Cutting costs and increasing productivity are just two of the results to be gained from real time collaboration (RTC). Learn how three different companies leveraged their investment in Oracle Collaboration Suite to: reduce or eliminate travel expenses provide on-demand access for customers shorten the sales cycle improve the level of customer support meet compliance requirements "Collaboration strategy is about the unification of tools," says analyst Mike Gotta. Read what Gotta has to say about RTC and the user experience ("Simplicity is the key factor" ) making business more agile (process and productivity metrics) the data center ("People want reliability and expect speed") and compliance ( "the right RTC tools make it easier').

As Published In August 2005

Internet messaging and Web conferencing are just the beginning.

Collaborative technologies—such as e-mail, calendaring, shared workspaces, instant messaging (IM), and Web conferencing—are touted for their ability to cut costs (notably from travel budgets) and increase personal productivity, but that benefit barely dents the capacity of enterprisewide real-time collaboration (RTC) to help companies realize fast return on investment (ROI).

"It's been maturing, but the average use is still productivity-based," says Mike Gotta, until recently senior vice president and principal analyst at Stamford, Connecticut-based META Group. "There's a laundry list of where it's being used: in sales, in marketing, and in compliance. But there's a multitude of scenarios where Web conferencing can deliver business value. Anchoring it around business processes creates a bigger business case."

Web conferencing is just one of several RTC tools, but a look at how three companies are realizing huge gains from the technology shows how its impact can be broadened beyond simply cutting costs and promoting productivity.

Avnet Partner Solutions: Transforming the Sales Cycle

At Avnet Partner Solutions, a division of the Avnet Technology Solutions operating group of Phoenix, Arizona-based Avnet Inc., a sales pitch is often accompanied by a hands-on demonstration. For Avnet Partner Solutions, a value-added distributor and provider of enterprise servers, storage, software, and services, the interactive demo experience is a necessity.

"Convincing our resellers to make investments in the hardware, software, and staff needed to build their own demo systems would be a very difficult, if not impossible, proposition," says Harold Grisamore, director of marketing at Avnet Enterprise Services. "We recruit new resellers to take on our suppliers' product lines. A big piece of the process is helping our customers understand the products and how they work."

Avnet's early demonstration efforts entailed shipping its 50 demo systems to resellers on demand. But maintaining the fleet of demo systems soon became prohibitively expensive. In 2001 Avnet began to replace on-site demonstrations with third-party-hosted Web conferences, but the Web solution was unreliable and difficult to use. In 2003 the company brought Web-conferencing capabilities in-house, by using Oracle Collaboration Suite and launching a new demonstration environment called IT DemoCentral.

Through its secure portal, IT DemoCentral enables partners to gain hands-on experience, using standard production versions of software to provide full interactivity and real-time access to subject-matter experts. Resellers can also use IT DemoCentral to tailor a demo to their prospective customer's needs, at the customer's work site or in the field, using only a browser. In IT DemoCentral, they can check the calendar, request an available time slot, and launch the application at the appointed time. They can also request that an Avnet technical consultant be on hand for a demo, either behind the scenes or as a visible player. The move to Oracle has helped Avnet realize significant travel and shipping savings. Phil McLaughlin, director of technical services for Avnet, estimates savings of US$150,000 in shipping costs alone, but that's minuscule compared with the operational savings for Avnet and its customers.

"The average demo took three to five business days for a technical resource at a partner site to test and prepare," says McLaughlin. "We've already done that with IT DemoCentral, so you figure, at $100 to $150 an hour, that's $4,000 to $5,000 per demo setup that the reseller doesn't have to spend. We have also saved our partners, suppliers, and ourselves millions of dollars in demo inventory. There's no longer a need to have demonstration hardware on hand, and that frees up more of our customers' market-development funds for business-building activities such as Avnet's market-identification, demand-creation, and relationship-marketing programs."

Spotlights Avnet Inc. www.avnet.com Founded: 1921 Headquarters: Phoenix, Arizona Revenue: US$10 billion in FY 2004 Number of employees: Approximately 9,900 worldwide Products and services: Oracle Database, Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Web Conferencing, Oracle Files, Oracle Application Server Portal, Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, Oracle Developer Suite Pemco Aviation Group Inc. www.pemcoaviationgroup.com Founded: 1951 Headquarters: Birmingham, Alabama Revenue: US$200 million in 2004 Number of employees: Approximately 2,100 Products and services: Oracle9i Database and Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Workflow, Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle E-Business Suite 11i, HP-UX, Red Hat Linux ARKONA Inc. www.arkona.com Founded: 1996 Location: South Jordan, Utah Revenue: US$7.4 million in FY 2005 Number of employees: 90 Products and services: Oracle Collaboration Suite, Dell PowerEdge hardware

"We literally have hundreds of people around the country accessing the same piece of equipment," Grisamore says. "We use Oracle Collaboration Suite to automate that capability and make it self-service. This has enabled us to scale our investments in demonstration equipment across our partner base. Now our subject-matter experts can influence more of the deals that our partners are demonstrating."

In addition to helping win sales, partners use IT DemoCentral to gain experience in performing real-world activities and thereby enhance their technical skills. Avnet also uses the recording feature in Oracle Collaboration Suite to archive demonstration and training sessions. Using IT DemoCentral, Avnet Partner Solutions has increased its demo output from 600 per year to close to 3,000. "It's clearly a differentiator between us and our competition," Grisamore says. "None of our competitors can quickly provide customers on-demand access to an extensive demo environment.

