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Well, it’s been 4 years in the making, but we’re delighted to have been recognised by hybris as the Asian regional partner of the year for 2012!!

We actually delivered hybris their first Australian customer, Jaycar, back in 2009. We then secured the Target web store project in 2010, but it wasn’t until the last 18 months or so that things really started to heat up, with companies such as Lorna Jane, Petstock and Landmark committing to hybris.

In 2012, hybris opened a local office under the leadership of Graham Jackson (ex Bazaar Voice), and things went up yet another gear. Our business doubled in size during 2012, and shows no sign of slowing down. We expect to be able to announce several new production hybris customers in the coming weeks.

Whilst we’re very proud of our efforts, we know we can’t stop getting better. We’re working hard to make our processes more efficient; to learn from each project to improve the next; to provide more training and certification opportunities to our team; and most importantly to ensure that we don’t get ahead of ourselves. We want to be the go-to-partner of choice for hybris for many years to come.

If you’re a senior Java developer that wants to be involved with great ecommerce & omni-channel projects; or if you’re a business looking for the industry’s best value B2B / B2C commerce solution, then we’d love to share more of our plans, our skills and our experience with you. Give us a call! You’ll find we’re easy to do business with

ClickFrenzy was, and will remain a great concept for Australian retailers. Yes, the organisers should have been better prepared to handle the traffic spike on their portal, but at the end of the day, the real losers were the retailers that website crashes.

Unfortunately, most retail executives won’t understand the magnitude of the lost opportunity. Publicly, they’re focusing on the increased sales they made when their sites WERE up (click frenzy a big success , We’re happy ), rather than focusing on the sales they DIDN’T make, or the customers that they may have lost when their sites were down.

Retailers that fail to address scalability issues on their websites are simply disrespecting their customers. They seem to assume that web shoppers are either used to this sort of disappointment, or are just bargain hunting anyway, and that they’ll just come back another time.

Sure, there are plenty of bargain hunters out there, but just because consumers are looking for value, doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in end-to-end service, or aren’t looking for trusted brands. The connected consumer is not a “channel” shopper – they’re a “brand” shopper. If they get annoyed with a particular retailers online store, it impacts the ENTIRE brand experience, and then if they choose to visit to another site and receive a good experience, they might just stick with that other brand for the longer term.

Despite what some retailers think ( ‘Online only retailers dominance will end‘ ), just because they have bricks and mortar stores doesn’t mean customers will ultimately prefer them over the online only brands. Sorry guys, if you continually fail to deliver, then your entire brand will suffer.

The lack of seriousness for the website channel with many retailers is essentially due to a lack of investment, as Gavin Heaton describes in How ClickFrenzy Became a ClickFizzer. And the irony of all this is that few of the retailers who had site problems during clickfrenzy will do anything about it. I know many retailers today are fully aware that their website can’t handle peaks of traffic – their sites come down whenever they do an email campaign, but they choose to throttle their campaigns rather than invest in their website infrastructure.

Every ecommerce manager that lost their site during ClickFrenzy should be seeking funds to invest in their infrastructure for the new year. The numbers are only going to get bigger. Calculate some decent projections, and then load test your site (If you want some help, talk to us). Then get your executive management to either fund your initiatives, or to sign off that they understand the potential lost opportunity – not just in one-off sales, but the potential longer term brand damage – if they don’t start caring for their customers.

I got the same old story at a retailer in Melbourne today. They’re in a tough position because because they can’t scale their website operations to meet the demands of their customers. They’ve got problems with data synchronisation; they’re unable to get consistent promotions in their stores and online; and customer records are not flowing correctly between channels. Click and collect simply isn’t an option because there’s no order management or universal view of inventory. Sure, their website LOOKS great, but the foundations are terrible.

As I’ve stated before customer-centric systems are now critical components of enterprise architecture, just like ERPs such as SAP and Oracle were 10 years ago. To meet the ever changing needs of the connected consumer requires a suite of components that make it easy to integrate both data and business processes for all parts of the business including inventory, orders, distribution, payments, products, pricing/promotions, customers and marketing. This is the foundation – the plumbing and the wiring – upon which you build agile commerce solutions that adapt readily to your customers’ needs. And yet we still see so many retailers that are prepared to entrust this, their new lifeblood, not to the plumbers, builders and electricians, but to the guys that specialise in the window dressings!

Getting cross-channel commerce right doesn’t just require retail systems knowhow. It requires a project methodology and approach that’s enterprise proven. It requires a team experienced with retail back-office systems and processes. It’s not just about how the customer interacts with the website, it’s about merchandising, picking systems & inventory movement, and handling returns and refunds. I’m certainly not saying that design isn’t important, because it absolutely is. But customers expect simplicity and familiarity, and it’s all too easy to get carried away with your front-end.

