A Brave New Mobile World

This paper evaluates the business models of Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the light of IoT and emerging mobile OS.  Microsoft has a unique component model that generates the revenues on a global scale capturing 95% of the PC market by collaborating with the strategic vendors of the corporate enterprises.  The high-tech innovators Apple have an end-to-end business model that has tighter integration with the highest quality of software, hardware, embedded iOS for IoT with more than 800,000 apps on Apple app store.  Google continues to prevail as the marketing leader in mobile computing by 2014.

Introduction

Mobile computing network and communication a emerging trends of the Internet age connecting consumers on the smartphones with a wide range of applications that can allow to even connect to virtual desktops remotely from the smartphones.  The evolution of multiple mobile networking protocols and convergence into a single version of digital mobile computing in the form of LTE (Long Term Evolution) network and 5G, 4G, 3G, 2G networks gave rise to create a new brave mobile world for the consumers in terms of big data transmission and connectivity on a larger scale of distributed network.

Analysis

In the digital age of recent evolution of technology, there are two business models that have been extremely successful; one is the integral model that constitutes as an embedded element into the core of the hardware and edge-to-edge inherent model that is pushed through into the market place to create new horizons of revenue opportunities. Microsoft has championed the integral embedded business model for few decades, while Apple has championed the edge-to-edge business model in the last decade.  In the integrated model, large number of enterprises either creates software applications like operating systems for IoT and computers, MS Office and other utility applications or hardware components such as processors, motherboards, and peripherals on an integrated platform.

The final product is assembled with the blend of software manufacturers and hardware manufacturers, though each application or chipset is not architected keeping in view of a specific operating system or a target software application platform.  There are some nuances and risks when such models are not built for perfection.  However in the edge-to-edge models a single enterprise architects the hardware keeping in view of the software applications and operating system that runs on the platform, therefore the rendering of the final product is impeccable, but the pricing strategy proves to be expensive with a single version of the final product either as a phone or as a notebook.  In the battle for conquering the computer industry, Microsoft has evolved as a marketing leader due to the specialization of operating system and software applications.

The business models of computer manufacturers are equipped with several component procurement suppliers with build-to-order just in time calls for piecing the components together such as Dell, Sony Vaio etc.  The computer manufacturers have established themselves as the strategic vendors such as IBM, Dell, HP for several corporate enterprises with contracts running over several years, thus Microsoft has pushed the envelope to renew the licenses with their latest operating systems and Microsoft software applications including Microsoft SQL server for the database storage applications. On the other hand, Apple could not evolve as a strategic vendor for enterprises as it has not tied up with hardware partners or establishing collaboration licensing agreements thus the Mac operating system did not soar above the competition.

The market trends have been shifting in the recent times, Apple has developed the go to market strategy to build edge-to-edge model building hardware such as Mac books, iMacs, music players such as iPods, iTouchs, Apple TV for streaming apple devices, mobile phones such as iPhones and mobile tablets such as iPads that can serve either as mobile consumption devices or gaming devices. Apple has championed the integration of software and hardware by building the iCloud platform with Apple servers storing data for mobile accessibility 24 x 7 on any of these devices.

Microsoft continue to clone some of the business processes from Apple business model in terms of building video game devices such as Xbox 360 which in turn is an edge-to-edge business model but with only limited success.  Apple in the recent times also started building Apple iTV which is in the R&D for conquering the households of the United States that can serve as a media explosion with music, video, Internet enable device as a hardware component as well as a software component.  The market capitalization of Apple continued to dominate with the evolution of end-to-end models thus reaching the position of most valuable company in the world.  Microsoft also launched cloud-based platform with Microsoft servers similar to Apple cloud-platform, however due to the lack of end-to-end model Microsoft could not generates as there are not many consumers of music or tablets, cell phones who would like to store their data on the cloud (Mossberg, 2006).