"Even if you take the cost component out of it—and that's a major component—it's really more about the opportunity cost, because when you are in an active sales campaign, time is the deal killer," he adds. "If you can get it done tomorrow and it takes your competition two weeks, then you're more likely to win the deal, because you're outflanking your competition. It's really about shortening the sales cycle—that's the huge benefit."

Pemco Aviation Group Inc.: Collaboration Features Drive ROI

Pemco Aviation Group Inc., a Birmingham, Alabama-based firm that designs and builds aircraft components, implemented Oracle Collaboration Suite as an alternative to upgrading from the Microsoft Exchange 5.5 messaging and collaboration server. Its immediate need was to upgrade e-mail, calendar, voice, and fax management, but real-time collaboration features are coming into play as well. In March the company held its first board of directors' meeting with Web conferencing, enabling board members in five locations, both in and out of the United States, to attend the meeting.

"The directors didn't even know we had this capability until we offered it as an alternative to videoconferencing, which would have been prohibitively expensive with that many locations," says John Griffith, Pemco's IT director. "We gained credibility with upper management and the board that we were able to create a savings by putting in Oracle Collaboration Suite to begin with, and then get these extra benefits on top of that." He also anticipates using Oracle Collaboration Suite to meet an increasing array of compliance needs. "We use [the business-process-management solution] Oracle Workflow, and there's very little configuration needed to tie any Oracle Workflow product into Oracle Collaboration Suite," Griffith says. "So we're trying to leverage that to handle some of our compliance requirements. As a public company, we have many compliance requirements: How long is the data kept? Where are you keeping this data, and do you want to automatically dump it into Oracle Files? Because the Oracle products tie so well together, it's pretty easy to do that."

Griffith projected a 12-month ROI on Oracle Collaboration Suite, revised it to 8 months, and watched it ultimately shrink to half the original estimate with the Web-conferencing implementation. Pemco saves thousands of dollars just on the e-mail and calendar portions of Oracle Collaboration Suite and considers the rest of the modules, particularly Web conferencing, a bonus.

"From an IT standpoint, it helps us serve our internal customers a lot better than we could before," he says. "Our support level really went through the roof. We're able to solve their problems much, much faster."

Griffith adds that Web conferencing isn't being used in the company as widely as he'd like, but he expects that to change as Pemco completes a transition to Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g Release 1, scheduled to release later this year. "Right now, Web conferencing is not foremost in employees' minds," he says. "We have just three or four engineers who have tried it, but they are pleased it can handle their high-resolution AutoCAD products. As others start using Instant Messenger, which I've used as a beta customer—and it's phenomenal—they're going to think about collaboration more, because it's going to be right there on their screens all day long."

Mike Gotta agrees that altering work habits is one of the biggest challenges for companies implementing RTC, and he says simplicity is a key factor: "Simplicity in the sense of 'push to talk,' 'one click'—anything that makes it really trivial for users to gracefully escalate from the application that has their context to communicating with somebody in a synchronous manner. If it's not simple, then I don't make it part of my daily life, and it will remain useful only for isolated-use scenarios, rather than just blending into the background. This has to be so simple to use that end users adapt to it as easily as they do to a telephone. If we don't get the user experience right, then this will remain something that never really grows in terms of a market or something that end users value."

ARKONA Inc.: Speed and Flexibility Powers Growth

Since its founding in 1996, South Jordan, Utah-based ARKONA Inc. has been a leader in developing software for automotive-dealer management. In 2000 the company had 45 customers and was poised for dramatic expansion as dealers sought a straightforward, scalable solution for managing their day-to-day business processes. But growing the customer base meant putting a strain on a small sales staff; it was tough to get salespeople in front of potential customers. It also meant anticipating stronger demand on the customer-support front.

In 2001 ARKONA began leveraging its sales and support resources, by paying user fees for externally hosted Web conferencing. This strategy not only allowed the company to become visible to more prospects but it also enabled the sales staff to hold weekly strategy meetings, which some staffers attended remotely. Business doubled and tripled and kept on growing; today, the company has more than 500 customers.

By 2003 ARKONA's IT director, Kevin Murdock, wanted to get out from under monthly Web-conferencing bills of US$1,800 to $2,000, so he purchased Oracle Collaboration Suite and implemented the Web-conferencing module. Within four months, reports Murdock, the company began realizing significant ROI. But trimming the budget was only one benefit.

"The main reason for making the transition to Oracle was cost savings," he says, "but when Oracle gave us our first demonstration, we immediately noticed the speed difference compared to our previous package. It became one of those 'We gotta have it' features. Sales staff would frequently come to me during a demonstration, pleading with me to do something to speed up the application response time. But the server was out of my control, so speeding it up was out of my control. Bringing Oracle Collaboration Suite into our facility was a major benefit, because now troubleshooting and speed performance issues are entirely up to me."

Because most automotive dealerships don't have dedicated IT expertise on staff and many users are not technology-savvy, ease of use is another benefit of Oracle Web Conferencing. Customers can share their desktops with ARKONA's support staff with a single click.

ARKONA uses Oracle Collaboration Suite for both sales and customer support and is now developing a training strategy based on RTC. "The recording features and functions were a big 'wow' factor to our support and sales representatives," notes Murdock. "They've been able to record conferences for diagnostic and documentation purposes, and we've redesigned our Web site to encompass dealer-training modules. Because it's easy to access, recorded instructional training is becoming a centerpiece in our Web portal.

"Another high point is that Oracle Collaboration Suite is a stable system," he adds. "It runs. There are no reboots. It just runs. From an IT director's perspective, that's priceless."