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http://www.the-itleader.com/projects/tridion/ Wed, 28 Nov 2006 00:00:00 GMT http://www.the-itleader.com/projects/tridion/ Anytime Online and Always Connected - Tridion Tridion Global Web Content Management is your key to success - it&squo;s all about connectivity. The other day the doorbell rang at my house as a representative of my utilities company wanted check the electricity meter. Out of interest I asked him if this was really necessary with all kinds of new technology available these days. He explained they had to because of the law but that things will change substantially in the next year or two when a network of satellites will take over their work completely. A network of satellites checking my light switch behaviour? It really sounds like Big Brother is here to stay. He already follows me by tracking both my mobile phone and the GPS in my car as well as my surf behaviour on the Internet. It made me realize once more that in our modern society, the Internet and all sorts of connectivity are determining the way we live and how we do business. It also brought to mind the trilogy by Manuel Castells: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture1 where he pictures the society paradigm of the future shifting from 'the rich and poor to the connected and not-connected'. MARKET AND COMPETITIVE POSITION For your enterprise it should make you rethink your position in the market. Are you really connected to your customers and other business partners? Does your ERP system really integrate with your suppliers and deliver the promise of supply chain management? Are your CRM system and your Internet sites really integrated with all customer interaction channels bringing you the promise of customer satisfaction and customer intimacy? All questions for you to answer in the light of your future competitive position. TCO AND DATA CENTER READINESS Daily at Tridion, we see many organizations improving these cross-enterprise relationships by offering end-to-end online connectivity - disclosing the right set of information to clearly targeted (marketing) audiences on a global scale. Worldwide scalability and localization capabilities of your enterprise marketing connectivity are essential in assuring brand and communication consistency across all countries and regions where you operate. From an IT perspective the key challenge is to keep the TCO of all these communication initiatives as low as possible. At the same time, IT wants to be able to follow the rapidly and ever changing marketing initiatives. Tridion Web Content Management solutions comply with all modern IT industry standards and are implemented on data center level at a wide variety of our customers ranging from KLM and Virgin Atlantic to Renault F1 and Suzuki. A recent example is in the area of compliance where an increasing number of our customers are confronted with rules and regulations forcing them to keep archive of their web content. The Tridion Archiving Manager archives web content in the way a website visitor would see it. All content is stored together with data/time stamps. DELIVERING THE PROMISE OF CONNECTIVITY 'Anytime online' and 'always connected' are abstract metaphors for explaining that your company needs to clearly define its marketing and communication strategy in the light of today's multi-channel environment. Multi-channel as such, is not a new phenomenon; but delivering that promise for many and international targeted marketing audiences in a consistent manner really is. Web, print, mail, SMS, RSS and others are technology channels that come and go at sometimes higher speeds than you would want. There is no point in trying to be ahead of the game all the time. It is crucial, however, to create a content infrastructure that enables you to react quickly and cost effectively to new communication channels; to the needs of your business colleagues; and most of all, to the needs of your customers. ABOUT TRIDION Tridion is the leading provider of best-of-breed enterprise-class web content management solutions. Tridion's solutions empower enterprises to provide compelling, consistent and personalized customer experiences across multiple web sites in multiple languages and through multiple (online) channels. Its unique 'Building Block' architecture and 'BluePrint Management™' technology allow enterprises to vastly improve customer experience by providing a consistent corporate image, multilingual localized content, accelerated time-to-market, and overall improvement of content quality, all while reducing operational costs. Over 400 customers rely on Tridion's web content management solutions, including ABN AMRO, Agfa, Alcatel, Canon, Goodyear, Heineken, Honda, KLM, Renault, Suzuki, Toyota, ING, Reed Elsevier, and Unilever. First published in 1996 at Blackwell Publishers; ISBN 1-55786-617-1, 1-55768-872-7 and 1-55786-874-3 http://www.the-itleader.com/projects/radware/ Tue, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT http://www.the-itleader.com/projects/radware/ Security of Web-Enabled and Networked Applications - Radware Proactive planning for ensuring the full availability, optimized performance and security of web-enabled and networked applications is the foundation for guaranteeing business continuity and cost-effective scalable operations. Increasingly, organizations are leveraging intranets, extranets and the Internet for business critical functions. Email, websites, web conferencing, video-conferencing, Voice over IP (VoIP) and other web-enabled technologies are used to communicate internally as well as externally with customers, partners and other key audiences. From Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to commerce, in a global economy, business processes and network infrastructures are tightly coupled ‐ and are often completely dependent on the strength and reliability of the network. The current business climate offers many opportunities and challenges. In an environment that demands businesses to be extremely agile, flexible and responsive, networks have become the cornerstone for successful business operations. A strong network infrastructure empowers companies for business growth and operational efficiencies. However, when the network is challenged, or attacked, it can paralyze a business ‐ not only impacting growth but potentially bringing revenue-generating operations to a grinding halt. RADWARE INTEGRATED APPLICATION DELIVERY SOLUTIONS OPTIMIZE MISSION-CRITICAL APPLICATIONS FOR AENA AENA is one of the leading airport organizations in the world and an innovator in passenger and aircraft movement. As result of its strategic geographical location, Spanish aviation authorities require best of breed technology to handle millions of passengers that pass through Spanish airports every year, especially during high season, when airline traffic flow peaks. All of AENA airports rely on the availability of mission-critical applications to provide essential airport facilities and services such as flight information, check-in and even baggage claim. Radware's Application Front-End Solution is deployed in all AENA airports to ensure the highest availability and performance of essential Internet /Intranet applications, enabling