June 2009

IN THIS ISSUE
Feature Story:  Hubspan and IBM Launch WebSpan Integration Platform

Executive Q&A: Hubspan VP of Client Services, Ralph Pryor

Integration Spotlight:  Customer Integration: How to retain customers and grow revenue

News & Views:  Articles on Strategic IT, Swine Flu and the Supply Chain, and CEOs on Innovation

Featured Story:  Hubspan and IBM Launch WebSpan Integration Platform

The Hubspan team recently returned from the IBM IMPACT 2009 conference, where we launched a new joint solution with IBM, branded “WebSpan”. WebSpan is a SaaS Integration Platform that combines Hubspan’s on-demand integration platform with key components of IBM WebSphere integration software. The result is an enterprise-class solution that helps companies of all sizes implement business integration with partners, customers and systems to improve business processes while cutting costs, complexity and management overhead.

WebSpan is a single instance, multi-tenant platform, which enables cost-effective business integration and ease of scalability, while optimizing the sharing of resources across integration communities. WebSpan is available with specific solution packages to meet the needs of a wide range of companies and business processes, with an initial set of offerings targeting supply chain, demand chain, ecommerce, logistics and financial integration.

Whether you need to improve the connections between you and your customers, enable a marketplace-commerce application with multiple vendors, integrate logistics automation, automate invoicing or any other business process, WebSpan has a solution that works for you.

“Our clients are asking us for cloud-based platforms that offer robust and comprehensive integration capabilities,” said Steve Worrall, vice president of WebSphere BPM, Connectivity, Commerce and GB Sales for IBM. “These companies are increasingly looking for a flexible solution that provides an easy entry point, delivering rapid and quantifiable business value. WebSpan expands our clients” choices when implementing connectivity and integration solutions.

WebSpan leverages a Software-as-a-Service model to reduce the cost and complexity of integrating collaborative processes within and between enterprises. As a cloud-based solution, WebSpan enables on-demand integration between companies, applications and business processes.

The solution is designed and priced for ease of deployment and scale. Customers have minimal up-front cost and no additional hardware or software requirements. Its subscription-based pricing allows companies to pay for the solution as an operating expense versus a capital expenditure. In today’s demanding economy, this “pay-as-you-grow” model helps you tackle integration challenges by offering an affordable starting point. With the WebSpan solution, you can start with one business process or integration project and then easily add new processes and communities.

WebSpan is marketed and sold by both the IBM global sales network and Hubspan to ensure broad awareness of this critical integration solution to customers worldwide.

For more information, go to www.hubspan.com/webspan or email webspan@hubspan.com.

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Executive Q & A

Ralph Pryor has more than 20 years experience in high tech services. For Hubspan, he leads the company’s client services operation, overseeing implementation services, customer and partner on-boarding, change management, project services, and the overall customer experience. His teams provide global assistance to all companies and people in the Hubspan integration community. Today, he talks to “Connections” about what it takes to keep a customer happy, including the main principles his organization follows, how Hubspan maintains a high customer retention rate, and how to ensure the right people in a company are involved with the integration process.

Connections: What are the main principles your client services organization follow?

Pryor: There are three guiding principles we follow, which are: keep it simple, make it easy, and be responsive. These may seem overly simplistic for a technology company, but they truly are the keys to maintaining great customer relationships.

First, keep it simple. Business integration, and the processes and technology behind what we do, can be complex; however, our job is to keep the customer process, our explanations, and our interactions with customers or partners as simple as possible. Second, make it easy. This is all about working within the processes and culture of the customer or partner organizations. For example, if a company has established processes around a certain business process, we are happy to accept those and make sure the integration piece flows nicely into that process. If they don’t, we are able to provide guidance and mapping as to what processes, methods, and guidelines are needed to make the integration work seamlessly. Third, be responsive. As you can imagine, this is our commitment to listen to the customer and to communicate in a timely manner. We take great pride in our fast response times across Hubspan, from customer support personnel to our senior executives.

We are able to adhere to these guidelines, because we’ve been in this business for ten years, and we have a great technology platform. With this expertise and capability, we can leverage our learnings from all of the integration work we do and repeat proven practices and methods. For our customers, this provides a streamlined experience and great customer service.

Connections: What is your customer retention rate and why do you think customers stay with Hubspan?

