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  • What development terms come from the construction industry?

    - by Renesis
    When talking with colleagues about software design and development principles, I've noticed one of the most common sources for analogies is the construction industry. It would be quite useful to have a list of what programming/development terms and concepts are borrowed from construction industry? (And please provide a description or experiences regarding that topic.) [Credit to Programming concepts taken from the arts and humanities for the idea]

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  • Willy Rotstein at the Oracle Retail Industry Forum

    - by user801960
    In the video below, Willy Rotstein from Oracle Retail talks about the success of the Oracle Retail Industry Forum that took place in Berlin in October.  Willy talks about the main discussion topics at the forum and summarises the thoughts of the retailers that attended the forum.  The forum was an excellent way for retailers to come together and discuss the challenges of the industry and share experiences in developing solutions to those challenges.  

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  • Why CFOs Should Care About Big Data

    - by jmorourke
    The topic of “big data” clearly has reached a tipping point in 2012.  With plenty of coverage over the past few years in the IT press, we are now starting to see the topic of “big data” covered in mainstream business press, including a cover story in the October 2012 issue of the Harvard Business Review.  To help customers understand the challenges of managing “big data” as well as the opportunities that can be created by leveraging “big data”, Oracle has recently run and published the results of a customer survey, as well as white papers and articles on this topic.  Most recently, we commissioned a white paper titled “Mastering Big Data: CFO Strategies to Transform Insight into Opportunity”. The premise here is that “big data” is not just a topic that CIOs should pay attention to, but one that CFOs should understand and take advantage of as well.  Clearly, whoever masters the art and science of big data will be positioned for competitive advantage in their industries or markets.  That’s why smart CFOs are taking control of big data and business analytics projects, not just to uncover new ways to drive growth in a slowing global economy, but also to be a catalyst for change in the enterprise.  With an increasing number of CFOs now responsible for overseeing IT investments and providing strategic insight to the board, CFOs will be increasingly called upon to take a leadership role in assessing the value of “big data” initiatives, building on their traditional skills in reporting and helping managers analyze data to support decision making. Here’s a link to the white paper referenced above, which is posted on the Oracle C-Central/CFO web site, as well as some other resources that can help CFOs master the topic of “big data”: White Paper “Mastering Big Data:  CFO Strategies to Transform Insight into Opportunity CFO Market Watch article:  “Does Big Data Affect the CFO?” Oracle Survey Report:  “From Overload to Impact – An Industry Scorecard on Big Data Industry Challenges” Upcoming Big Data Webcast with Andrew McAfee Here’s a general link to Oracle C-Central/CFO in case you want to start there: www.oracle.com/c-central/cfo Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need additional information:  [email protected]

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  • My first time in the gambling industry

    - by sfrj
    I am a Java enterprise developer with almost 3 years of professional experience. Soon i am going to have a face to face interview with a company in the gambling industry. I already did successfully a phone screening and now for the personal interview i suppose they will ask me about some kind of white board problem or system design task. I think i am in the right place to ask about this, and would appreciate a lot if someone would give me some tips or share something related to his own experience. The things i am more interested in regarding my interview are: What are the most common challenges for programmers, in this industry? Any idea or suggestion on a white board problem they may ask me? Could you point me to some links where i can find information on the topic or sample problems in this industry?. I personally find this question very interesting not just for me. Also i think, the given answers can help also others in a similar situation. Just what i want to say whit this last comment is: Please avoid, answers like: www.google.com and so on...

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  • Dental SEO Bolsters the Popularity of Dental Care Insurance Coverage

    The benefits of dental insurance have been even more stressed upon by the well-known icons on television, who constantly seem to have flashing white flawless pearly whites. These types of teeth are caused by proper care, expensive dental consideration and therefore the need for costly group dental insurance plans offered by insurance providers that decrease in number by the day.