Google is a search giant with 90% of the worldwide population leveraging the Google as the search engine; their business model is heavily relied upon generation of revenues via ads. Microsoft’s Bing search model a competitor to Google, currently holds 5% of the market place for search-based industry generating ad-based revenues (Delaney, 2005).  Google also launched a digital library project to build the largest body of knowledge in the world for the human race.  On this platform, Google started ads; though American association of publishers and guild writers raised concerns regarding the copyrights of the books, Google finally settled down the books agreement to grant the part of the revenues to the publishers and for those who have opted out of the books project, they can opt in to allow 20% of the snippets of the books thus generating revenues for both publishers and Google.  The majority of Google revenues are coming from their AdSense and Adwords launched on search engine, YouTube.

Google has launched Android operating system for enabling the advance mobile computing for cell phones. Google generated $14 billion revenues for the Q4 of 2012 with profits at $2.9 billion; mainly the profits were generated from ads with 67% of the revenues generated on Google search engine and Google associated products and sites.

Google has created a new wave of technology on mobile computing with Android operating system with open source software created open handset consortium with Samsung, Sony, HTC, hp, and LG etc.  By 2010, Google’s android mobile operating system has evolved as a game changer on the mobile computing taking a quantum leap over Apple, RIM (now blackberry) and Microsoft Windows mobile phones worldwide.  The research firm Gartner projected that Google’s Android will evolve as number 1 mobile computing operating system by 2014 even surpassing Nokia’s Symbian OS and handsets.

Table 1

Rise of the smartphones and mobile computing OS by 2014 projections by Gartner Inc.

Google faces certain challenges in surpassing Nokia Symbian and Apple iOS and prevailing as a market leader. Oracle has recently sued Google for $1 billion dollars for manufacturing Android operating system with Java UI for violation of patents from Oracle the owner of Java’s Sun Microsystems.  A victory for Oracle could mean derivation of the shared percentage of revenues from Google, on the other hand; a loss for Oracle could catapult their leading software marketing position on the Internet Java based applications development.  The loss for Google could mean a roadblock for prevailing as a market leader (Bailey, 2012).

In 2012, Google won the law suit over Oracle and the jury in the case found that Google did not infringe any Oracle’s patents and the structure of the Java APIs used by the Google was so abstract that it cannot be copyrighted by Java, therefore both Google and Oracle settled down on zero dollars in statutory penalties.  Google now has built algorithms on all Android phones to extract the data related to search performed on the mobile platforms thus it can increase the ad revenues and can pool the Big data generated by the smartphones in making intelligent product launch decisions.

Conclusion

This paper has evaluated different business models of Google, Apple and Microsoft by drawing comparisons on their component and end-to-end models.  Microsoft continued to dominate the PC-era by building the operating systems and software applications by collaborating with the assemblers of the computer machines such as Dell, HP and IBM and occupied 95% of the PC market.  Apple’s business strategy relies on building end-to-end model for tighter integration between hardware and software including music players, gaming consoles, mobile computing devices, tablets, cell phones etc. This strategy made Apple as the most valuable company on the planet.  Google has developed Android operating system to dominate the mobile computing to compete with Apple and soar above the competition.  Google faced some patent challenges but it has now settled the suit with Oracle.  Google is on the trajectory path of prevailing as the market leader in the mobile computing with a projected 30% share of the market by 2014.

Levi’s Strauss & Co SAP BI Implementation

Abstract

This paper evaluates the importance of BI capabilities in an organization.  The business intelligence in today’s world is called differently as business intelligence, business analytics, business warehousing, and big data.  This paper examines the SAP BI project at Levi Strauss & Co.  This paper discusses the key capabilities required for an organization in terms of the storage capabilities of the data for the business that can be fetched at any point of time from the information cubes, and how to integrate the data integration points of the information, and provide insights for making product intelligent decisions, and dashboarding and visualization capabilities of the BI reports in terms of presenting the data with nuts and bolts of the data attributes in the organization.

