The needs of E~operations in E~business

As noted above, there are six broad areas that will have a significant impact on next-generation e-business success:

» Enterprise management – this typically requires scalable, flexible, fully-automated, and highly-integrated solutions to manage the extended enterprise for continuous availability and optimal performance. Such enterprise management solutions include systems and network management, service desk, backup and recovery, event, workload, database, and application management.

» Security – companies need to ensure that their operations are adequately protected – e-operations need to protect areas such as intrusion detection, administration, authentication, and authorization.

» Storage – safeguarding e-business-critical data against fire or damage requires storage solutions that reach across multiple platforms. This requires end-to-end backup capabilities today, such as serverless backup, and on-line ‘‘hot’’ backup, as well as recovery capabilities enabling a rapid restarting of business operations.

» E-operations transformation and integration – making the transition to e-operations requires integrating disparate applications and processes. This in turn requires appropriate systems integration skills that can provide the services necessary to integrate applications, databases, and business partner systems via powerful XML, transport, and messaging services.

» Information and knowledgemanagement – e-operations require constant, immediate responsiveness; time spent retrieving, hunting for, or consolidating information obviously affects productivity. Information and knowledge management solutions should enable users to parameterize databases and extract requisite data in a usable format suited to individual preferences.

» Predictive analysis and visualization – predictive analysis adds intelligence to help e-businesses identify new opportunities. For example, data analysis of buying patterns to enable demand forecasting, or identification of cross-selling or up-selling opportunities.