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Top Ten New IT Opportunities for 2004For more than a decade, the Crossroads A-List Award Program has recognized the best newly proven IT solutions delivering business value today. Last fall, when we began the search for the 2004 winners, we did so amidst debate in the business community about the fundamental value of IT. Is technology still the basis for a game-changing business strategy? Or is technology an essential tactic to staying in the race? In either case, business leaders know they can ignore technology only at their peril. The critical decisions today revolve around where to innovate vs. where to emulate. Even with the economy looking brighter, businesses, institutions and governments know they must do more with less. On one hand, they must focus more tightly, invest less money up front, spend less time for integration and expend less redundant effort. At the same time, they expect a bigger bang for the buck. This brings the fast-follower approach to the fore, spending less and minimizing risk by limiting experimentation in favor of quickly adopting what is better, cheaper and faster. These trends have two implications for the Crossroads A-List Awards in 2004. First, the Awards focus on big wins relative to the investment required - comprehensive solutions, easily adoptable services, products that complement installed systems, and technology that differentiates its adopter. Second, the Awards focus on a limited number of can't-miss opportunities. CROSSROADS A-LIST AWARD WINNERS 2004 Now more than ever, ascertaining the value of emerging technology boils down to a focus on results relative to expenditure. Results are what we look for. And results are indeed delivered by the Crossroads A-List Award winners in 2004:
For information on each Crossroads A-List Award winning solution, see the linked Research Brief. REFERENCE CUSTOMERS ARE THE JURY The credibility the Awards confer stems from our process of research and validation. The Crossroads research program focuses on technology applied to business priorities and challenges. Drawing on in-depth interviews with line-of-business and IT executives, the program identifies the newly proven solutions and services that are making the strongest contribution to business results for early customers right now. A particularly impressive group of people served as reference customers in 2004. Split about equally between business professionals and IT professionals, reference customers shared a holistic knowledge of what it takes to make technology work for business. Without exception, reference customers of Crossroads A-List Award winning companies are seasoned veterans who brought discerning judgment to the evaluation process. We appreciate their participation in the selection process. AWARD-WINNING TECHNOLOGY DELIVERS BUSINESS IMPACT Each Crossroads A-List Award-winning vendor is delivering, as demonstrated by reference customers achieving consistent business results. With the Crossroads A-List 2004 Award-winning products and services, reference customers have:
In 2004, every Crossroads A-List Award winning vendor delivered on more than one of these benefits. UNIQUE ADVANTAGES Crossroads A-List Award winners Digital Harbor, Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), and Staffware have demonstrated that IT can still deliver strategic advantage. Reacting quickly isn't good enough anymore for Digital Harbor reference customers. They needed to develop systems that would provide a shared context for effective communication and rapid decision-making in complex, fast-moving situations such as emergencies. The Digital Harbor Professional Interactive Information Environment (PiiE) composite application platform is helping organizations correlate external events and collaborate effectively enough to be proactive in real time. Reference customers have used Digital Harbor PiiE to develop and pilot real-time interactive dashboards for situations where cross-functional communication and common situational awareness is critical to effective action. When broadly deployed, these applications will reduce discovery time, provide better information, lower training costs, increase the value of reports, and minimize the number of desktop applications required. Reference customers for FAST Data Search for Site Search are competing with public Internet search sites such as Google. They have used the technology to combine material available on the Web with corporate material, exclusive partner sources, and pay-for-placement material. The result: portals that deliver better results for their user communities than the most widely used search sites. Just about any way you measure it - raw traffic, click through, revenue or third-party ratings - reference customers have improved the numbers with FAST. Customers have proven they can create cohesive search results that sort documents together with database records. This enabled one company to move to a new, highly differentiated style of user interface not previously possible. Staffware reference customers have laid the foundation to grow their businesses while staying lean and mean through process efficiency and effectiveness. They say that the Staffware Process Suite has