Archive for March, 2011
Tuesday, March 29th, 2011
Ajilitee announced today that it has expanded its client roster to 11 organizations since its spring 2010 founding.
Ajilitee’s enterprise and midmarket clients include leading healthcare payers in California, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York and Vermont; a national property and casualty insurance leader; and a variety of IT solution providers and not-for-profits.
“Ajilitee uniquely blends expertise in big-data and analytics as well as cloud environments to help clients competitively innovate,” said Terrence Ryan, Ajilitee CEO. “Our consultants are known for their talent, and our team continues to grow to meet client demand. By empowering companies to make smarter, more effective use of their information while taking advantage of cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), IT becomes a strategic driver of critical business imperatives such as improved growth, better operations, and greater agility.”
Ajilitee’s business and IT services span strategy and planning, architecture and design, implementation, maintenance and support, and managed services – the latter growing in prevalence as more companies seek to outsource their data services or analytics in a scalable, flexible and cost-effective model.
HealthNow, the leading healthcare payer in western New York, tapped Ajilitee to create strategic plans for improved business intelligence and analytics for enhanced customer service.
“Ajilitee’s recommendations considered numerous aspects of our business, including user adoption barriers, change management, health reform requirements, organizational readiness, data availability, and analytics capability,” said Jared Gross, Vice President, Healthcare Economics for HealthNow. “We’re pleased how quickly Ajilitee grasped our long-term vision to develop a roadmap to support the business need. They are now helping to implement their recommendations so we can evolve our BI to better serve our member community.”
Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a full-service health benefits company serving members throughout New England with a network of over 135 hospitals and 28,000 doctors and clinicians, hired Ajilitee to help initiate a cloud computing strategy and business case through its five-day Cloud Opportunity Map engagement.
“As our data continues to grow in size and complexity, we realized that our systems and processes need to evolve. In a very short timeframe, Ajilitee analyzed the potential impact of cloud computing to our organization from a multitude of key dimensions,” said Ralph Miller, Director of Corporate Information Management from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care. “As a result, we’ve decided to move forward with SaaS-based analytics and collaboration, which will enable rapid deployment, scalability, and ease of use for our analysts and researchers.”
Ajilitee has seen particularly strong interest in enterprise-level data governance and master data management initiatives that improve data quality, and in Managed Analytic custom solutions hosted in the cloud.
“We’re on the cusp of the democratization of analytics – the enablement of large-scale, corporate-wide analytics embedded into business process. Ajilitee is helping companies get their data right before moving it into the hands of more users,” said Ryan. “As cloud adoption becomes more widespread, analytics will assume an even more important role in understanding what’s happening in the business. Ajilitee is poised to fill this gap.”
About Ajilitee
Ajilitee is a consulting and services firm that specializes in business intelligence, information management, agile analytics, and cloud enablement. Our award-winning information experts create agile IT environments for enhanced business performance using cloud-based methods, technologies and architectures for faster time-to-benefit with less risk and cost. For companies with strategic information needs, we advise, build, and run programs that quickly and cost-efficiently drive immediate and measurable outcomes. Ajilitee is a division of LaunchPoint, a provider of enterprise-class information-centric services and solutions. Learn more about us at www.ajilitee.com.
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Tuesday, March 29th, 2011
Customer-vendor relationships may be of greater value than sales at this stage of trend
by Wailin Wong.
The employees at information technology consultancy Ajilitee like to keep ahead of trends and be known as pioneers. That’s why the Rolling Meadows firm conducted an experiment on deals site Groupon, offering $25,000 worth of services for $12,500.
The three-week offer was the priciest deal ever run on Groupon and marked one of the first times a merchant used the Chicago-based daily deal site to market services to businesses rather than consumers. And while the company saw a spike in traffic on its Web site, no buyers stepped forward.
“We felt like we were testing the waters, using the discount platform, which was Groupon, to get the most mileage from our experiment,” said Diann Bilderback, Ajilitee’s chief marketing officer. “But we jumped into a pool that’s still filling with water. In time, it will be possible to swim.”
Ajilitee’s foray into group-buying illustrates the challenges for an emerging group of entrepreneurs hoping to translate Groupon’s lucrative model in the business-to-business space, already populated by the likes of OfficeArrow, BizGrouper and B2Bucks.
All of them hope the same zeal for deals that has sold millions of discounted manicures and restaurant meals also can work for printer cartridges or legal services.
Gary Slack, co-founder of BizyDeal, a Chicago-based deals platform for businesses that launches Monday, said he wants his site to be an additional channel that small- and medium-size firms use to reach new customers. Slack said his platform is tailored to the specific needs of small-business owners. For example, some of the offers on his site will be open for a week or even a month because buying decisions at companies typically require more time, especially if multiple people have to sign off on big-ticket purchases.