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  • Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy

    - by kellsey.ruppel
    Oracle Unveils Industry’s Broadest Cloud Strategy Adds Social Cloud and Showcases early customers Redwood Shores, Calif. – June 6, 2012 “Almost seven years of relentless engineering and innovation plus key strategic acquisitions. An investment of billions. We are now announcing the most comprehensive Cloud on the planet Earth,” said Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison. “Most cloud vendors only have niche assets. They don’t have platforms to extend. Oracle is the only vendor that offers a complete suite of modern, socially-enabled applications, all based on a standards-based platform.” News Facts In a major strategy update today, Larry Ellison announced the industry’s broadest and most advanced Cloud strategy and introduced Oracle Cloud Social Services, a broad Enterprise Social Platform offering. Oracle Cloud delivers a broad set of industry-standards based, integrated services that provide customers with subscription-based access to Oracle Platform Services, Application Services, and Social Services, all completely managed, hosted and supported by Oracle. Offering a wide range of business applications and platform services, the Oracle Cloud is the only cloud to enable customers to avoid the data and business process fragmentation that occurs when using multiple, siloed public clouds. Oracle Cloud is powered by leading enterprise-grade infrastructure, including Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic, providing customers and partners with a high-performance, reliable, and secure infrastructure for running critical business applications. Oracle Cloud enables easy self-service for both business users and developers. Business users can order, configure, extend, and monitor their applications. Developers and administrators can easily develop, deploy, monitor and manage their applications. As part of the event, Oracle also showcased several early Oracle Cloud customers and partners including system integrators and independent software vendors. Oracle Cloud Platform Services Built on a common, complete, standards-based and enterprise-grade set of infrastructure components, Oracle Cloud Platform Services enable customers to speed time to market and lower costs by quickly building, deploying and managing bespoke applications. Oracle Cloud Platform Services will include: Database Services to manage data and build database applications with the Oracle Database. Java Services to develop, deploy and manage Java applications with Oracle WebLogic. Developer Services to allow application developers to collaboratively build applications. Web Services to build Web applications rapidly using PHP, Ruby, and Python. Mobile Services to allow developers to build cross-platform native and HTML5 mobile applications for leading smartphones and tablets. Documents Services to allow project teams to collaborate and share documents through online workspaces and portals. Sites Services to allow business users to develop and maintain visually engaging .com sites Analytics Services to allow business users to quickly build and share analytic dashboards and reports through the Cloud. Oracle Cloud Application Services Oracle Cloud Application Services provides customers access to the industry’s broadest range of enterprise applications available in the cloud today, with built-in business intelligence, social and mobile capabilities. Easy to setup, configure, extend, use and administer, Oracle Cloud Application Services will include: ERP Services: A complete set of Financial Accounting, Project Management, Procurement, Sourcing, and Governance, Risk & Compliance solutions. HCM Services: A complete Human Capital Management solution including Global HR, Workforce Lifecycle Management, Compensation, Benefits, Payroll and other solutions. Talent Management Services: A complete Talent Management solution including Recruiting, Sourcing, Performance Management, and Learning. Sales and Marketing Services: A complete Sales and Marketing solution including Sales Planning, Territory Management, Leads & Opportunity Management, and Forecasting. Customer Experience Services: A complete Customer Service solution including Web Self-Service, Contact Centers, Knowledge Management, Chat, and e-mail Management. Oracle Cloud Social Services Oracle Cloud Social Services provides the most broad and complete enterprise social platform available in the cloud today.  With Oracle Cloud Social Services, enterprises can engage with their customers on a range of social media properties in a comprehensive and meaningful fashion including social marketing, commerce, service and listening. The platform also provides enterprises with a rich social networking solution for their employees to collaborate effectively inside the enterprise. Oracle’s integrated social platform will include: Oracle Social Network to enable secure enterprise collaboration and purposeful social networking for business. Oracle Social Data Services to aggregate data from social networks and enterprise data sources to enrich business applications. Oracle Social Marketing and Engagement Services to enable marketers to centrally create, publish, moderate, manage, measure and report on their social marketing campaigns. Oracle Social Intelligence Services to enable marketers to analyze social media interactions and to enable customer service and sales teams to engage with customers and prospects effectively. Supporting Resources Oracle Cloud – learn more cloud.oracle.com – sign up now Webcast – watch the replay About Oracle Oracle engineers hardware and software to work together in the cloud and in your data center. For more information about Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL), visit www.oracle.com. TrademarksOracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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  • BPM in Retail Industry

