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When people are equipped with the right tools, they can tackle complex business challenges while simultaneously increasing productivity, ultimately contributing to the bottom line. One of the challenges that has emerged in the workplace is that for people to do their jobs, they are required to switch between unstructured personal productivity tools and structured business applications. The reality of working in both unstructured and structured environments applies not only to the data they work with but also to their daily processes and tasks. From a software standpoint, there are a number of options for Microsoft and SAP customers to extend information access to users as well as improve their productivity which are explained in this paper.

The German holding company Hubert Burda Media Group (HBM) began as a printing business more than a century ago. An early Internet user and among the first buyers of SAP software, forward-looking HBM established a wholly owned subsidiary, Offenburg-based Burda Digital Systems GmbH to provide its IT services. Burda Digital meets its clients’ rapidly evolving requirements with an HP Virtual Server Environment based on the HP-UX 11i operating system. The platform employs HP Integrity servers equipped with Intel Itanium 2 processors.

Situated in Vitoria, the capital of the Basque country in northern Spain, Grupo Cegasa started business as a battery manufacturer in 1934. Effective Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions are vital to Grupo Cegasa and it had a number of different ERP systems which caused financial and management issues. It decided to increase efficiency by consolidating onto one ERP system and the choice was SAP. Grupo Cegasa needed to standardise onto a powerful, consolidated and cost-effective platform for its new SAP landscape and it chose to transition from its existing systems to six HP Integrity rx7620, with a total of 30 CPUs. Two ProLiant BL20pG3 servers are used for a Citrix farm, used by the sales force to access SAP.

Auto insurance is a very tough and complex business and there are a large number of insurers competing for business, so the market is highly mature allowing for only a tiny growth in the volume of business. Profit margins, if positive, are very thin. Consequently, effective technical and management control is absolutely essential to keep Estrella Seguros’ motor insurance business profitable. It is obviously essential that any insurer should not only be able to set a competitive yet profitable rate, but also should be able to provide a quote to the customer instantly and automatically. Like most motor insurers, Estrella Seguros uses SAS to perform the tariff segmentation and data analysis required to deliver accurate rating.

With an unstable stock market comes the increasing tendency among nervous investors to shift money out of their mutual funds. At the same time, financial services firms find themselves struggling to attract new investors. Many financial services companies have chosen to address these challenges by implementing punitive measures, such as levying high redemption charges to customers who pull their assets before certain time limits have passed, or more benign measures, such as lowering fees for long-term customers. At least that’s the case at most firms – but not at the Dreyfus Corporation. Dreyfus, a subsidiary of Mellon Financial Corporation, relies on SAS Customer Relationship Management Solutions (CRM) to help keep customer loyalty and profitability on the rise.

What’s behind the door? An interactive tour of resources and information based on industry expertise and today’s critical information challenges.<br><br>Register and enter a landscape of solutions. Videos, white papers, executive briefs, and guides to products show you how to leverage Information On Demand to lower costs, manage risk and complexity, gain insight, and much more. Open the door and see what Information On Demand can do for you.

DB2 9 is a single database management system for both XML and relational data. It provides cost effective management of both relational data and pure XML data in a single data server – to provide you with all of the business information you need to solve challenging new problems. View the demo now to see how it works.

This white paper explains the importance of the IBM information infrastructure in terms of providing the information employees need to help their companies become on demand businesses. Of critical importance to this infrastructure are information services such as business intelligence solutions. IBM offers the widest range of business intelligence solutions along with the most scalable, highest-performance data warehouse software product to help customers meet their need for rapid query responses and in-depth business analysis.

This paper incorporates significant “New thinking”, which has been made possible because of the introduction of new enabling technologies, such as Logical Campaigns and Smart Responses, both of which are explained later in this paper. While this paper has been specifically written for IT Vendors, the same principles will also apply in many other industries.

Patrica Seybold Group identifies trends early enough to make a difference. Bridge the gap between information need and ability to make decisions. How can you achieve this and use “terrific search”? In this white paper, Patricia Seybold Group analyzes the answers.

Marketing Optimization is the key to maximizing one’s profitability – helping he or she reach the right customer through the best channel, given the available resources. This webcast discusses the significance of marketing optimization in today’s marketplace.