This is a major difference from the consumer space, where the prevailing model is to offer a deal for 24 hours. But by running longer offers, providers of B2B discounts risk losing the sense of impulse that is a key factor in getting consumers to open their wallets.
“I think the basic psychological premise that has fueled Groupon in the consumer space (will) largely be there as well in the small-business space,” said Slack, who is also CEO of Slack and Co., a local B2B marketing services agency. “We do believe that for the deals to be compelling and to emotionally connect with people … discounts of 50 percent will really contribute significantly to their interest level in doing something sooner rather than later.”
For some business owners, a 50 percent discount might not be tempting enough if the overall scale of the deal is too small. This is one lesson Jordan Stewart learned when he started BIZcounts, a deals site for businesses, in August 2010. The site is on hiatus while Stewart and his team work on building more features. He plans to relaunch the platform in a few months.
“Offering a small business owner $25 off on a stack of paper is not going to get that job done,” said Stewart, who is based in Huntington Beach, Calif., and previously ran a social media consulting firm. “Is a $50 deal even worth a business owner’s time? They need more expensive products or services … a reason to go through the process. If I can save you $500 or $5,000, you’re looking at a totally different conversation.”
Slack said he wants BizyDeal to be a wide-ranging platform, offering discounts on reams of paper and rates for events at hotels or retreat facilities. He said he’s been talking to Ford Motor Co. about a deal for the Transit Connect, a compact commercial van, although nothing has been finalized.
For Desks Inc., a Chicago-based office furniture dealer, the appeal of partnering with BizyDeal was the ability to reach small businesses. Jim Ford, the company’s managing principal, said he had been mulling the idea of hiring dedicated salespeople to address that segment when he bumped into Slack at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The two men later met up in Chicago and agreed to work together.
“As a vendor … you’re not going to make a lot of money on any one individual sale,” Ford said. “But you’re building a relationship database with companies that will hopefully grow, and you can grow with them.”
Ford said the products his company offers through BizyDeal will be items that can be sent via UPS and assembled by the buyer, such as office chairs. These restrictions cut down on shipping and labor costs that would otherwise eat into the value of the deal.
The new B2B group-buying platforms have the potential to help companies such as Desks Inc. by attracting small businesses. The big question mark is whether those buyers will become long-term customers, or whether they’re simply chasing discounts and will hop from one site to the next, as many consumers are doing with Groupon and its competitors.
Attracting the right kind of customer is a concern for John Duzansky, an account executive at Midwest Promotional Group, a Summit-based company that makes promotional products. After attending a Christmas party where many of the guests talked about buying Groupons, Duzansky started exploring the group-buying model as a possibility for his company. But he is still watching the industry and thinking about how to structure a deal.
“We sell (to) a wide variety of clients,” Duzansky said. “What you’re trying to do is reach the most-qualified, solid ones. We’ve got relationships — we’ve been dealing with people for 20 years here. That’s what we’re trying to build. I look at the (group-buying sites) as being a way to get your foot in the door. But you want to get your foot through the right doors.”
Meanwhile, Bilderback said Ajilitee remains optimistic about group-buying deals as a marketing tool.
“We’ve learned a great deal and we feel there’s a groundswell building,” she said. “This model has legs, and it’s going to become a tool of the small business and eventually the enterprise. I’m sure we’ll be participating again.”
Read the full article here>>
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011
On March 21, Ajilitee’s Groupon offer for 50% off a $25,000 consulting engagement ended. It’s been a fascinating three weeks, rich with learnings. At the end of the day, no one accepted our offer of a discounted one-week BI Best Practices Audit or a Cloud Opportunity Map. We knew this was possible, maybe probable. A big-ticket IT consulting offer had never been offered on a daily deals site before, and our approach was a first.
We wanted to know if a popular B2C model bringing together buyers and sellers in a new way could be adapted in a B2B enterprise environment. Can you fit a square peg in a round hole? We extended the deal to three weeks, allowed a year for exercise, and extended a relevant offer on the discount platform that would provide the most mileage for our experiment. Ready, set, go.
It appears the market isn’t quite ready for enterprise deals, which typically require months of decision-making time, executive buy-in and planning. These organizational constraints are a hindrance—our buyers in many cases aren’t empowered to pull the trigger on a big purchase without conferring with others, expenses need to be built into annual budgets, project resource allocations are already committed. It’s too different and it feels risky to be the first.
Our concept struck a chord with the market, though. In the past three weeks, we’ve heard about (and directly from) many deals sites that are springing up at this very moment to provide discounted B2B deals, mainly targeted to the small business market. Just to name some: Bizydeal, Bizdeals, BizGrouper, B2Bucks, GroupPrice, BIZcounts and OfficeArrow.
