A TOSHIBA SERIES
PROFILING VISIONARY LEADERS OF AN INTERCONNECTED WORLD MAKING ONE-TO-ONE WORK FOR BUSINESS |
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| HOW BROADVISION EXTENDS THE ELECTRONIC ENTERPRISE |
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| One-to-one. The
phrase connotes intimacy, connectedness, a form of personal interaction in which each
party knows the other like a close business associate. Not quite what you might expect
from Corporate America or from the Internet, that great engine of encyclopedic information
and mass communication. And yet it's rapidly becoming the key differentiator for companies
trying to connect with customers over the World Wide Web.
"One-to-one marketing is the most significant business-to-business marketing concept in years," says Terri Spence, president of Woodland Hills, CA, digital marketing council W3PR, who advises such global companies as Chevron, 7Up, and Unilever. "With one-to-one marketing, business relationships become highly personalized, increasing efficiency, reducing transaction costs, and boosting customer satisfaction, all driven by a better understanding of customers' wants and needs. A simple task? Hardly. Implementing this kind of personalization with real-world business managers is difficult enough. Doing so in an environment in which your only sales agents are bits and bytes, and in which business executives are as likely to be working remotely on a laptop computer as they are in company headquarters surrounded by staff and files, is another thing entirely. Achieving success in a digitally interconnected world requires a whole new way of thinking about marketing, communication, and business relationships. PERSONALIZING E-COMMERCEEnter BroadVision. The Redwood City, CA, Internet applications developer is the industry leader in enabling one-to-one electronic marketing and communication for sales, customer service, supply chain management, and electronic commerce. Using one-to-one techniques, BroadVision customers "are reaching hundreds of thousands, even millions, of end-users, all on a personalized basis," says BroadVision president and CEO Pehong Chen.
It wasn't always this way. When Pehong Chen founded BroadVision in 1993, many analysts viewed one-to-one marketing as digital smoke and mirrors, a mere public relations gimmick. As a result, despite Dr. Chen's impeccable credentials, (the recent sale of his start-up Gain Technologies to Sybase for $100 million) BroadVision found slow acceptance in the marketplace. And then, by late 1997, the market solidified. Economic forecasters started adding zeroes to their projections of the value of online commerce. Suddenly, electronic commerce was hot, and Corporate America was seeking desperately not to be left behind. As one of the first players in Internet-based commerce, BroadVision easily could have responded to this explosion of interest by attempting to become a "comprehensive electronic commerce solutions provider" like Microsoft or IBM. But Dr. Chen stuck to his conviction that the best way to connect people over the Internet was on a one-to-one basis. |
That focus has paid off. According to recent International Data Corp. figures,
BroadVision is now the world's second leading e-commerce vendor in terms of licensing
revenues, just behind Netscape and ahead of Oracle, IBM, and even Microsoft. It is the
only Internet commerce firm listed in Bloomberg's Top 100 Stocks.
A
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
Amid this success, Dr. Chen's main
interest remains the motivation that ignited his initial vision for BroadVision: making it
possible for companies to streamline their corporate operations by building one-to-one
relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners. "A new chapter in the history
of enterprise automation is being written by one-to-one personalization," he
proclaims. Companies adopting this approach "are immediately securing the competitive
advantage of doing business more effectively and at a much lower cost."
BroadVision makes
personalization possible through two key innovations. The first is the maintenance of a
dynamic personal profile for each user of a BroadVision-enabled Web site. Like an
attentive sales person or a responsive business manager, the personal profile learns, and
remembers, all that it can about the user, and then deploys that information in order to
enhance the user experience.
The second
innovation is an authoring framework for creating a rich array of business rules that
determine which content, products, and advertisements are shown to which customers.
Through easy-to-use administration tools, business managers with no programming skills can
enter content into the system's data base, and write any number of personalized business
rules (e.g., "If the prospect is a purchasing manager, show Product Pricing Schedule A.)
A RAPID RETURN ON
INVESTMENT
These innovations are finding an attentive audience, Nearly 300 companies, from startups to global market leaders, have adopted the BroadVision approach to personalization, including such, household names as American Airlines, Circuit City, Nortel, and Toyota. One striking example of the capabilities of personalization is the recently launched business-to-business Web site operated by RS Components, a leading global distributor of electronic and industrial supplies. The RS Cornponents site provides the company's 150,000 customers with easy, intuitive access to more than 100,000 products as intelligently as if each customer had own personal sales agent. Because the system is Internet-based, customers can take the world with them as easily from a laptop computer as they can from the home office. In addition, the system routinely brings customers special offers related to their fieIds of interest, boosting the size and frequency of orders. "By providing personalized services to our customers, we hope to create greater loyalty," says RS managing director Grant Raby. "And with more satisfied, loyal customers, we can enerate considerable repeat business resulting in a rapid return on investment." For more information about Toshiba portables, desktops, or servers, visit us at www.toshiba.com or call 1-800-TOSHIBA. Look for our next profile: Chronologue Systems On Intelligent Time Management.
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