helped them move from a mode of barely getting by to a mode of consistently executing an optimized business process. This enables a different business strategy and yields a big difference in financial metrics. Staffware Process Suite has enabled two solution providers to deliver game-changing capabilities to their customers. One firm achieved nearly a seven-figure savings annually for each business process automated. WORLD CLASS CAPABILITIES, PDQ! Crossroads A-List Award Winners Arena PLM and SalesNet Extended have enabled customers to grasp the benefits of high-end product lifecycle management (PLM) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions without the legendary delays, integration hassle and daunting capital expenditures of the last generation of solutions. Customers have used the Arena PLM product lifecycle management service from Arena Solutions to eliminate scrap and rework while impressing their (often far larger) customers by cutting product development cycles in half. Arena PLM enables smaller and midsized outfits to work on equal terms with name-brand contract manufacturers and a host of small Asian suppliers. For some customers, Arena PLM paved the way to ISO certification. The Salesnet Extended customer relationship management service helped sales management deliver the numbers. Businesses have used Salesnet Extended to develop, implement and institutionalize their own unique selling models that encapsulate "The way" that sales reps manage the customer relationship and leverage the Web-based self-service channel. VPs of Sales credit Salesnet with enabling their teams to present a highly credible consultative selling image and to work effectively with extended teams in closing complex deals. VERTICAL INDUSTRY IMPACT BUILT IN Crossroads A-List Award Winners ZANTAZ and SupportSoft are becoming the gold standard in their respective industries of financial and broadband services. Reference customers in the financial services industry have achieved regulatory compliance by using ZANTAZ Digital Safe to archive email and instant messages in a non-tamperable way. Litigation readiness is becoming a necessary core competency in today's world. Financial institutions are using ZANTAZ Digital Safe not only to respond to electronic discovery requests, but also to prevent problems and to deal proactively with litigation when it does occur. To help foster a climate of regulatory compliance, customers are using ZANTAZ Digital Supervisor to enable supervision of email and instant messages, and to report that supervision activity to regulators. With SupportSoft Service Automation Suite, Multi-System Operators have overcome the challenge of delivering a utility-grade, "just-gotta-work service" to the world's most complex and error-prone consumer product, the PC. Broadband service providers now have a practical way to implement their plans for integration and standardization of service delivery. They are now positioned to cross-sell and to co-market partner offerings on a fast-moving, opportunistic basis. MAXIMIZING PRODUCTIVITY FOR LEAN, FLEXIBLE GROWTH Crossroads A-List Award Winners SupportSoft, IQNavigator, Project Arena, and Staffware have become invaluable to companies poised for growth as the economy expands. Broadband service providers report that the SupportSoft Service Automation Suite provided a double win - improving the customer experience while boosting productivity in the call center. One provider reduced cable-modem self-install times by 20% or more. Another doubled its subscribers while keeping call-center headcount and hold times stable. SupportSoft reference customers praise the system's ability to fully or partially automate the resolution of common problems. With the IQNavigator people services procurement and spend management service, reference customers trimmed labor expenses materially while improving quality and regulatory compliance. With smoothly running hiring processes that effectively leverage the contingent and contract labor talent pool, IQNavigator reference customers are poised to respond competitively to the economic upturn. IQNavigator's analysis and reporting capabilities enable them to be more strategic in their overall hiring activities. Project Arena project portfolio management service helps drive measurable, dramatic productivity improvements in situations where compensation, utilization and/or revenue per employee are key metrics. Managers have the real-time project status information and visibility of financial consequences they need to make better decisions faster. Those using Project Arena in more than one department say they are now able to optimize their business across the whole delivery cycle. With the business firing smoothly on all cylinders, reference customers have a better capability to plan, bid, manage, and deliver in aggressive, competitive environments. Everybody needs to do more with fewer resources, and Staffware Process Suite delivers. One reference customer cut the elapsed time for customer response by a factor of five. Meanwhile, the quality of interaction has increased because staff has more time to focus on intelligent answers to difficult questions. Another firm experienced a 35% reduction in headcount required for an exception-handling