Will the enterprise buyer get there eventually? Our opinion is yes, and Ajilitee is on record to have broached this notion. It will begin with small businesses, who are more nimble, with less infrastructure and more individual empowerment. And it will probably focus on commodity-type products and services initially before branching out into more complex buys. Over time as the model becomes familiar and ingrained in practice, economics will draw in the enterprise buyer. And perhaps sites like Groupon will find more ways to add flexibility in their platforms to align with typical B2B buying cycles.
As consultants, our job is to keep our heads above the clouds and pay attention to what’s happening in the atmosphere. We were willing to test this out-of the-box strategy designed to help customers help themselves. In the end, no one did help themselves, but we think prospects will value our bold thinking nonetheless.
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
Day 7. Ajilitee’s Groupon offer completed its official run on the Groupon site yesterday and entered a two-week extension here on the Ajilitee site. Are IT executives agile enough to take advantage of this really good deal? In truth, we really didn’t expect our enterprise buyers to move that deftly—their buying cycles just don’t lend themselves to impulse buys of the Groupon variety. Still we believe there’s something in the B2C model that can work for us B2b buyers and sellers.
Groupon apparently does, too, according to a recent Media Buying Online interview during which Groupon confirmed its interest in B2B potential for their platform. Click here for the full story.
Among the most interesting conversations we’ve had since our offer launched was a chat with Gary Slack of Slack and Co., a prominent national B2B marketing specialist headquartered in Chicago. The same week our offer rolled out, Gary announced BizyDeal, a new B2B portal that will focus on connecting B2B buyers and sellers, specifically in the small business sector. “We definitely see the same potential you see,” said Gary. “To be successful with a b-to-b deal site, you need to understand enterprise sellers, small-business buyers, distribution channels, procurement processes and channel-conflict issues.”
Spot on, Gary! We’re making our short list of learnings to share with everyone, and they include your qualifiers. They also include the thought that adoption has to occur in baby steps. Like eBay Business, which Gary’s team helped launch, it started first with individual consumers, migrated to small businesses and eventually won over enterprise buyers.
Any thoughts out there on how (or whether) B2B can leverage the deal of the day/week model? Is small business the obvious first target? Can enterprise buyers get around their organizational restraints to join the fun?
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
by David Zax.
By now you’re familiar with Groupon deals. You get a wacky, manically written email each day offering you $30 of tapas for $15 or half off a full Brazilian. Dollars saved here and there; small-time stuff for the average consumer. But what if you got an offer for a $25,000 product for $12,500?
That’s exactly what happened last week. Rather than a local barbershop or cafe offering a deal to neighborhood customers, an IT tech consulting firm, Ajilitee, offered $25,000 worth of consulting services for $12,500.
No amount of lively copy-writing from low-paid freelancers (how Groupon fuels its daily deals copy) could make this IT deal seem sexy. Ajilitee offers either a “BI Best Practices Audit” (“choose among Data Architecture, Process Architecture, or BI Architecture”) or a “Cloud Opportunity Map” (“a five-day workshop that brings together key stakeholders to assess opportunities, potential benefits, and strategies for cloud computing adoption.”) But that, in a way, is the point. This isn’t a business-to-consumer offer; it’s a business-to-business offer, and a bold new experiment in whether Groupon’s social buying model works in the B2B world. If you understand what the offer even means, then maybe it’s for you: You can save $12,500 up until March 21, when the offer closes. Most Groupons just run for a day, but a several-week period is “still a relatively short timeframe for IT purchase decisions,” Ajilitee’s Michelle Smyth tells Fast Company. Only 10 such Groupons are available; no buys yet, says Smyth.
Even so, she adds, “Even without a single ‘buy’ via Groupon, we would feel successful if one or more organizations called to vet our offerings.” Though Ajilitee hasn’t gotten any phone calls yet from potential buyers, the company’s Diann Bilderback tells Fast Company: “We have seen an awful lot of interest from the media, which is asking the same question we are: whether these kinds of channels can be adapted to a B2B buying cycle. We’ve all seen how things begin in a consumer model, then migrate to a small business model, then eventually reach the enterprise level. We were just testing to see if we could accelerate that process.”
Groupon didn’t send out the Ajilitee offer via email. Rather, Ajilitee used Groupon Stores, a relatively new feature of the Groupon website where businesses can run deals whenever they want, online, via Groupon, without having to wait for an email to go out on their behalf (or, presumably, undergo some sort of vetting by Groupon). Groupon Stores deals only run for a week, which is why the offer is no longer available through Groupon (though is still valid directly through Ajilitee’s site; Groupon simply won’t get a cut if buyers still go for it). Groupon has become such a big name that simply having a deal affiliated in some way with the site is a potential way to earn attention for your brand. Whether that actually translates into money for either Groupon or businesses yet remains to be seen.
Read the full article here>>