    - by Sanjeev Sharma
    The following series of blog posts discuss common BPM use-cases in the Retail industry: Retail 2.0 represents the transformation in the retail industry triggered by the accelerated shift towards online and mobile technologies and social shopping paradigms. Never before has the consumer been of more importance or should i say in greater control, especially so due to the shrinking information asymmetry between merchants and consumers that has tilted the balance of power in the latter’s favor. For details, click Customer Experience Management for Retail 2.0 - part 1 / 2 Below is a concept architecture for streamlining front-end, mid-office and back-end interfaces through shared process to achieve consistency and efficiency in managing the customer experience from order capture to order provisioning. For details, click Customer Experience Management for Retail 2.0 - part 2 / 2 ARTS Retail Reference Model (Coming Soon!)

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  • Have Your Cake and Eat it Too: Industry Best Practices + Flexibility

    - by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies
    By Richard Garraputa, VP of Sales & Marketing, brij Richard joined brij in 1996 after graduating from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with degrees in Information Systems and Accounting. He directs brij’s overall strategies of both the business development and marketing departments. Companies looking for new ERP systems spend so much time comparing features and functions of software products but too often short change the value of their own processes.  Company managers I meet often claim that they are implementing a new ERP system so they can perform better and faster.  When asked how, the answer is often “by implementing best practices”.  But the term ‘best practices’ is frequently used to mean ‘doing things the way everyone else does them’ rather than a starting point or benchmark to build upon by adding your own value. Of course, implementing standardized processes across an enterprise is an important step in improving operational efficiencies.  But not all companies are alike.  Do you ever tell your customers “We are just like our competition and have no competitive differentiation”?  Probably not.  So why should the implementation of your business processes be just like your competitor’s?  Even within the same industry, companies differentiate themselves by leveraging their unique expertise and approach to business.  These unique aspects—the competitive differentiators that companies use to thrive in a crowded marketplace—can and should be supported by the implementation of business systems like ERP. Modern ERP systems like Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne have a broad and deep functional footprint designed to integrate a company’s core operations.  But how can a company take advantage of this footprint without blowing up their implementation budget?  Some ERP vendors claim to solve this challenge by stating that their systems come pre-configured with ‘best practices’.  Too often what they are really saying is that you will have to abandon your key operational differentiators to fit a vendor’s template for your business—or extend your implementation and postpone the realization of any benefits. Thankfully for midsize companies, there is an alternative to the undesirable options of extended implementation projects or abandoning their competitive differentiators.  Oracle Accelerate Solutions speed the time it takes to implement JD Edwards EnterpriseOne solution based on your unique business characteristics, getting your new ERP system up and running faster without forcing your business to fit a cookie-cutter solution. We’ve been a JD Edwards implementation partner since 1986 and we now leverage Oracle Business Accelerators—cloud based rapid implementation tools built and maintained by Oracle. Oracle Business Accelerators deliver the benefits of embedded industry best practices without forcing every customer in to one set of processes like many template or “clone and go” approaches do. You retain the ability to reconfigure your applications—without customization—as your business changes. Wielded by Oracle partners with industry-specific domain expertise, Oracle Accelerate Solution implementations powered by Oracle Business Accelerators help automate the application configuration to fit your business better, faster. For example, on a recent project at a manufacturing company, the project manager told me that Oracle Business Accelerators helped get them to Conference Room Pilot 20% faster than with a traditional approach. Time savings equal cost savings. And if ‘better and faster’ is your goal for your business performance, shouldn’t it be the goal for your ERP implementation as well? Established in 1986, brij has been dedicated solely to helping its customers implement Oracle’s JD Edwards solutions and to maximize the value of those customers’ IT investments. They are a Gold level member in Oracle PartnerNetwork and an Oracle Accelerate Solution provider.