activity in the area of financial trade processing, while improving risk management and demonstrating regulatory compliance. SMARTER, SAFER INFRASTRUCTURE Crossroads A-List Award Winners Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) and Kavado are enabling businesses to run a faster, tighter ship and to steer more confidently around the reefs of information security. Customers say that FAST Data Search for Site Search is highly efficient in terms of both hardware and maintenance personnel. Moreover, it delivers the scalability that portal sites need. One reference customer supports a million users generating more than 700,000 queries a week against 160 million documents. Another reference customer's site handles 120-150 queries per second. This site has significantly lowered index time of new postings (within 30 seconds), even while query search time has decreased by as much as an order of magnitude (from 10 seconds to subsecond). Well aware of the costs of various security incidents - from lost revenues per minute of downtime to incalculable damage to brand image to catastrophic results for national security - Kavado customers say the ScanDo Web application security scanner is invaluable insurance. Kavado ScanDo diminishes risk by helping organizations enforce a positive security model, in which permitted application behaviors are specified, and all other application behaviors are disallowed. The positive security model is mandatory nowadays, Kavado customers insist, because the Web Services standards UDDI and WSDL make it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities in poorly written applications. Thus, they reason, the firewall must be aware of the application schema and must enforce only permitted behaviors. Kavado customers are accomplishing this by using ScanDo to configure the InterDo Web application firewall. MAXIMIZING IT PRODUCTIVITY Crossroads A-List Award Winners Kavado and Digital Harbor are enabling IT shops to accomplish more with fewer resources. In the past, it had been especially challenging for internal teams to keep pace with the flood of new vulnerabilities and to bulletproof their own applications, let alone to police partners' applications incorporated into the portal. With the ScanDo Web application security scanner, defenses are always current. There is a practical, factually-based approach to assessing all applications. Kavado ScanDo is typically introduced by the security organization as a risk management or regulatory compliance activity. Kavado customers quickly came to understand the benefits of moving the use of ScanDo into the development organization, where potential security problems can be nipped in the bud. Digital Harbor reference customers - all with considerable experience in attempting horizontal information fusion for decision-making purposes - agree that the PiiE composite application platform is more comprehensive than anything they've ever seen. It combines development functions with application, data and process integration, and with client-independent delivery of live information that can be linked and inspected in an ad-hoc manner. In pleasant contrast to previous failed technical approaches, prototypes can be developed rapidly with Digital Harbor PiiE and are close to production grade. Adding PiiE enabled one customer to recapture the original schedule of a project that had gone off track. CAPABILITY ON DEMAND Half of the Crossroads A-List Awards in 2004 went to vendors offering business services delivered over the Web. Comparable or superior in functionality to the traditional premises-based approaches, these application services have extremely short ramp-up times and are designed for integration. The investment is small relative to the return, raising ROI and reducing the payback period. Overall, reference customers give these on-demand services rave reviews:
All these on-demand solutions were implemented quickly and operate smoothly. Customers are satisfied that the security and availability of the hosted solutions are superior to what they could have achieved on their own. MAKE THESE RESULTS YOUR OWN The outstanding results garnered from Crossroads A-List Award winning products and services didn't happen by magic. The results were obtained through vendor-customer partnerships. Without exception, reference customers of Crossroads A-List Award winning companies are veterans who managed the projects skillfully. Each reference customer shared critical success factors, important management insights and lessons learned. You'll find their most important insights crystallized in the Crossroads A-List Award Brief for each solution. Overall, the message is simple. The prize is within your reach. With management, you can grasp it. CONCLUSION 2004 was the most competitive year in the 11-year history of the Crossroads A-List Awards. There were many well-qualified finalists that met the criteria and submitted four good references. The ten winners stood alone in delivering business value on multiple dimensions. Albeit new, these solutions are already proven by highly credible reference customers exemplifying the target market. They stand on their merits, tested and proven by discriminating buyers. Author: Nina Lytton Published: May 2004 |