Most designers have limited integration experience – having built their ‘reputations’ on sexy websites with shopping carts; SEO and email marketing. They also don’t have the right business model to deliver true cross-channel retailing solutions, because fundamentally, their billing model is based upon cycles of rework, consulting and rework. They bill by the hour. They aren’t in the game of managing a tight up-front specification, project management, development and integration to a budget and then handing over the keys to the car.

Forget spending $50K or more on multiple rounds of designs for your new website. I’d suggest budget no more than $10K for the complete design of phase 1. Find some world-class sites and model your site on those structures, or build on the framework provided by your infrastructure provider. Focus on the fundamentals – architecture, plumbing, wiring, and concrete foundations. Put these in place and take a couple of months to iron out any process issues. And then go to town on your designs.

contiigo has recently agreed to represent the world-class Celum digital asset management solutions to Australian businesses.

celum seemed a natural fit for us. Not only because it is integrated with hybris (we’re a hybris gold partner); or because we’ve already deployed it for one of our existing clients, Jaycar; but mainly because in order to provide compelling customer experiences, more and more companies need the ability to easily repurpose their content for a multitude of channels.

celum solutions enable you to optimise the value of all your digital assets. Celum makes it easier to download, sort, track, rename, group, archive, convert, edit and optimize digital media. Celum solutions are characterised by their ability to integrate into the desktop environment and with technologies like Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Office, Adobe and mobile applications.

Celum is used by more than 500 companies including P&G, Toyota, VW & Toshiba, and in Australia by the likes of Jaycar, Worldvision and Universal Music Group. We’re looking forward to helping them build out this list!

Remember the millennium bug?  Planes were going to fall out of the sky.  Power companies were going to shut down.  The fear of what might happen to ageing computer systems spurred companies to spend up big on new ERP solutions and drove huge business for the likes of Oracle, SAP and the hardware companies.

Whilst these new ERP systems required massive investments by organisations in infrastructure & change management, it also enabled these companies to streamline their internal business processes and achieve massive supply chain efficiencies throughout the last decade.

Today, though we are in the age of the customer -  and the focus has turned from the supply chain to the demand chain, with the focus not just on bottom line costs, but also top-line revenue.   Of course, the supply chain is still a critical component of satisfying the customer, but, whilst customers absolutely do expect to find the product on the shelf when they need it – they also demand  understanding, relevant offers and great service.

Today’s consumer is more savvy, less loyal and harder to attract.  And if you do manage to cut through the clutter filling their inbox, you then have to work hard to keep their attention.  This means finding new ways to engage and to ensure your offer is compelling.  It means you need to innovate.  It means you need to be agile.

Unfortunately, ERP systems simply aren’t the right sort of platforms to deliver to the needs of an agile organisation.  They are complex, inflexible and very costly to change.  ERP providers such as SAP and Oracle have had to either create completely new platforms (e.g. SAP By Design), or they have had to buy out other companies and then try to integrate their solutions (e.g. Oracle ATG, Endeca, Siebel, Fatwire).

The buy option results in a mess of different systems that are patched together and require different skillets to operate and support.   This results in a significant increase in management, deployment and upgrade complexity (and revenue opportunities for the vendor – consider Oracle Fusion middleware) which is obviously counterintuitive to being an agile organisation.

As for build the build option, to date neither of SAP or Oracle have been able to present a viable omnichannel commerce solution in-house despite more than a decade of effort.

For today’s retailer, we’re not too far away from the day where channels like web and mobile will generate 1/4 of your sales, and your omni-channel solution should be the most significant investment your company will make in the next 10 years.

Just like with your ERP, you have an imperative to invest now.  But it’s not a hyped up millennium bug, it’s your survival.  In the age of the connected consumer,  the only way you’ll differentiate is to make a serious investment in your platform so that your company can be agile enough to adapt and innovate as your customer demands.

Incredibly, too many organisations are still hesitant about committing to create the right infrastructure.  In particular, they’re still opting for low-cost, me-too, web-only platforms.  Ironically, they think they’re making the right move by catching up to the other web retailers, but in reality, they’re just compounding their problems by delaying the inevitable, and restricting their ability to innovate.

Or, they’re waiting for their ERP to deliver them an option that the ERP vendors just can’t seem to deliver.

As one customer said to me recently, it’d be a brave CIO that recommends an alternative solution after saying for years that SAP is the centre of their universe and the answer to everything.   The reality is though, that organisations need to be brave or they risk obsolescence in the age of the connected consumer.