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  • Take care to unhook Anonymous Delegates

    - by David Vallens
    Anonymous delegates are great, they elimiante the need for lots of small classes that just pass values around, however care needs to be taken when using them, as they are not automatically unhooked when the function you created them in returns. In fact after it returns there is no way to unhook them. Consider the following code.   using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Diagnostics; namespace ConsoleApplication1 { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { SimpleEventSource t = new SimpleEventSource(); t.FireEvent(); FunctionWithAnonymousDelegate(t); t.FireEvent(); } private static void FunctionWithAnonymousDelegate(SimpleEventSource t) { t.MyEvent += delegate(object sender, EventArgs args) { Debug.WriteLine("Anonymous delegate called"); }; t.FireEvent(); } } public class SimpleEventSource { public event EventHandler MyEvent; public void FireEvent() { if (MyEvent == null) { Debug.WriteLine("Attempting to fire event - but no ones listening"); } else { Debug.WriteLine("Firing event"); MyEvent(this, EventArgs.Empty); } } } } If you expected the anonymous delegates do die with the function that created it then you would expect the output Attempting to fire event - but no ones listeningFiring eventAnonymous delegate calledAttempting to fire event - but no ones listening However what you actually get is Attempting to fire event - but no ones listeningFiring eventAnonymous delegate calledFiring eventAnonymous delegate called In my example the issue is just slowing things down, but if your delegate modifies objects, then you could end up with dificult to diagnose bugs. A solution to this problem is to unhook the delegate within the function var myDelegate = delegate(){Console.WriteLine("I did it!");}; MyEvent += myDelegate; // .... later MyEvent -= myDelegate;

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  • Regulation of the software industry

    - by Flexo
    Every few years someone proposes tighter regulation for the software industry. This IEEE article has been getting some attention lately on the subject. If software engineers who write programs for systems that expose the public to physical or financial risk knew they would be tested on their competence, the thinking goes, it would reduce the flaws and failures in code—and maybe save a few lives in the bargain. I'm skeptical about the value and merit of this. To my mind it looks like a land grab by those that proposed it. The quote that clinches that for me is: The exam will test for basic knowledge, not mastery of subject matter because the big failures (e.g. THERAC-25) seem to be complex, subtle issues that "basic knowledge" would never be sufficient to prevent. Ignoring any local issues (such as existing protections of the title Engineer in some jurisdictions): The aims are noble - avoid the quacks/charlatans1 and make that distinction more obvious to those that buy their software. Can tighter regulation of the software industry ever achieve it's original goal? 1 Exactly as regulation of the medical profession was intended to do.

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  • Managed Cloud Services Wins Another Prestigious Industry Award

    - by Dori DiMassimo-Oracle
    Over the last 90 days, Oracle Managed Cloud Services has been the proud recipient of TWO prestigious industry awards for service excellence and customer value leadership.  The most recent award is last month's 2014 Frost & Sullivan Best Practice Award - North America Managed Cloud Customer Value Leadership Award, which rated Oracle Managed Cloud Services as the clear leader versus other providers; Managed Cloud received an "exceptional" rating in 9 of 10 evaluation categories.  The research report  is an excellent look at our industry and what is valued by cloud customers looking for a managed solution.   In April, Managed Cloud was a repeat winner of the Outsourcing Excellence Award - 2014 Outsourcing Excellence Award - Best ITO Infrastructure (Sony Computer Entertainment America).  Last year we won the award for Best Cloud: 2013 Outsourcing Excellence Award - Best Cloud (Take-Two Interactive)  These awards are a great testimony of the transformation of Managed Cloud Services to a true Cloud-based business and a strategic and relevant part of the Oracle Cloud Solutions portfolio.  Frost & Sullivan, in particular, recognizes our vision and our capability of successfully managing business transactions in the cloud.

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  • Oracle Tutor: XPDL conversion (and why you should care)

