Reporting from Sterling Commerce Customer Connection
Randall's session kept up on the topic of interconnectivity and the importance of merging AT&T and Sterling Commerce product footprints to give a new experience to the customer. And the key of this experience lay in making it completely channel-agnostic, location-agnostic and then finally, device-agnostic. Randall emphasized his point multiple times waving his iphone that what we need is the same performance and same security of the enterprise on the iphone. He also talked about dollars saved by using new technologies like cisco's telepresence (as against everyone landing up physically in his office) and of course, the importance of spectrum for a telecom company.
On the final day, Bob Irwin, CEO of Sterling Commerce, joined us at our table as part of a partner-lunch thank you event. Sitting next to me, one could not but be struck by the passion of his convictions and disarming, almost goofy candour in his self-deprecating humor. Bob's message was pretty much along the same lines. To underline the potential of cross-company leverage, he talked about AT&T's 2,000+ sales managers pushing one Sterling Commerce product each (and that, by as the collective gasps in the room echoed, would be quite something). The second interesting point that I caught on was that of mobile as the 4th channel - after direct, call centers and the internet. He took pains in differentiating that this did NOT mean internet on mobile (which is more of the same 3rd channel), but the ability to have the exact same app, say Order Management System, on the phone. The third was the conviction we need to spread that within the four walls, ERP is a great idea, but if you're looking at collaborating/connecting/communicating with an extended eco-system, Sterling Selling & Fulfillment suite and the BIS product suite is what you need to be after. While a frontal confrontation with the Big-2 may not be the best way to go, Sterling Commerce surely seemed to be carving an interesting whitespace to make its play as the client challenges shift more outwards and the focus moves to how organizations are able to weave their supply chains together.
More later on some of the sessions I could catch during the two days.