Pryor: Hubspan maintains a more than 95% retention rate with our customers. And more importantly, we continue to enjoy growth among our customer base, as our customers scale their integration projects or add new business processes to the Hubspan integration platform. The secret behind this is great customer relationships.

What our customers tell us is that they continue to work with Hubspan because of the value, both from a cost-effectiveness perspective as well as the strong ROI they receive; the overall service we provide; and because it is easy to do business with us. We do an annual customer survey to make sure we are meeting our customer needs and tracking our customer satisfaction. In the most recent survey, customers gave Hubspan an average score of 94%, or very satisfied, across all major categories, which included overall coordination and management, quality, communication skills, knowledge and expertise, understanding of customer needs, and responsiveness. The scores were above 95% on questions regarding the platform and technology capabilities.

Here are just some of the comments customers provided as part of this survey when asked what stands out for them about Hubspan people and technology:

• “The flexibility that it provides to exchange data of any format (EDI,XML etc) and different flavors of those formats, and the expertise in these areas that Hubspan provides.”
• “Excellence in expertise as well as client service and support.”
• “Reliability and security.”
• “The creativity and responsiveness of many of the Hubspan engineers. Time and again they have helped us develop solutions to meet customer’s requirements and have often gone the extra mile to ensure that these solutions were deployed on time.”
• “Speed and market know-how.”
• “I have a high level of confidence that the files are transferred safely, and if I have questions, all I need to do is call.”

Connections: What is the most common question customers ask you?

Pryor: One of the first questions all customers ask is: How long will this take? And they are almost always pleasantly surprised with the answer we give them, because we can implement integration very quickly. Before companies work with Hubspan, they are used to working with integration processes or systems that take months to implement. So, when we tell them we can test the integration in a number of days, and have the first integration process up and running within a few weeks at most, they are shocked, in a good way. We are able to do this because we are a cloud-based platform delivered as a managed service, and we have many years experience and strong expertise in business integration. All of this enables an incredibly fast time to implementation and fast time to value for the customer.

Connections: Who within the customer company should be involved in the business integration process?

Pryor: We have found the most success when there are people on both the business and the IT side involved. The IT folks make sure we know all the protocols, formats and applications that will be used, and the business side ensures we are meeting the needs of the business. Specifically, on the IT side, it is good to have someone from networking and connectivity as well as whoever is handling the application or business process involved. Depending on the size of the company, we might work with as few as one person or as many as five or more. It’s common that we play a mediating role not only between technologies but between IT and business divisions within a company, and we enjoy bringing those parts of the company together and creating a successful process for them all.

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Integration Spotlight

Customer Integration: How to retain customers and grow revenue

We have a saying at Hubspan about customers . . . “bring them into the family and love them to death”. Corny? Perhaps. But every employee at Hubspan knows this as a key component of our culture. And today more than ever, knowing your customer, understanding your customer and, yes, loving your customer is paramount for every business. Because, if you don’t love your customers, someone else will, and that someone else will be the competition. Using integration technologies is one way to keep your customers close and build a stronger and more profitable relationship.

The current economic climate is making it even more vital for companies to protect their existing customer base while increasing top line revenue. Keeping your customers happy and protecting that revenue base is crucial to not only growth, but in many cases, survival. Research has found that during times of uncertainty there is increased anxiety that causes a change in customer attitudes. Customers are more likely to search for alternatives. Customers then compare their current provider against the results of their search for alternatives. It is inevitable that this will happen to nearly all companies. As part of this, the customer experience becomes even more important, as it is one of the top reasons customers choose one company over the other.

Now more than ever, companies should make sure they are doing everything possible to strengthen and maintain relationships with existing customers. The cost of acquiring new customers is significantly higher than the cost of maintaining a current one. So while new sales efforts should not come to a halt, you need to be laser focused on your existing customer base.

Take Amazon.com, the leading etailer, as an example. The customer is paramount at Amazon.com, and every job and technology investment are about improving the customer experience and making it easy to find everything they need to buy online. In Q4 of 2008, when most retainers were suffering one of the worst holiday seasons on record, Amazon.com achieved sales growth of 18% for the quarter.