    - by mary.keane
    You may have noticed that the Oracle Business Process Converter feature in Tutor 14 supports "XPDL" conversion to Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite (BPA), Oracle Business Process Management Suite (BPM), and Oracle Tutor, and you may have briefly wondered "what is XPDL?" before you moved on to the Visio import feature (a very popular feature in Tutor 14). This posting is for those who do not yet understand (or care) about XPDL and process modeling. Many of us (and I'm including myself) have spent years working in the process definition arena: we've written procedures, designed systems and software to help others write procedures, and have been responsible for embedding policies and procedures into training material for employees. We've worked with tools such as Oracle Tutor, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Word, and UPK. Most of us have never worked with "modeling tools" before, and we certainly never had to understand BPMN. It's a brave new world in this arena, and companies desperately need people with policy and procedural system expertise to be able to work with system analysts so there is a seamless transfer of knowledge from IT to employees. When working with applications, a picture is worth a thousand words, so eventually you're going to need to understand and be able to work with business process models. XPDL is an acronym for XML Process Definition Language, and it is an interchange format for business process models. It allows you to take a BPMN model that was developed in one workflow application such as BizAgi and import it into another workflow application or a true BPMN management system such as Oracle BPM. Specifically, the XPDL format contains the graphical information of a model as well as any executable information. By using a common format, models can be moved from a basic modeling application used by business owners to applications used by system architects. Over 80 applications support the XPDL format, including MetaStorm ProVision, BEA ALBPM, BizAgi, and Tibco. I mention these applications because we have provided XSLT mapping files specifically for these vendors. Oracle Business Process Converter was designed with user extensibility in mind, and thus users can add their own XML files so that additional XPDL models from other vendors can be converted to BPM, BPA, and Oracle Tutor. Instructions on how to add your own files can be found in Appendix 4 of the Oracle Business Converter manual. Let's take a visual look at how this works. Here is an example of a model devloped in BizAgi: This model can be created by the average business user without a large learning curve, and it's a good start for the system analyst who will be adding web services as well as for the business manager who manages the process described in the model. By exporting this model as XPDL, the information can be converted into Oracle BPA and Oracle BPM as well as converted to Oracle Tutor to become the framework for a procedure. Through this conversion feature, one graphic illustration of a business process can be used by a system analyst, business analyst, business manager, and employee, as seen below. Model Converted to Tutor Procedure Below is the task section of the procedure after conversion from an XPDL file. Model converted to BPA Model converted to BPM End users still want step by step instructions on how to perform their jobs, so procedures (Oracle Tutor) and application simulations (UPK) are still a critical piece of the solution. But IT professionals need graphic descriptions of how the applications work, regardless of whether there are any tasks involving humans. Now there is a way to convert procedures (Oracle Tutor docx files) and basic models (XPDL files) so that business managers and system analysts can share process information. References Wikipedia XPDL. Workflow Management Coalition, XPDL Support and Resources Oracle Business Process Converter manual, Oracle Tutor 14 Oracle Business Process Management 11g If you have any XPDL conversion stories to share, we'd love to hear from you. Best wishes for the coming new year, Mary Keane, Senior Development Manager, Oracle Tutor and BPM

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  • C# in vedio game industry?

    - by kasparov
    Other than Indie game development, C# is also used for in house tool development at large studios. I have two questions -: 1) Is microsoft planning to release a native C# compiler sharing the backend code generator with the C++ compiler? http://www.compilerjobs.com/db/jobs_view.php?editid1=648 2) If microsoft IS planning a native C# compiler, then can C# replace C++ as the industry standard in AAA vedio games?

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  • Managing Project and Portfolio Risk in the Energy Industry with Oracle's Primavera Solutions

    The current economic situation is causing energy companies to take a closer look at how they manage project and portfolio risk. Join Guy Barlow, industry strategist for the oil and gas and utility industries at Oracle, and learn how Oracle's Primavera project and portfolio risk management solutions can help executives and project team members successfully manage their CapEx and maintenance projects within a risk adjusted framework to complete projects on time and within budget.

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  • Oracle's Vision of the CRM Industry

    Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President for Oracle's CRM Solutions talks to Cliff Godwin about the state of the Customer Relationship Management Industry today, Oracle's CRM Vision and Oracle's comprehensive CRM On Demand Model.

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  • Future Projections For the SEO Services Industry

    The SEO services industry has emerged, over the last one and a half decade, to be what is arguably a billion-dollar enterprise; employing tens of thousands of people (or more) from all over the world. It is one of the things that were born of the Internet revolution that took place in the mid to late 90s, and which is still unraveling even at this moment.