the non-stop operation of the airport to enhance passenger satisfaction. To ensure continuous Internet access to its web site, AENA needed to procure services from more than one ISP for failover protection. Initially AENA was set to use BGP to achieve this. With Radware Access Solutions, AENA was able to get high availability for Internet connections without the complexity, cost and overhead associated with implementing BGP. In addition to being more cost effective and easy to deploy, AENA was able to achieve dramatic operational and infrastructure cost savings with Radware's dynamic inbound and outbound link load-balancing capabilities. Moreover, AENA was not dependent on any particular Internet provider. ELIMINATING THE SECURITY/PERFORMANCE TRADEOFF Radware Security Solutions were deployed to improve the performance of the anti-virus systems AENA deployed to protect against malicious content. Without Radware, large numbers of anti-virus servers were needed to filter all email traffic. With Radware, trusted traffic is forwarded directly to the users while potential malicious traffic is redirected to anti-virus server farms. Content inspection time is faster because anti-virus servers are only handling suspect traffic. This results in faster response times for end-users and accelerated application performance. As a result, AENA has reduced the number of anti-virus servers while improving performance to more than 10,000 users. Radware's redirection capabilities also give AENA the benefit of high availability for its anti-virus servers. CENTRALLY MANAGING INTEGRATED AVAILABILITY, PERFORMANCE AND SECURITY APPLICATION DELIVERY SOLUTIONS Radware's unified management tool enables centralized control of all Radware products deployed across more than 50 airports throughout the country. Radware provides AENA with an easy to use tool for configuration, management, monitoring and reporting. With full visibility into the operational status of the network AENA has the information needed for capacity planning and trend analysis to ensure continuous optimized application delivery. Today AENA has deployed more than 50 Radware application-smart networking devices for optimizing business critical applications. Fly to Spain - either for business or for fun - every airport has 100% availability, maximum performance, and absolute security powered by Radware. http://www.the-itleader.com/projects/brand-consistency/ Tue, 22 May 2006 00:00:00 GMT http://www.the-itleader.com/projects/brand-consistency/ Maintaining Brand Consistency on the Internet - Tridion A well-managed web presence is critical to a company's brand and business success, but the increasing scale of a typical company's web presence is making it difficult to manage this channel. According to our recent research, companies are losing grip of their brands as web site numbers spiral out of control. Large companies are struggling to maintain brand consistency on the Internet as the number of web sites they publish increases, according to new research conducted by Tridion. The research found that the average number of external, customer-facing Web sites that companies maintain has doubled since 2001 to 34. Almost a quarter (24%) of companies said they had so many externally facing web sites, they are not entirely sure how many they have. This figure is likely to triple if internal web sites and intranets are also included. Entitled "Brand Control on the Web", the research involved 200 interviews with brand managers and senior Internet custodians within large European companies in industries including financial services, manufacturing, retailing, transport and public utilities. Each company had an annual turnover of more than £75 million (€110 million). A similar research project was conducted in 2001, allowing comparison of results. WEB SITES VITAL TO OVERALL BRAND AND BUSINESS SUCCESS The research found evidence that the importance and influence of a company's Web presence has become acknowledged and recognised more widely during the past four years. It shows that almost all (97%) companies questioned stated that having well-managed content and a consistent look and feel to their company's externally-facing Internet sites results in some form of business improvement or benefit: Over three quarters (78%) of companies said that a well-managed web presence results in a more professional image for the company More than two in three (68%) companies said it leads to increased profitability Almost two thirds said a consistent look and feel to a company's web site leads to increased customer acquisition (62%) More than half (59%) stated that a well managed web presence leads to increased competitive advantage and one in two (54%) agreed that it benefits and increases customer retention and loyalty More than half (54%) of respondents said that the web site is an integral part of their brand strategy BRANDS OUT OF CONTROL ON THE WEB? But, whilst the importance of web sites to a company's brand and business objectives was recognised, the increased scale of a typical company's web presence is clearly making it difficult to manage the web channel. To revamp most of the key components of a typical externally facing web site would on average take a single person three months. The research also found that although two thirds (61%) of companies were aware of the need to keep their brand consistent across the Internet, many lack the tools and processes to do this well. Only just over half of brand managers (54%) have a key say in the look and feel of the web sites Even fewer (42%) have formal guidelines specific to the Internet in place For more than half (55%) of companies the web site owners have to manually update and check the web sites to ensure brand consistency across their entire array of web sites Only a third (33%) use software to automatically update the content on their web sites and ensure changes ripple through from site to site instantaneously BRAND OWNERSHIP Interestingly the research shows that responsibility for brand consistency and image is now more widely owned by a single person at board level. In 61% of companies, a single corporate marketing, e-business or media director takes responsibility for the consistency of the brand image across the organisation's entire array of externally facing web sites. In contrast, for 13% of companies, a single corporate IT director takes on this responsibility. Collectively, in three quarters (74%) of companies, a single person takes ownership of brand consistency across the organisation's entire array of externally facing web sites. BRANDS ONLINE Companies clearly spend millions to develop a unique brand and message and the best organisations then ensure that this is communicated to customers consistently across all channels. Companies evidently have more web sites than ever, communicating about more products, in more geographies, to more audiences and in various languages. Ensuring that brand messages stay consistent across the Internet channel is a real headache for companies. With web sites acting as the shop front for so many businesses, it is crucial companies get it right if their brands are not to be eroded in the online world. This makes web site management more important than ever before.