The biggest challenge facing organisations as they try to become omni-channel isn’t what technology to choose.  It’s not figuring out how to keep up with ever-changing consumer needs and the wide-variety of channels through which you need to engage.   It’s not even how you achieve a ‘single view of the customer’ or how you exchange data between mobile, stores and web.

In our twelve years or so of delivering omni-channel (multi-channel, cross-channel) solutions, without doubt, the biggest challenge we see organisations face is how to break down the silos of processes, data, people and systems that have built up over years and years.

We’ve seen it in retail, distribution, telecommunications; in companies small and large.  It’s a huge barrier because fundamentally silos involve people, habits, behaviours and opinions.

To be omni-channel requires a realignment of the organisation around the needs of the customer rather than those of merchandising, supply chain, finance, or fulfilment, which for so long have served the company’s needs.  New organisational processes need to be channel agnostic.  New KPIs need to be established.

The problem with silos is that they tend to:

• be insular & self serving
• have entrenched behaviours
• have focused (departmental) objectives & KPIs
• have limited & predefined inputs and outputs
• be protective of their turf

Some examples we’ve seen:

• The retailer that embarks on an omni-channel strategy and creates a cross-divisional team to drive it (good!), but then fails to appoint a senior executive with authority to reign in other initiatives & control departmental decision making regarding cross-over projects.  End result is a series of projects for mobile, email marketing, in-store kiosk and ecommerce that are neither aligned nor even use the same data.
• Product buyers that do not understand the need for creating new data attributes and content required for web – resulting in poor data quality and limited product detail pages.
• Marketing departments spending up on mobile applications that are not integrated either to web-commerce or loyalty initiatives
• The failure to develop a cross-channel customer profile resulting in an inability to provide targeted marketing or tailored customer experience.

In order to break down organisational silos, you need vision & commitment from senior management to drive change and crack entrenched behaviours.    It’s likely you’ll need to appoint a change agent – whether they are an internal person or an external contractor will vary depending on your situation.  Regardless, they should have the credentials to be respected, be 100% supported by (and a direct report to) the CEO and they should be empowered to reign in competing projects and make difficult calls that may offend some people.

Some tips:

• Define the right organisational structure
• Appoint a change agent.  Empower them.  They must be ‘respected’.
• Start with the customer & how they interact in various channels.  This should include your brand values too
• Define high-level processes and needs (channel agnostic)
• Identify business metrics that transcend channels – in particular customer focused KPIs
• Build an omni-channel roadmap/ project program that incorporates channel specific initiatives too
• Consolidating your data repositories (customers, products, inventory, sales, campaigns, content) is inevitable and you should be getting on with this regardless

(DISCLAIMER:  contiigo develops solutions primarily using Java)

Comments by recently departed Magento founder and 8-year CTO, Yoav Kutner should raise doubts in the minds of those retailers that have chosen Magento as their eCommerce platform because of it’s so called ‘open source’ status.

Kutner says that eBay has a different interpretation of ‘open source’ to his original vision, and that they are struggling with getting the fabric of their next generation platform right.  This would seem to infer that if and when eBay does figure out what it’s going to do, at least some elements of the Magento code base will be brought in-house – and this does make corporate sense for eBay.  Unlike a free-wheeling founder, eBay has to control their own destiny, deliver on a roadmap, and provide proper enterprise support to their clients.  But the question is, what does this mean to Magento customers that have been sold the open source story?  What changes will be occurring to the code-base?  How long will clients have to wait?   Will existing customers be able to upgrade?  Will 3rd party plug-ins be entertained?

Australian retailers face a choice of platforms for their new website.  They can either go with an entry level proprietary package from the likes of EstarOnline, or Powerfront;  they can go with Magento based on PHP; or they can choose one of the global eCommerce platform solutions such as ATG (Oracle), hybris, Blue Martini (Red Prairie) or Websphere (IBM), all based on Java.

For those with a short-term view and a web-only presence, Magento is a seemingly valid option.  It provides a decent set of promotions and the basic administration tools you need, and it’s cheap to licence  (or even free if you want a very basic presence).

However, Magento is not a suitable solution for any retailer looking to provide a cross-channel customer experience.  For one, it’s missing the broad level of functionality required to deliver a comprehensive cross-channel solution, and if you’re a retailer looking to meet the demands of the connected consumer, then you don’t need another ‘silo’.  According to Brian Walker at Forrester, in ‘Is An Open Source Platform Right for You‘ (June 2011) the experience of retailers in the US has been that Magento has been unable to deliver a solution that their meets enterprise needs as their sites have grown.