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  • Oracle BI Applications for Industry Sectors

    - by Mike.Hallett(at)Oracle-BI&EPM
    Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE Oracle BI Applications already provide pre-built line-of-business analytic applications to over 4,000 customers: these expose the data otherwise locked inside ERP and CRM applications, giving the business user the analytics they need, and a greater ability to self-service ad-hoc queries. Now you can also take advantage of the pre-built Oracle BI Applications approach for industry sector specific analytics to streamline your client’s operations, offer better services, and increase profit margins. Find out more at http://www.oracle.com/us/solutions/business-analytics/analytic-applications/industry/overview/index.html. Retail Education Oracle Retail Merchandising Analytics Oracle Student Information Analytics Oracle Retail Customer Analytics Public Sector Financial Services Oracle Tax Analytics Oracle Financial Analytics Manufacturing Health Care Oracle Manufacturing Analytics Oracle Enterprise Healthcare Analytics Asset Intensive Oracle Clinical Development Analytics Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics Oracle Operating Room Analytics Related Links Health Sciences Analytic Applications for Your Business Role Oracle Health Sciences Clinical Development Analytics Analytic Applications for Your Product Line Oracle Argus Analytics Oracle Business Intelligence Tools and Technology Communication Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine "The adoption of Oracle Financial Services Analytic Applications is of great significance to the bank's transition to more rigorous and risk-averse management practices."Yang Changxue, Project Manager Oracle Communications Data Model /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi; mso-fareast-language:EN-US;}

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  • Understanding the value of Customer Experience & Loyalty for the Telecommunications Industry

