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ConnectInc.com
"When you mean business on the 'net"
• What We Do
• How We Do It
• How We Sell
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What We Do
In business, being first is the difference between who becomes a market leader...or an also ran. In the cyber-speed world of e-commerce, where compressed time frames rule the day, the ability to act fast is even more crucial. This is where our technical strengths and business experience can help your company compete. ConnectInc.com's MarketStream software and unique implementation services can create customized e-business web sites quickly and on-budget, giving your company a competitive edge in this new digital economy. You can be up and running "live" on the web while others are still in the design stage. Let's talk about some examples of companies we've helped.
Often an established company wants to expand its market access and Internet-enable some part of what the company does. The Daytimers Store, (www.daytimers.com) is an example of this kind of business extension. Daytimers have sold their schedule system for years through traditional marketing channels. They asked us to help them create a unique Internet ordering experience so their customers could personalize their Daytimers to mark special events and other important dates in their lives. These events and dates are then pre-printed on their calendars saving them the hassle of having to enter them by hand when they receive their order—a very customer-friendly touch and terrific marketing advantage. Our software powers this site and our services implemented it (along with several subsequent improvements to it). Click on it and take a tour.
Nortel, a worldwide telecom leader, wanted to create a unique marketplace that extended their current business model to the Internet and allowed their customers to place equipment orders and know the exact status of their order at any time. They asked us to build sites for them in the U.S. and Europe. One of their customers, British Telecom, now orders billions of dollars worth of equipment through one of these sites. And new business orders are growing every day. Our software and services power and maintain this business-to business site.
Sometimes we help start a new business. Chemdex had the vision to create a new business providing a marketplace for companies who want to order specialty bio-chemicals (www.chemdex.com). This business model did not exist before (and could not exist without) the Internet. By bringing multiple suppliers of bio-chemicals together with the companies that needed to buy their products, Chemdex is a great example of the new style of Internet Vertical Market-Makers. We helped them win their initial round of corporate funding by bringing their site up "live" in less than six weeks using our software and implementation services. We continue to help them enhance their site as they develop their business.
If your company is looking for a competitive edge, there are more examples we would like to discuss with you. We have implemented over 50 e-commerce sites to date, with 15 of these companies each having annual sales of $1.0 Billion dollars or more. We have extensive experience in quickly solving the difficult problems that can hinder your company's e-business launch.
How We Do It
We know a lot about doing business on the Internet. We've been doing it for over five years now. And for those who like basketball, "We are nothin' but NET!" That's all we work on...Internet projects. Our people specialize in making e-business work for our clients. Our experience gives our clients a big leg up, since we don't have to "learn" on their time. Since we've done so many implementations we've seen a lot of mistakes and made a few of our own. But out of this fray of doing battle on the Internet we've created a way to do projects that incorporate methods of preventing those same mistakes in the future. We tell our client prospects, "We know the pitfalls and we've made mistakes too, so you don't have to repeat them." We think this is a big plus for our clients. After all, your goal is to implement a successful e-business...not to become an expert in what to avoid while putting a web business together. Knowing how to avoid those things is our job! We're the hunting guides who lead you through a successful hunt while keeping you from getting lost in the woods. And like a quality guide, we complete all of our projects for a fixed price. That moves the risk off your back and onto ours. It also says a lot about our self-confidence.
Now we're going to get a bit more technical, but not too much. We have our own software called MarketStream which is designed for those special applications where the buy-side and the sell-side of a commerce transaction need to come together under one roof with multiple buyers and multiple sellers. We are proud of our next-generation of this software. It follows all of the established standards that have emerged from the Internet, including Enterprise Java Beans, CORBA, JDBC, and ODBC. Without going into a lot of detail explaining these acronyms, this means that it is well designed to meet existing and future e-business needs.
