| About InfoWorld : Advertise : Subscribe : Contact Us : Awards : Events : Store |
 |
||||
|
||||
 |
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 COLUMN
Even virtual companies ship real products and have real customers ONLINE RETAILER Amazon.com will own 4 million square feet of warehouse space by year's end. Internet grocer Webvan signed a $1 billion contract with construction giant Bechtel Group to build a 300,000-square foot warehouse in each of 26 cities over the next two years.
The supposedly "virtual" companies don't call their warehouses by their real names. They call them "distribution centers," which makes it sound as if no products actually stop moving in these buildings as they speed from manufacturer to customer. Hardly -- Amazon.com stocks inventories of its most popular books to ensure quick shipment. Whatever you call them, these giant buildings are filled with real products and workers who are paid significantly less than Amazon.com's CEO, Jeff Bezos. Think any of Amazon.com's warehouse staff will become dot-com millionaires from stock options? Don't bet on it. In the small Nevada and Kentucky towns where these warehouses are situated, people are probably happy to have jobs at all. Most of the so-called "Internet pure plays" are a lot more real-world than you might think. Whether you're at a Net start-up or a traditional brick-and-mortar company, your information systems still touch the physical world in at least two places: your customers and your product distribution. Louis Borders spent a lot of time sweating the logistical details when he was planning Webvan. And you'd better believe that Webvan's Web site is intimately tied to the company's back-office software. What really differentiates so-called Internet-only companies is that they are free to build cutting-edge information systems from the ground up. Net start-ups are also taking advantage of a shift in business focus toward customers and their individual needs. Instead of producing commodities in bulk and selling them to mass markets, what's trendy now is selling individually customized products to "markets of one." Even Ford is forming a partnership with Microsoft to sell custom-built vehicles on the Web. (See "Build-to-order drives change," Sept. 27.) For the IT department, that means making customer data available in real time to a variety of applications. In other words, you're tracking the real-world movements of your customers as those movements happen. It's no longer sufficient to build batch-mode data mining tools so that executives can drill down into various aspects of last week's business. Now, you need personalization software that responds instantly to customer actions, delivering product offers, Web pages, and other enticements tailored to each user's specific interests. You also need the infrastructure to support personalization: real-time databases, scalable application servers, and terabytes of storage. On the back end, the systems tracking your supply chain and distribution had better work as seamlessly with your business partners as the Web site does with your customers. That may produce legacy integration issues, even for Net start-ups. Just look at eToys, which is outsourcing its fulfillment needs to traditional direct marketer Fingerhut. Smart move -- with the holidays coming up, eToys is going to need all the fulfillment help it can get. But for that to work, it'll need to make eToys' computers talk to Fingerhut's, which may be no small task. How do you make the connection from the Internet to the physical world? Write to me at dylan@infoworld.com. Dylan Tweney is the content development manager for InfoWorld Electric. He has been writing about the Internet since 1993.  RELATED SUBJECTS  E-CommerceMORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
SPONSORED LINKS
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
