Siebel would like to close on a successful sale of their SFA system to Q&R/FleetBoston as their sales figures for the quarter pretty much depend on this one sale to Q&R. It has to convince the executive board at the company about the superiority of it products over its close competitors in order to achieve this goal.
Additionally, Siebel would like to win FleetBoston’s faith in its products. Although a large percentage of the deal on Q&R’s side has already been done by representatives and department heads, it is essential to convince the new acquirers at FleetBoston of the feasibility of using Siebel Systems over the already existing Scopus product.
Currently Siebel also needs to sustain their competitive advantage against prevalent competitors. They can do this by convincing Q&R and FleetBoston of the superiority of their SFA system over the existing Oracle system. This could well be done by demonstration, eradicating the need for an integrator and result in a huge financial transaction for Siebel Systems.
Furthermore, as they make the transition towards new software, Siebel would like to discourage the use of the old Scopus system. Although FleetBoston could very well employ the existing Scopus system with the help of integration, it is to Siebel’s advantage both financially and lawfully that the new Siebel SFA system be used in this case.
Problem Set
FleetBoston has excess licenses for its old Scopus software, which Siebel now owns the rights to. FleetBoston does a significant amount of business (“$30 million of cross-selling at stake… over the next couple of years” ) with Siebel and should not be slighted by losing their investment in these licenses. Currently they could push Scopus upon a reluctant Q&R and ‘get the job done’ while saving a lot of money.
Since Q&R has just been acquired by another company, it would be hard for the Siebel people to break through the upper ranks of FleetBoston and change their minds about the new deployment without taking extra time. The people who Mr. Carman had developed contacts and relationships with are now greatly diminished in importance within the new company, which complicates the future direction of the sales push.
With the acquisition of Q&R came new management and policies. One of the factors that hindered the progress of the transaction was the six months of paperwork that had to be carried out in order to see it through. If this same project were to proceed within FleetBoston, Siebel could face significant delays which could allow their competitors (namely Oracle) to catch up.
...iary. We achieved that by requesting a SOC3 report from the third party and interpreting/learning about the boundaries of their system. We learned that the company maintained effective controls over its system, which included controls over the infrastructure, software, people, and procedures. Therefore, we concluded that the system works effectively and the information gathered through this third-party intermediary will be reliable.
The Hefty Hardware case study presents multiple critical issues that will impact both short-term and long-term growth and development of the company. The first issue is the communication gap and lack of integration between stakeholders in business and the Information Technology division. The second critical issue is the lack of shared knowledge and each department working on projects in essentially silos. The third critical issue is internal company politics driving the executive-level decision making process. Solutions to the above issues will need to be addressed with utmost urgency to ensure Hefty Hardware’s foothold in the marketplace.
The factors listed though impressive and quite thorough, lacks in three crucial factors we believe would make a deep influence in choosing a provider. They are future scalability and expandability, flexibility to adapt to probable changes during development and maturity of technology being used. Elaborating on why the above stated factors are important to be considered during the selection process, we believe that sufficient forethought and foresight needs to be put on to predict future demand and load on the software and evaluate if the provider can handle these predicted future requirements by upgrading and scaling their system. With a focus on agility, the SiL’K team needs to ensure if the providers are flexible enough to accommodate a change if one arises outside the scope of the initial requirement specification. This is more of a qualitative assessment. Lastly, the third factor stresses on evaluating the technology used in the provider’s implementation. Care must be taken to ensure though the technology can meet the current needs, it is of the modern age and has sufficient maturity to evolve over a period of time to enjoy advantages of new, upcoming enhancements.
As Ray Soles, I think the situation involving the purchasing of Marconil requires a deep analysis and strategic thinking, accommodating this process within the company’s supply chain strategic objectives that will consequently help to follow the strategy path of Sabor, Inc.
...ide whether it should be getting better at what it is already good at or whether it should be looking toward higher order capabilities that are beyond the old. The strategic vision of AT&T must be adjusted to reflect their intent of being ‘boundaryless’ and to become the leader in the infocom industry. It must become the companies culture.