Past economic downturns and research have proven that:

• Companies that compete and win based on customer experience are rewarded with customers who are loyal and spend more money today and in the future
• Opportunities exist by delivering a valued customer experience targeted at both current customers and competitor’s customers
• Opportunities exist by delivering a valued customer experience targeted at both current customers and competitor’s customers
• Focusing on the customer and doing business “their way” creates a competitive barrier and a tendency towards long term loyalty
• Actions taken today to secure and grow existing customers will be invaluable to secure and grow new customers in the future

So what can you do from a business and IT perspective to make sure your company is putting the customer first and retaining that vital revenue base? There are three key things you should be doing:

1. Investing in simple, affordable technologies that focus on tightening and strengthening relationships and deliver value to the customer
2. Automating key customer processes to drive out costs for you and your customer
3. Prioritizing projects that deliver quantifiable value to the customer within 3-6 months

One of those technologies that tighten and strengthen customer relationships, while at the same time delivering value to the customer organization, is business integration. Integration strengthens customer relationships and increases the “stickiness” to your company, as switching costs become higher. This, at the same time, creates a barrier to entry for the competition, since your customer is closer to you. With integration, you have greater visibility into your customer’s business and can often be proactive in identifying ways to further improve processes or find issues in transactions.

Most importantly, business integration allows you to say, “yes”, when a customer asks you to do business their way.

Several of Hubspan’s customers have experienced the value of business integration firsthand. For example, a leading Web commerce company used customer integration with Hubspan to manage its b2b e-Commerce operation and e-procurement process. The results were not only increased automation and fewer manual processes, but more importantly, higher revenues and 100% customer retention.

Hubspan Solution: Web Commerce Customer Integration
Results:

• Captured 20% more business with existing customers
• Automated nearly 95% of all orders
• Significantly cut order costs
• 100% customer retention of integrated accounts

Another Hubspan customer in the biotech industry used integration to seamlessly connect their online catalog and ordering system with their customers’ systems. To achieve this, the company needed to work with a variety of protocols and applications in their customer community.

Hubspan Solution: Customer Integration for Order Management and Catalog Synchronization

Results:

• Grew revenue 25% with integrated accounts.
• Increased profit margin10%
• Improved order accuracy to 99%, which in turn improved the customer experience and account retention

As you look at your business plan for the rest of the year, think about how business process automation and deeper integration of customer-related processes can help. Customer integration can play a critical role in helping your company maintain strong customer retention, secure new customers, increase sales volume and drive fast time to value for customers. The current economic climate is making it even more vital for companies to protect their existing customer base while increasing top line revenue.

To learn more about how Hubspan can help you achieve customer integration quickly and cost-effectively, please email info@hubspan.com.

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News & Views

A back-to-basics strategic approach to IT
By David Andrew, Enterprise Management Quarterly

In this interesting piece, the author argues that IT should be used strategically. He advocates for changing the mindset from software to service which requires organizations to think about technology differently. Successful organizations will integrate technology within the context of an overall business process system. The three key points in this article are:

• Information technology can and should be used strategically
• Smart organizations that leverage IT to strategically advance their missions and goals will gain a competitive advantage.
• Successful organizations will integrate technology within the context of an overall business process system.

The Swine Flu: Your Supply Chain Moment of Truth?
By Jim Burleigh, IndustryWeek

The supply chain has faced significant obstacles in 2009 with the prolonged recession and economic fears and then the Somali pirates terrorizing merchant ships along the high seas. Now, another potential problem has emerged with the swine flu that not only threatens the lives of thousands, but the economic lifeline of businesses. Mutual real-time visibility and collaboration between your company and those in your supply chain will determine how effectively you respond to any shock to production.

CEOs pessimistic on innovation – the time to innovate is now!
By Gartner analyst Mark McDonald

The April 20th, 2009 issue of BusinessWeek focused on the issue of innovation and its role in the economic recovery. The article featured a survey of CEOs conducted by the magazine and Boston Consulting Group that showed that innovation interest is waning in the face of the economic crisis and investment in new products and services to be flat. This is great news for leaders who want to innovate and create new sources of competitive advantage. The reason is simple. Competitive advantage comes in part from being different and new in ways that matter to customers. If your competition chooses not to innovate, then they are opening the door for you to do something new and capture the market’s attention and dollars.

Have a great customer that’s tough to do business with? Chances are they are already in our extensive trading network and can be onboarded into a frictionless process very quickly. Drop us a line with the name of your trading partner and we’ll perform a quick search for you.
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