Telkom aims to provide enterprises with a e-business platform for the 21st centurty
Mail & Guardian reporter
Here is a way of doing business that goes under many names: “i-commerce”, “e-business”, “e-commerce” and “e-tailing”, to name but a few. It conjures up images of purchasing flowers for Mother’s Day with a few clicks and keystrokes yet e-commerce entails much more than online shopping.
Telkom’s Business Integration Services is focusing on providing South African businesses with the means to maintain a total (and successful) e-presence, and to do so in a cost-effective manner courtesy of the economies of scale offered by the telecommunications giant.
With the rise and fall of many a company still fresh in the collective memory, “dot-bomb” sceptics are calling for a return to old-style business practices. Yet there can be no doubt that the business environment has changed forever and that the Web revolution has just begun.
The statistics are mind-boggling. According to figures released by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, a projected 579-million computers were in use by the end of 1999, and worldwide Internet use is set to grow by 119% over the next four years. Current online spending is estimated at $29,2-billion, but the projections are that this will grow to $133-billion by January 2004.
The truth is that e-business is critical to the survival of any enterprise, regardless of its size or market segment.
The market is there and so are the means to reach it. All indications are that businesses now need to combine the old with the new in a “clicks and mortar” model that will reap the benefits of a new marketplace while maintaining stability.
To this end Telkom is consolidating its Internet and e-business assets into a single, focused portfolio known as business integration services (BIS). This will include services and products related to e-commerce transaction switching, the ASP (application service provider) field, security, content provision, local area network and Internet.
“The e-business drive in the industry is really an effort to eliminate or reduce inefficiencies,” says e-business guru, Rikus Matthyser, Telkom’s executive: business integration services.
“Internal to any business, all the layers from human resources to physical operations have e-business elements. At the most basic level, e-business initiatives are about generating revenue or reducing costs, which is why e-business in its current form strongly focuses on business integration services.”
Telkom is no newcomer to this area it has for some time had peripheral operations and initiatives related to various areas of e-business, such as Intekom and CyberTrade. In response to the challenges of the new economy, all of these elements have grown and convergence has been the inevitable result.
South Africa is mirroring the global trend towards consolidated and converged network services, says Matthyser, with networks being able to carry applications, voice, pure data and even control systems.
“Customers increasingly require multiple applications to either streamline or improve inefficiencies in their businesses, yet all of those applications still have to be transported by means of a network,” he says.
“With the highly successful implementation of similar systems inside Telkom, combined with the capabilities that we gained by consolidating our various initiatives in BIS, we are ideally positioned to provide solutions in this regard.”
With the backing of international players such as Thintana (a consortium of Telkom’s strategic equity partners, SBC International and Telekom Malaysia), Telkom has access to information on what telecommunications operators are doing in various countries and how it’s is done on a sustainable basis.
“This means that we are not relying solely on home-grown solutions we are offering the best practices followed by leading telecommunications operators around the world,” says Matthyser.
“In addition to this, our skills base is growing both through our investment in individuals and through sharing information with partners. BIS allows us to integrate the full range of business practices into any network, in other words to provide an interface layer between the customer’s business processes and Telkom’s proven network.”
As part of its current operations, Telkom has one of the largest and most-skilled IT divisions in the country, which may come as a surprise to those who see IT and telecommunications as two distinct entities.
Matthyser explains: “Very few people understand how big an IT capability telecommunications operators really have. Communications have moved from voice into the digital era, and telcos have had to establish a plethora of IT services to remain sustainable.
“This obviously gives us a competitive edge when it comes to effecting business integration for our customers, as we have been doing for our own company. We are able to compete head-to-head with companies that are systems integrators, value-added network service providers and ISPs [Internet service providers].”
A further advantage is that Telkom can leverage the economies of scale of a large telco to package the same set of integration services for small to medium enterprises, allowing smaller enterprises access to markets previously dominated by large corporations.
In addition to Telkom’s proven industrial-strength hosting and local area network capabilities, the company’s BIS drive incorporates skill sets, partnerships, collaborations and cooperative agreements that read like a who’s who of the computing, IT and network world.
SAP/Commerce One: Telkom offers an EDI (electronic data interchange) platform integrated with XML (extended mark-up language), the latter being expected to become the dominant format for electronic data interchange.
“We’re one of only six marketplaces that have rolled out the coengineered SAP/Commerce One platform,” says Matthyser.
“Commerce One sells the e-commerce software that allows companies to set up online trading marketplaces, while SAP (and its e-business software arm, SAPMarkets) connect that e-commerce software to a company’s back-office applications, as well as its supply chain and inventory management systems, all via the Web. This means that we will be presenting the South African market with a set of preintegrated functions in a single marketplace.”
Cisco: “We’re already a Cisco Gold partner and are well on our way to achieving Cisco IQ Partner status,” says Matthyser. This is certainly a feather in Telkom’s e-cap, since Cisco reserves IQ partner status exclusively for companies that have a proven ability to accelerate customer successes in the Internet economy.
“We are confident that we have the ability to deliver repeatable, scalable Internet business solutions that reduce cost, risk and time to market for small, medium and large enterprises,” says Matthyser.
“We look forward to combining forces with Cisco in supplying the South African market with an advantage in pre-integrated solutions in the e-commerce world in other words not just application boxes, but also the transport of applications seamlessly across the network.”
Sun Microsystems: “Sun Microsystems is one of the suppliers in our hosting and data centre environment, and we are working towards SunTone certification,” says Matthyser.
“This is a natural progression in our relationship, since our focus has always been on best practices in operational procedures and the effective management of platforms. To us, SunTone certification represents an excellent opportunity to achieve external validation for the fact that the procedures we have in place are right up there with the best. As a preferred hosting partner to Sun, Telkom has the ability to leverage shared infrastructure to the advantage of our customers.”
Dell and Compaq: “In the desktop environment we’re working with both Dell and Compaq,” says Matthyser. “We are firming up those relationships so that, as a joint force, we can take either of those sets of hardware to the desktop and local area network environment.”
Microsoft: “In addition to the fact that we have one of the largest groups of Microsoft certified engineers and technicians in the country, one of the bigger projects within Telkom today is the migration from Novell software to Microsoft Project and Professional,” says Matthyser.
“In this regard Microsoft’s support drives Telkom’s business, and the synergies between the two companies will allow us to take specific sets of products to the markets, once again giving our users a sustainable advantage in the e-market.”
Asked to peer into his crystal ball, Matthyser outlines a number of exciting developments made possible by the new BIS drive. They include:
* Electronic bill presentment.
* Collaborative e-commerce applications, including mail and unified messaging services.
* Electronic shop fronts, preintegrated into a market place where financial services and logistics are already available.
* Extensive coverage by means of a live electronic directory for the market place.
* A host of affordable e-procurement solutions and structured e-procurement environments, allowing small and medium enterprises to achieve the same efficiencies as large corporations.
* With the advent of ADSL (asynchronous digital subscriber line), new ways of distributing content including video and music on demand on a pay-per-view basis.
* Private-label ISP services, allowing corporate companies to provide their end users with branded ISP services for customer loyalty programmes, trading purposes and so forth.
But the best part, says Matthyser, is already here.
“We are seeing the birth of a new trading platform in South Africa an EDI- and XML-integrated platform that really supports as broad a range of transactions as possible.”
BIS will provide South African enterprises with access to the new economy.