How does e-business fit into a broader multi-channel strategy?
Sasaki: Traditionally, e-business has been conducted through Web-based consumer storefronts. But a large volume of transactions are doing direct B2B transactions through partners. One of Sun’s visions is to enable our partners to enable their customers to interact with them based on Sun’s back-end, e-commerce environment. This saves time and should improve the overall customer experience of buying Sun products through partners. In the ’90s, there was a buzzword called “frictionless e-commerce,” which no one really understood. It means taking the information cost and time lags out of the overall supply system — basically democratizing the information so that it’s available for partners to use as an extension of your company. From a channel perspective, this has accelerated services. As service-oriented architectures (SOAs) get built and identity technologies are employed, consumers start demanding more instant data, and channel partners and others in the supply chain demand more efficie