One of the key selling points for Magento implementers is that it is ‘open source’, and that what it lacks in functionality can easily be made up via customisations and 3rd party plug-ins from the ‘community’.  And it’s easy to be seduced by arguments of a low licence fee, plenty of cheap developers in the market, and access to a vast pool of 3rd party utilities.   Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword.

The more customisations you have, the more difficult it is to upgrade your platform , and the more locked-in you are to your implementation partner.  To make matters worse, there is a lack of control with open-source – there is no real enforcement of development standards or frameworks, making support difficult.  Hence eBay’s inevitable need to bring some order to things.   For IBM, hybris, ATG etc, there are formally documented process frameworks for building any  customisations, and partner quality standards are enforced by the vendor, who has to support the solution at the end of the day.  This also means it’s easier for you to switch implementation partners if you have a fall-out with your current provider.

In any case, the community offers little value to enterprise deployments.  The plug-ins are available typically serve simple needs, and don’t replace the major chunks of functionality that Magento lacks, like Product & Content Management, Workflow and cross-channel order management.    And who is going to support the custom code?   Is it documented?  What happens if eBay changes their code base – will it still work?   What will it cost to maintain?   Who’s backside are you going to kick if something goes wrong – some developer in Uzbekistan?

A cross-channel commerce & order management solution should be a retailer’s most significant platform decision of the next 5 years, just like the ERP was over the last 10 years.   IBM, hybris and Oracle stand behind their solutions with established 24×7 support organisations and a product roadmap that extends several years into the future.   In contrast, Magento is in release 1.7 after nearly 3 years in the market.  Are customers going to be relying on proprietary customisations for ever?  And if/when release 2 does arrive, will it be compatible with the original code and all the extensions and what effort will be required to upgrade?  This is a significant consideration.

But an even bigger risk for your business is that of lost opportunity.  As Gartner says in their most recent eCommerce Magic Quadrant, leading vendors hybris, ATG and IBM have an ‘ability to see around the corner’.  They provide you with a solution that gives you the opportunity to innovate more quickly to gain competitive edge — in web-time.  Not just a ‘me-too’ website.

And you need to think about this NOW, not in 3 years.  If you try to change your platform then, it’ll be like changing the engine on a moving car.

The promises of location-based marketing, such as that customers are more likely to respond to offers (right offer, right time) and that more customers can be attracted back into stores, is giving traditional bricks and mortar retailers hope and driving the success of the likes of Foursquare, Shop-bot and Google places.

There are still many challenges to location-based marketing, such as:

• Getting the offer/incentive right
• Determining location accurately
• Channel integration
• Cost
• The plethora of technologies – GSM triangulation, NFC, Blue tooth, geo-fencing, RFID etc
• Customer privacy

Despite these, though, the incentives are just too great, and you can expect to see many more retailers trial location based marketing services  as part of their loyalty programs.

Besides targeted marketing offers, location-based-marketing also provides the opportunity to capture a lot more data about customers – data that will help retailers identify more effective customer segments & also to help figure out where best to focus their marketing spend by understand the customer’s path to purchase.

Path to Purchase is sometimes used to define the route a customer walks once they enter a store, but I’m using it here in a broader sense – as the series of influences and brand exposure the customer experiences that drives them to take up an offer, or to walk into a particular store in the first place.

Historically, the path to purchase was pretty easy to understand – TV, Print and maybe a catalogue drove customers to stores.  It wasn’t hard to figure out how to spend your marketing dollar.  But that was pre-web, pre-mobile and pre-social media.   Today, understanding how a customer first hears of a brand and then the specific channels that they will move through before making a purchase is much more difficult.  Did they hear about an offer through a friend?  Was it reinforced by website research, or traditional above the line advertising?  What were the ‘touch-points’ along the way?

Of course, you can survey your customers post-purchase, but location based marketing gives retailers the chance to capture a customer’s precise location at the particular time they responded to a promotion, and this may go a long way to helping retailers understand how and where customers are interacting with brand advertising.

For example, a customer scanning a QR code at a certain bus shelter is letting the advertiser know that they’re at that bus shelter at that time of day.    Using geo-fencing, retailers can send SMS messages when customers enter certain zones near their stores, or shopping centres.  If the customer responds, then the retailer should ‘close the loop’ to know that the customer was at that location at that time and converted to the offer.  Mobile applications, too regularly try to track your location.  (How many times have you been asked ‘XYZ app wants to use your location’?).

