The anatomy of an online retail strategy. Nick Spooner is CEO of Salmat Digital, leading their digital marketing and communications business.
Since moving to Sydney in 2000 from London, Nick has been COO at Ninemsn, chief digital officer at Network Ten and has also worked in various senior roles at Optus. The long-awaited super-fast broadband network promises to have a dramatic impact on the Australian retail sector, in a similar way that the birth of the chain store in the 1880s and the advent of self-service supermarkets in the 1960s changed forever the way we shop and engage with retailers. A recent IBISWorld forecast of ‘Australia’s Digital Future in 2050′ predicted that the retail sector will experience a significant benefit from the new superfast broadband utility in the coming 40-50 years, including the possibilities of product embellishment, potential productivity gains and advantages in terms of faster growth, lower costs and higher profitability.
Related posts. How the Cloud Is Putting the Sizzle Back Into Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence is a multibillion-dollar market made up of enormous software projects from the likes of IBM/Cognos, SAP/Business Objects and Oracle/Hyperion — think high barriers to entry, long enterprise sales cycles and expensive software licensing.
The recent $5.8 billion SAP/Sybase acquisition is just the latest evidence of the high stakes involved. But several cloud-based solutions are in the process of disrupting that market by, for example, making sophisticated BI accessible to general business users via monthly plans, and using web features to easily publish and share information company-wide. GoodData, whose on-demand model allows users to get started in minutes, provides integrated solutions to salesforce.com and NetSuite, among others.
Another player in the on-demand intelligence game is Indicee, which aims to lift burdened spreadsheet jockeys out of their misery with an elegant cloud-based approach. Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Marketing Campaign Case Studies Collection.