    - by raul.goycoolea
    Worried by economic woes and market forces, especially in mature markets, communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly focus on improving customer experience. In fact, it seems difficult to find a major message by a C-level executive in the developed world that does not include something on "meeting and exceeding customers' needs". Frequently in customer satisfaction studies by prominent firms, CSPs fall short of the leadership demonstrated by other industries that take customer-centric approaches to their bottom-line strategies. Consider the following:Despite the continued impact of global economic crisis, in July 2010, Apple Computer posted record revenue and net quarterly profit. Those who attribute the results primarily to the iPhone 4 launch should note that Apple also shipped around 30% more Macintosh computers than the same period the previous year. Even sales of the iPod line increased by 8% in a highly commoditized, shrinking media player market. Finally, Apple began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of more than 3 million units. What does Apple have that the others lack? Well, some great products (and services) to be sure, but it also excels at customer service and support, marketing, and distribution, and has one of the strongest brands globally. Its products are useful, simple to use, easy to acquire and augment, high quality, and considered very cool. They also evoke such an emotional response from many of Apple's customers, which they turn up their noses at competitive products.In other words, Apple appears to have mastered virtually every aspect of customer experience and the resultant loyalty of its customer base - even in difficult financial times. Through that unwavering customer focus, Apple continues to drive its revenues and profits to new heights. Other customer loyalty leaders like Wal-Mart, Google, Toyota and Honda are also doing well by focusing on customer experience as an essential driver of profitability. Service providers should note this performance and ask themselves how they might leverage the same principles to increase their own profitability. After all, that is what customer experience and loyalty are all about: profitability.To successfully manage all the critical touch points of customer experience, CSPs must shun the one-size-fits-all approach. They can no longer afford to view customer service fundamentally as an act of altruism - which mentality dates back to the industry's civil service days, when CSPs were typically government organizations that were critical to economic development and public safety.As regulators and public officials have pushed, and continue to push, service providers to new heights of reliability - using incentives and punishments - most CSPs already have some of the fundamental building blocks of customer service in place. Yet despite that history and experience, service providers still lag other industries in providing what is seen as good customer service.As we observed in the TMF's 2009 Insights Research report, Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty & Profitability there has been resurgence in interest by CSPs. More and more of them have stated ambitions to catch up other industries, and they are realizing that good customer service is a powerful strategy for increasing business performance and profitability, not an act of good will.CSPs are recognizing the connection between customer experience and profitability, as demonstrated in many studies. For example, according to research by Bain & Company, a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can yield as much as a 75 percent increase in profits for companies across a range of industries.After decades of customer experience strategy formulation, Bain partner and business author, Frederick Reichheld, considers "would you recommend us to a friend?" as the ultimate question for a customer. How many times have you or your friends recommended an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? What do your children recommend to their peers? Their peers to them?There are certain steps service providers have to take to create more personalized relationships with their customers, as well as reduce churn and increase profitability, all while becoming leaner and more agile. First, they have to define customer experience, we define it as the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service provider(s). Virtually every customer touch point - whether directly or indirectly linked to service providers and their partners - contributes to customer perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately profitability. Gaining leadership in customer experience and satisfaction will not be a simple task, as it is affected by virtually every customer-facing aspect of the service provider, and in turn impacts the service provider deeply - especially on the all-important bottom line. The scope of issues affecting customer experience is complex and dynamic.With new services, devices and applications extending the basis of customer experience to domains beyond the direct control of the service provider, it is likely to increase in complexity and dynamism.Customer loyalty = increased profitsAs stated earlier, customer experience programs are not fundamentally altruistic exercises, but a strategic means of improving competitiveness and profitability in the short and long term. Loyalty is essential to deriving long term profits from customers.Some of the earliest loyalty programs date back to the 1930s, when packaged goods companies offered embedded coupons for rewards to buyers, and eventually retail chains began offering reward programs to frequent shoppers. These programs continued for decades but were leapfrogged in the 1980s by more aggressive programs from the airlines.This movement was led by American Airlines, which launched the first full-scale loyalty marketing program of the modern era with the AAdvantage frequent flyer scheme. It was the first to reward frequent fliers with notional air miles that could be accumulated and later redeemed for free travel. Figure 1: Opportunities example of Customer loyalty driven profitOther airlines and travel providers were quick to grasp the incredible value of providing customers with an incentive to use their company exclusively. Within a few years, dozens of travel industry companies launched similar initiatives and now loyalty programs are achieving near-ubiquity in many service industries, especially those in which it is difficult to differentiate offerings by product attributes.The belief is that increased profitability will result from customer retention efforts because:•    The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship: the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost;•    Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs, or as a percentage of revenue, over the lifetime of the relationship;•    Long term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and less price sensitive which can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume;•    Long term customers may initiate word-of-mouth promotions and referrals, which cost the company nothing and arguably are the most effective form of advertising;•    Long-term customers are more likely to buy ancillary products and higher margin supplemental products;•    Long term customers tend to be satisfied with their relationship with the company and are less likely to switch to competitors, making market entry or competitors gaining market share difficult;•    Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service, as they are familiar with the processes involved, require less 'education', and are consistent in their order placement;•    Increased customer retention and loyalty makes the employees' jobs easier and more satisfying. In turn, happy employees feed back into higher customer satisfaction in a virtuous circle. Figure 2: The virtuous circle of customer loyaltyFigure 2 represents a high-level example of a virtuous cycle driven by customer satisfaction and loyalty, depicting how superiority in product and service offerings, as well as strong customer support by competent employees, lead to higher sales and ultimately profitability. As stated above, this is not a new concept, but succeeding with it is difficult. It has eluded many a company driven to achieve profitability goals. Of course, for this circle to be virtuous, the customer relationship(s) must be profitable.Trying to maintain the loyalty of unprofitable customers is not a viable business strategy. It is, therefore, important that marketers can assess the profitability of each customer (or customer segment), and either improve or terminate relationships that are not profitable. This means each customer's 'relationship costs' must be understood and compared to their 'relationship revenue'. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the most commonly used metric here, as it is generally accepted as a representation of exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary terms, and therefore a determinant of exactly how much a service provider should be willing to spend to acquire or retain that customer.CLV models make several simplifying assumptions and often involve the following inputs:•    Churn rate represents the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period;•    Retention rate is calculated by subtracting the churn rate percentage from 100;•    Period/horizon equates to the units of time into which a customer relationship can be divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period for this purpose. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, often projecting three to seven years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The model horizon is the number of periods used in the calculation;•    Periodic revenue is the amount of revenue collected from a customer in a given period (though this is often extended across multiple periods into the future to understand lifetime value), such as usage revenue, revenues anticipated from cross and upselling, and often some weighting for referrals by a loyal customer to others; •    Retention cost describes the amount of money the service provider must spend, in a given period, to retain an existing customer. Again, this is often forecast across multiple periods. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives and so on;•    Discount rate means the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced method used in more sophisticated CLV calculations;•    Profit margin is the projected profit as a percentage of revenue for the period. This may be reflected as a percentage of gross or net profit. Again, this is generally projected across the model horizon to understand lifetime value.A strong focus on managing these inputs can help service providers realize stronger customer relationships and profits, but there are some obstacles to overcome in achieving accurate calculations of CLV, such as the complexity of allocating costs across the customer base. There are many costs that serve all customers which must be properly allocated across the base, and often a simple proportional allocation across the whole base or a segment may not accurately reflect the true cost of serving that customer;  This is made worse by the fragmentation of customer information, which is likely to be across a variety of product or operations groups, and may be difficult to aggregate due to different representations.In addition, there is the complexity of account relationships and structures to take into consideration. Complex account structures may not be understood or properly represented. For example, a profitable customer may have a separate account for a second home or another family member, which may appear to be unprofitable. If the service provider cannot relate the two accounts, CLV is not properly represented and any resultant cancellation of the apparently unprofitable account may result in the customer churning from the profitable one.In summary, if service providers are to realize strong customer relationships and their attendant profits, there must be a very strong focus on data management. This needs to be coupled with analytics that help business managers and those who work in customer-facing functions offer highly personalized solutions to customers, while maintaining profitability for the service provider. It's clear that acquiring new customers is expensive. Advertising costs, campaign management expenses, promotional service pricing and discounting, and equipment subsidies make a serious dent in a new customer's profitability. That is especially true given the rising subsidies for Smartphone users, which service providers hope will result in greater profits from profits from data services profitability in future.  The situation is made worse by falling prices and greater competition in mature markets.Customer acquisition through industry consolidation isn't cheap either. A North American service provider spent about $2,000 per subscriber in its acquisition of a smaller company earlier this year. While this has allowed it to leapfrog to become the largest mobile service provider in the country, it required a total investment of more than $28 billion (including assumption of the acquiree's debt).While many operating cost synergies clearly made this deal more attractive to the acquiring company, this is certainly an expensive way to acquire customers: the cost per subscriber in this case is not out of line with the prices others have paid for acquisitions.While growth by acquisition certainly increases overall revenues, it often creates tremendous challenges for profitability. Organic growth through increased customer loyalty and retention is a more effective driver of profit, as well as a stronger predictor of future profitability. Service providers, especially those in mature markets, are increasingly recognizing this and taking steps toward a creating a more personalized, flexible and satisfying experience for their customers.In summary, the clearest path to profitability for companies in virtually all industries is through customer retention and maximization of lifetime value. Service providers would do well to recognize this and focus attention on profitable customer relationships.