So location data will become invaluable in helping retailers understand the power of their various forms of advertising and where to best focus their marketing dollar.  But capturing the data is one thing – how will retailers turn that raw data into something useful?

Retailers are already struggling to get value from their existing retail data, and location data is potentially another massive chunk of data that we can be tracking about our customers.  Add it to the list of social media data, behavioural data, personal profile data, demographic data, sales data, financial data, campaign data.    McKinsey calls this vast explosion in data ‘Big Data’ and says it’s the next frontier for innovation (McKinsey-big-data)

There’s no doubt the biggest pay cheques of the future will go to the guys that can make sense of all this data and turn it into real insights that can enable better segmentation, improved relevancy and ultimately drive customer loyalty.

We were lucky enough to be interviewed by The Australian again this past week – this time for our opinion on the state of the employment market for Java experts.  Thanks to Jennifer Foreshew from The Australian, and Tracy from Pentica PR for the opportunity.  (Incidentally – The headline quote is mine, and I had to feel for Joe Woods our Services Director having his picture right underneath – surely not exhibit A !)

The theme of the article is that Java is no longer ‘in vogue’ and that newer ‘web’ languages such as Ruby on Rails, PHP and Python are the languages of choice for graduates and employers.

As a predominantly Java development house, it’s certainly in our interest that Java is around for the long-term, but we aren’t naive to think that we won’t have to help our team cross-train as we move forward.   Having said that, though, in our view, the replacement for Java is yet to be written and the web-languages just aren’t yet ready for prime-time.

There’s no doubt these newer languages are easy to learn, and you can work on some sexy projects, but Java is more robust, proven and performing.  PHP and the like are languages that originated for front-end development, not for the plumbing that keeps applications afloat.  Java remains the language of choice for banks, telecommunications and government for this reason, and I believe that even companies such as Facebook use Java for the core engines of their applications.

One thing that concerns me though, is that the new breed of application programmers may be so front-end focused that we could end up with less focus and training on the foundation coding & architecture skills of integration, performance and fault-tolerance.  Could this lead to less-stable, lower quality business & technology applications?

The day my family and I left Sydney to California last month was the day before my eldest daughter’s birthday – we were to be traveling on the big-day (don’t think I’ve lived that down yet).

‘H’ has been a big fan of Boost Juice for the past year or so, and is a member of their loyalty program- entitling her to a free birthday juice.  As it was to be her birthday whilst we were in the air, we asked at the Boost Juice outlet in Sydney Airport if they could bend the rules a little so that she could have her free birthday juice.  Unfortunately, they told me it wasn’t possible because of a restriction in the point of sale – “If the system doesn’t tell me she’s entitled to a juice, then I can’t give one out”.  ‘But you can SEE it’s her birthday tomorrow’ I pleaded to no avail.

My daughter was pretty disappointed.  I asked her last week if she’d ever been back to Boost, and she told me no – the local juice shop does better juices anyway.

In telling this, I think back to Ray’s Tent City in Sydney.  These guys run a loyalty program, but you’d be hard pressed to know it at the point of sale.  The first time I bought something, I wasn’t asked to join, but I noticed a tattered looking sign promoting the program AFTER I checked out.  The next time I went, I specifically asked if I could join, and they told me yes, and that I would receive a discount on my purchase!  Nice.  So of course I joined.

Ray’s (part of Super Retail Group) obviously hasn’t really figured out what they are doing with their program.  Are their staff trained to NOT advise customers of the loyalty program (because they might have to give a discount)?  Perhaps the program is merely a ‘me-too’ with head office ambivalent about it?  Or are they just slack on training?

Interestingly, another member of the Super Retail Group (admittedly a very new one) is Rebel Sports.  Rebel (www.rebelsport.com.au) does a great job of promoting their Season Pass loyalty program in-store and online.  Their staff are well trained, understand the program and encourage customers to participate.    Another great program is Jeanswest Rewards (our customer www.jeanswest.com.au).  Jeanswest uses secret shoppers to make sure their staff are doing the right thing and encouraging customer participation, and their program has grown boast over a million members over the past 2-3 years.

Loyalty programs are not about the card, the discount, or the free juice.  They are about engaging customers with your brand for the long term.  They’re about gathering useful information on your customers, their likes, dislikes, behaviour and purchasing history and using it to business advantage.

For cross-channel retailers, your primary engagement point is still the store, and without training your staff to promote your program; without having adequate point-of-sale marketing & information; and most importantly without EMPOWERING your staff to use their discretion to keep their customers happy, you’re not going to get the best results from your loyalty program, and worst still, you might just end up with an unhappy customer with a twitter account.