, or spillover. Some people may think that means I can get rid of a bunch of operators. What we find is that in some cases, it means that more and more companies use speech not as a way only to satisfy their customers and provide better customer service to the people who are connected to their live operators, but handle things like peak loads and traffic much better. You can't plan on something like a hurricane, for example, so Verizon has a repair line that's driven by speech technology from ScanSoft, and during one of the hurricanes this last fall, one of their call centers just went live with our new app. They would have never been able to handle all the inbound traffic, all the incoming calls, with live operators, but they were able with this new app to not only handle the calls, but in many cases, resolve the customer's problems in an automated way. So it's a really cool app. ... Otherwise, either you'd have frustrated customers who might have switched from your service, you'd have the cost of customer churn, or you would have had to go to a third-party service to handle some of your excess overflow calls, which obviously would have some hard costs associated with it.

$10 billion to $20 billion
The estimate of how much U.S. states have lost in tax revenue on online purchases since the inception of the commercial Internet.
Source: E-Commerce Times

50 percent
Number of Global 2000 companies that will support multiple data centers for high-availability requirements by 2008. (Free registration required)
Source: META Group

Slight Upturn in Global IT Services
NewsFactor Network: Outsourcing and systems integration led the global IT services market to grow 6.7 percent in 2004, according to a new report from Gartner analysts. Gartner predicts that market sales will increase by 4.2 percent this year. IBM remains the biggest player, with 7.6 percent of global sales. Number-five Accenture had the largest growth rate, at over 16 percent.

IBM to Unveil Scaled-Down Server for Smaller Firms
St. Paul Pioneer Press: Mid-sized businesses with scattered operations are the customer targets for IBM's new UNIX machine, the p5 510. The server will sell for under $4,000 and has the same Power5 microprocessor as the p5 line of servers in use in large corporations. IBM retired the less-powerful p610 series a couple of years ago, and this server is the company's re-entry into the low-end market. (Free registration required)

Hold the Phone, VoIP Isn't Safe
Wired: Soon, e-mail spam will have nothing on various VoIP attacks, according to members of a newly formed organization, the VoIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA). To try to prevent exploitation of VoIP traffic, security experts, researchers, equipment vendors and other organizations will be working together to identify problem areas, such as weaknesses in protocols like SIP and H.323. If spam over Internet telephony, or SPIT, were to become common, networks could become stressed or overwhelmed. The audio equivalent of phishing would be easy for scammers to institute. And the possibilities for malicious behavior go on and on. That's one fear of observers of the new organization; announcements of efforts and research by this group may give script kiddies and scammers ideas.

Without Fiorina, Will HP Lose Users?
eWEEK: This article says that HP has built its business around hardware and services that are quickly becoming commoditized and the company is very vulnerable to customer loss to its main rivals after the resignation of CIO Carly Fiorina because its high-level services are not on par with those of SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and IBM. On the plus side, the company has a great credit rating, which is a factor in attracting customers, and analysts don't expect it to change as a consequence of the loss of Fiorina.