There are a few driving forces in the software industry that directly affect SS&C. There is pressure to provide a web component to desktop software (to allow access from internet). Currently only a handful of the SS&C's products are web-based (BancMall). Another pressure comes from the increasing globalization in this industry. In 2003, international revenues accounted for 22-23% of total revenues, a work in progress from the company goal of 50%. SS&C already has a sales presence across Europe, a large office in Malaysia, and their US based clients have operations in Europe. Two of their close competitors (Princeton Financial and Advent Software) have not had much success in Europe. SS&C could also capitalize on the rapidly growing Hedge Fund market in Europe to increase this market. Product innovation and technological change are also constant pressures in software. Both technology and financial markets are constantly changing and new product introductions are key. There is a growing preference for differentiated products as certain niches (i.e. debt and derivatives) need products tailored to their market type. SS&C combats this using acquisitions to gain products to satisfy these niches.
The other opportunity is the technological advances the company was upgrading their ships and more importantly were working on building new ones that will be ready to set sail in 2014. In addition, the technology has increased the cruise travel. Gives the technology to enhance the activities within the cruise.
What we noticed is that due to Control's relative inexperience and lack of understanding of joint venture, James was recalled only after completing one third of his contract length, to be replaced by a relatively inexperienced employee from Singapore (Jimmy Chao). Controls Asia Pacific, in doing so, ignored the fact that they might threaten the success of the joint venture.
"Our actions are centred on improved cash flow and profitability -- and at the same time strengthening our strategic core"- Paul Allaire- CEO(24/10/00)
The first of these strategies that will be rejected deals with segmentation. Sea Goddess Cruises has not adequately considered enough segments in the market, which has been a major contributor to the lack of market share. SGC should eliminate all plans for monosegmenting. As stated in earlier reports, the segment that SGC is trying to target (i.e. lawyers, doctors, CEOs, etc.) is not large enough to make consistent profit. SGC must look at some other segments to a greater variety of passengers, which may then lead to increased market share and revenue. We have found that the current segment is far too narrow and complex. SGC may want to try and market more to the upper-middle class or middle class portion of the population. In addition to this rejected strategy, it is important that SGC does not oversegment in their efforts to improve the company. Oversegmentation is extremely expensive and a majority of segments do not have the financial abilities it takes to enjoy a Sea Goddess cruise. Also, the current facilities are very limited, considering SGC only employs to ships.
At a macro level as a result of the acquisition the combined size of Turner & Townsend Thinc was considered to be of strategic benefit to both firms. While there have been no official mass redundancies, role duplication has resulted in early retirement and resignations. However, the common problem faced after the acquisition is power struggles, excessive overhead, bureaucracy, uncontrolled layering, and decision strangulation.
In the Pieles de La Garriga case study we have to decide whether we are going to accept the offer of Comerpiel and under which conditions. In order to make our decision we have to consider some criteria. The criteria that I identified as the most important are the lack of capacity for the first month if we decide to take the whole order, the profit or loss, the risk that Comerpiel will back out the contract, and the strategic implications of our decision.
BSB made another mistake when they focused more on technology and not on customers and costumer needs. Data doesn’t give significant information that costumers wanted higher quality TV (comparing to existent BBC or ITV for instance) as BSB assumed, and therefore thought that having the 15-year franchise of the high-powered DBS channels, the other medium and low-powered were not a concern. Nevertheless, competitors had the capability to overcome the entry barriers. This could be made for example with Astra that would launch medium powered satellite in 1988, and so, before BSB planned to start broadcasting. With medium-powered satellites, Sky coul...
There are two sources for SAI finance: revenue and shareholders funds. Both are valuable because they are key factors to support the operation of SIA. Two factors that allocate to the SAI revenue are overall load and passenger seat, and they are not unique because every airline companies must contain these sales. While, SAI’s group shareholders funds even were enough to pay for most of its purchases of aircraft in future and recent past the shareholders funds had grown at a rate exceeding S$500 million every year, as well as no debt for group, so this strong financial position is unique to comparing with others. However, shareholders funds is not sustainable competitive advantage, because the process of collecting funds are not complexity, any airline companies have this kind funds, and it is easy to tacit.