This is from one of them yahoo's on the Yahoo M.B............ Web-Based Tools Impacting Sales Scene
(07/28/98; 5:51 p.m. ET)
By Mo Krochmal, TechWeb
NEW YORK -- Web applications are revolutionizing the sales industry by creating a highly mobile, virtual sales force, said Silicon Valley consultant Tim Bajarin in his keynote at the Sales Force Automation trade show here Tuesday.
"The Internet is the key in the development of what we are calling the virtual sales organization," said Bajarin. "We're not there yet, but we are starting to see a tremendous amount of work being done."
The virtual sales force could access corporate applications from anywhere at anytime, he said, marking another shift in the automation of the sales force, a process that started with the introduction first of contact-management applications like ACT, followed by the introduction of the portable computer, which would let a sales representative write a sales order and then download it from a corporate server.
Now, the move is to use the Internet to let a sales force do everything from the field, via the Web.
"This is not utopian," he said. "The architecture is already in place and vendors are building the hardware and software. The money is not going into mainframes or client-server. It's pouring into Web-based applications. There is a Web-based explosion."
The hurdles are the same that other users face: bandwidth, connectivity, and security.
Bajarin is optimistic that bandwidth roadblocks are closer to being solved. The recent announcements of consolidations in the telephone industry, most recently Tuesday's Bell Atlantic acquisition of GTE, can only serve as the catalyst for the development of high-speed networks, he said.
Access devices -- PCs, network computers, portables, ultraportables, palmtops, palm PCs, and smart telephones -- are coming into the marketplace, as are the tools to use them, including Microsoft's Jupiter, the latest version of its Windows CE operating system.
Thursday, General Magic of Sunnyvale, Calif., will rollout its Portico service, a virtual assistant available by phone or Web 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Portico has a voice interface that users can customize with a choice of accents, gender, or age. For $3 to $5 per day, business users can dial in to check voice mail and e-mail, fax, page, check an address book, make a calendar entry, or check news and stock quotes. General Magic says the voice-recognition software is 98 percent accurate.
Bajarin said firms like Rubrick, Docent, Pivotal, Sales Logix, and First Wave are among the companies that have been coming out of the woodwork since last December to provide Web-based automation tools.
"The bottom line is that client-server and database mainframes are not going away," he said. "But the Web has had a dramatic impact." |