Employees usually need a number of communications and IT services during the working day, whether they are mobile or not. To provide the right tools for every job, one needs to understand the individual service needs of each employee. It is helpful to divide communication and IT services into Person-to-Person and Person-to-System services. Person-to-Person services include both voice and text based communication, whereas Person-to-System services include services such as phonebook, calendar, general office applications, connectivity to enterprise intranet and various enterprise specific applications such as Customer Relations Management (CRM) applications.

How can information become a competitive differentiator and be managed as a strategic asset to unlock the confines of legacy systems and gain real business value? Does your business fully leverage the value of its own information assets? More than 60 percent of CEOs agree that businesses need to do a better job of leveraging their information. Discover how IBM Information On Demand solutions can help.

Check out this on-demand Webcast from IBM to hear noted industry analyst Jasmine Noel describe the evolution of business process management (BPM) and its integration with service-oriented architecture (SOA). Noel explains how SOA is allowing companies to implement process automation with greater speed and agility than ever before. You’ll learn:</span></p><ul><li>How SOA and BPM technologies complement each other</li><li>Why processes must become independent of specific information resources and specific task automation applications</li><li>How standards-based SOA works, including its ability to create process independence</li><li>How the integration of BPM and SOA facilitate “managed flexibility”</li></ul><p><span class=”plain”>

The New England Media Group (NEMG), consisting of The Boston Globe, BostonWorks, Boston.com and Worcester Telegram & Gazette, determined that to effectively manage, and therefore increase their sales, they needed to get all sales staff to use one comprehensive Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The challenge was not just to install and implement the new CRM, SalesLogix, but to shift the mindset of the sales staff to see the value of a CRM. They also had to provide consistent training to a staff dispersed throughout the U.S without incurring costly travel expenses and downtime. When creating the training solution, New Horizons understood that the training not only had to teach the sales staff how to use SalesLogix but also why to use SalesLogix.

Learn how IBM Data Servers can provide you with: 1) a resilient and security-rich information management infrastructure that maximizes availability while minimizing planned outages; 2) a scalable, powerful solution that handles mixed workloads and spikes in demand to fully leverage your resources and help you fulfill service-level agreements (SLAs); 3) a productivity-boosting system with autonomic features that enable your information technology (IT) staff to work efficientlymaximizing resources and helping you to keep down the total cost of ownership; and 4) database servers that plug easily into your existing IT architecture.

Tightly integrating business information with processes and people is crucial in order to enhance productivity while extending information infrastructures to ensure consistent, high-quality customer service. Companies must ensure that information such as purchase histories and current portfolio activity is available to employees, distributors and customers, in real time. Learn how IBM Content Management can help you: improve productivity and maximize control of information, streamline compliance to address specific business needs, extend and leverage existing information assets, deliver content where it’s needed, maximize return on information, curb database growth and manage compliance issues.

IBM’s leadership of the enterprise portal software market in terms of license and maintenance revenue over the past three years has been due to its ability to successfully sell portal solutions to businesses of all sizes in conjunction with other complementary products, especially those used for collaboration. As part of the IBM Workplace strategy, WebSphere Portal provides key capabilities that appeal to prospects and clients alike that are seeking ways to improve employee effectiveness by taking advantage of role-based composite applications that present content and Web services application functionality to users in the context of the work at hand.

Whether they’re delivered as printed documents, HTML emails, or voice or text messages, it’s important that the customer communications that are generated by ERP, CRM, or other back-office systems be as attractive and targeted to your customers’ individual interests and needs as possible.<br><br>Download this IDC white paper to read about enterprise document presentment (EDP) systems and how they help today’s businesses achieve this goal. The paper features several brief but compelling case studies of real-world companies that have implemented StreamServe’s EDP solution. They highlight how StreamServe has helped those companies turn their routine business correspondence into an effective marketing tool for cross-selling, up-selling, and brand building.

The Editorial Verbo S.A. group, headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, first discovered SAP solutions in 1999. Since then Editorial Verbo has been expanding its influence to the numerous companies comprising the group. The previous system gave support specifically in the CRM area, but it had no relation with the sales area. In other words, the company had two nonintegrated systems therefore company considered it essential to have an information system that enables this merger. Verbo Postal further decided to implement, in tandem with mySAP CRM, the SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence component, which in an initial phase offers backup to mySAP CRM and that, according to Nunez, was fundamental to the company, as they placed structured historical information directly at Verbo Postal’s service.