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  • Beware: Upgrade to ASP.NET MVC 2.0 with care if you use AntiForgeryToken

    - by James Crowley
    If you're thinking of upgrading to MVC 2.0, and you take advantage of the AntiForgeryToken support then be careful - you can easily kick out all active visitors after the upgrade until they restart their browser. Why's this?For the anti forgery validation to take place, ASP.NET MVC uses a session cookie called "__RequestVerificationToken_Lw__". This gets checked for and de-serialized on any page where there is an AntiForgeryToken() call. However, the format of this validation cookie has apparently changed between MVC 1.0 and MVC 2.0. What this means is that when you make to switch on your production server to MVC 2.0, suddenly all your visitors session cookies are invalid, resulting in calls to AntiForgeryToken() throwing exceptions (even on a standard GET request) when de-serializing it: [InvalidCastException: Unable to cast object of type 'System.Web.UI.Triplet' to type 'System.Object[]'.]   System.Web.Mvc.AntiForgeryDataSerializer.Deserialize(String serializedToken) +104[HttpAntiForgeryException (0x80004005): A required anti-forgery token was not supplied or was invalid.]   System.Web.Mvc.AntiForgeryDataSerializer.Deserialize(String serializedToken) +368   System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper.GetAntiForgeryTokenAndSetCookie(String salt, String domain, String path) +209   System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken(String salt, String domain, String path) +16   System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper.AntiForgeryToken() +10  <snip> So you've just kicked all your active users out of your site with exceptions until they think to restart their browser (to clear the session cookies). The only work around for now is to either write some code that wipes this cookie - or disable use of AntiForgeryToken() in your MVC 2.0 site until you're confident all session cookies will have expired. That in itself isn't very straightforward, given how frequently people tend to hibernate/standby their machines - the session cookie will only clear once the browser has been shut down and re-opened. Hope this helps someone out there!

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