When we started out five years ago we wrote our own software to function as web server and application server. Some people think this makes it proprietary. In our opinion, proprietary is simply another word for doing what you need to do to make something work where no prior standards existed. But now with the emergence of standards, we can allocate more time to improving our application rather than re-inventing the wheel. We've made our software work with several industries where there are unique business rules that we understand well — telecommunications, health care, manufacturing and distribution and retail. This evolved into the creation of our latest generation of MarketStream that uses other people's software for the "plumbing" and merges it with our expertise in e-commerce. The flexibility of this approach lets us concentrate on that part of our application (MarketStream) that is especially designed to help clients create e-business from any place within their core business they wish to start, whether it's ordering, customer support, inventory management or...where ever. It's also important to mention that our software is double-byte configured for Japan and similar language markets, and it is designed to work internationally where language and currency issues need to be addressed.
Our latest generation MarketStream also works on a variety of platforms. There is a version that is IBM oriented since we have a partnership with IBM to sell our software. It uses Websphere, MQ Messaging and Websphere Performance Pack, etc. Another version is Microsoft oriented for those customers who have their data processing environment standardized on Microsoft products. Finally, our Unix version works especially well with very large applications that choose to use Unix for better scalability and performance. This gives our customers a wide range of choices and puts them in control of the environment they choose to work in.
We know that e-businesses do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, they have to integrate with a wide variety of other software. Some of these are enterprise systems that have been around for a long time and pose unique technical challenges to companies wanting to enter the digital economy. Our most complicated project integrated with over 40 legacy systems to enable a large telecommunications client of ours to send out cellular telephones to their customers overnight, fully configured and with the telephone number installed. We've also done a multitude of EDI integration projects including batch, fax, flat file, real time and any other type of integration you can name. Some of these are enhanced by the variety of messaging middleware we incorporated into our solutions which already have APIs and transactions types built into them for many legacy systems. We use MQ Messaging, MSMQ, Tuxedo, and Tibco software to meet these requirements.
Though we have our own software, our thinking is that pure software companies will not dominate the Internet's future. The cyber-world is simply moving too fast with new software and solutions emerging almost daily. We think that much of the success in the future for the Internet will belong to companies who not only have software components but who have a significant implementation capability as well. In many ways, software is becoming a commodity; but the ability to deliver a project successfully, on-time and on-budget is never going to be a commodity. In the world of systems integration, studies show that over 80% of all projects fail to live up to that standard. Ours do. Though we have our own software that serves well for certain solutions there is nothing sacrosanct about our using it. We want to use the best applications available to meet our client's needs...even if it's not ours. We have partnerships with other companies like Intershop Communications and Open Market who also have great software for certain solutions. In other words, we're not like the carpenter who only owns only a hammer and begins to think everything looks like a nail. Our flexibility assures our clients will get the best solution for their needs.
We warned you earlier that we were going to get somewhat more technical about how we do it. If you're feeling a little bit lost with all the techno-speak and your head is swimming in acronym soup, have no fear. Just have your "techno-wizards" call our "techno-wizards". We speak fluent "TechNese" here at ConnectInc.com and will be happy to talk with them. We're also good at translating things into plain talk so even the most techno-phobic will understand how our unique technology and services will transform your present business into a highly competitive e-business...FAST!
How We Sell
Our marketing focus is to pay special attention to mid-sized companies ranging from $200M to $5B in annual sales. We sell through an in-house direct sales force and with strategic partners like IBM, who use their software sales force to market our application. We've also created a re-marketer program that identifies significant partners in major U.S. metropolitan areas. We call this the ConnectInc.com Affinity Partner Program (CAPP). Once CAPP is firmly established, we plan to go overseas with the same type of program. Our overseas partners will sell our software and create value for their customers by packaging other services they provide along with our MarketStream product. We'll establish a special pilot program to get their customers up and running quickly for a very reasonable price.
Additionally, we are creating programs that take advantage of the Internet as a software and services sales channel. We think this fits under the category of "the Internet is our friend", and will break some of the traditional rules for selling while reducing the cost of sales.
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