Keywords: SAP BI, storage capabilities, information integration, insight creation, dashboards

Introduction

Business Intelligence is extremely far-reaching métier in the organization.  The BI primarily has four critical capabilities in the enterprise; these are enterprise memory, information assimilation, product intelligent intuitive decision-making capabilities, and dashboards and visualization capabilities.         s

Analysis

            There are different BI platforms with several and vendors in the market with different product lines supporting the enterprises with different infrastructure with cloud suite capabilities.  Some of the major BI products include SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Oracle & Hyperion, Microsoft BI & PerformancePoint, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SAS BI, Pentaho, Dundas, QlikTech, Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and JasperSoft.

Capgemini, the systems integrator for Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI to management their enterprises business intelligence solutions across the globe with data warehousing capabilities in SAP BW Netweaver 7.1 EHP1 platform with BI crystal reports, SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 with Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence reporting capabilities (BusinessWire, 2011).

The first capability of BI is to have the ability of storing the rising flood of the data in the organization by storing them in various BW InfoCubes for storing the master data attributes table, time dependent attributes, time independent attributes, dimension tables, external hierarchy tables, fact tables, navigational attributes tables, P tables, SID tables, text tables (Cronin, 2012).  Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BW/BI 7.1 with Teradata foundation layer that helped provided the enterprise as a horizontal and vertical scalability of the database as a DBMS (database management system tool) with Teradata 13.10 that runs on Linux for massively parallel processing of the data extraction, transformation and loading.  The following figure 1 depicts the organizational memory database layer as Teradata 13.10 for Levi Strauss & Co for their SAP BI implementation project.

Figure 1.  Enterprise Memory Teradata 13.0 on Linux for SAP BI Netweaver

(SAP, 2013).

SAP BI Netweaver provides the second capability of BI information integration as part of SAP’s multiple integration layers of the SAP NetWeaver product.  Such integration capabilities would provide TREX (Tree regular expressions for XML) capabilities for the enterprise for text mining and search and classifying capabilities by integrating the links between unstructured and structured data with check-in and check-out capabilities and version control management.  Such creation of taxonomies can keep the organizations on leading edge with knowledge management concepts and capabilities.  The following figure 1 shows the information integration capability as part of SAP BI solution (SAP, 2013).

Figure 2.  SAP BI Information Integration Capability

(SAP, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented the information integration by linking various sources of their retail physical outlets by linking the structured and unstructured data from more than 80 legacy systems with SAP BW/BI Netweaver 7.1 Teradata implementation that helped them to build a knowledge management tool for search and classification purposes of their apparel and footwear solutions product management, master data management in the organization (BusinessWire, 2011).

Insight creation for launching new products and making product intelligent decisions is the third capability of BI for creating strategic roadmap for the business enterprise with different data sizes, different locations, regions across the globe help organizations realize their goals and objectives on-time with real-time interactive BI capabilities (Howson, 2013).  Levi Strauss & Co.  has added an array of new capabilities for insight creations by implementing SAP BI project that had provided results with Teradata foundation layer extremely quicker and faster, to explore, visualize, and navigate the data attributes for their product lifecycle management (BusinessWire, 2011).

The fourth capability of BI is innovative and intuitive dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities that will help an organization to maximize the revenues by providing the insights into the organization with real-time data thus allowing the stakeholders of the organization to make product intelligent decisions.  These dashboard and visualization tools help the organization to display the data with green, red, and yellow statuses of different scorecards on various aspects of the organization such as supply chain management, financials management, business process consolidation, logistics, inventory, and materials management (Howson, 2013).

The coming together of the dashboards and visualization tools enable the organization to maximize their return on investment and create golden standards and measurement for the enterprise performance management with key performance indicators on several business processes with sales revenues, volumes, pipeline management, marketing segmentation, web channel sales, physical store sales by affiliate, territory, and region  (Howson, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI, BW, BusinessObjects products for their supply chain management, and apparel and footwear business retail stores for displaying the data for next 18 months for advanced planning optimization, demand planning, supply network planning, supplier network collaboration implemented by the systems integrator Capgemini consulting.  SAP BI tools have been instrumental in providing the dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities for their supply chain management by adding value premium in the organization to improve their merchandise and planning operations, global supply chain management capabilities, product line planning (BusinessWire, 2011).

Conclusion

This paper has examined the various BI vendors providing BI products on the BI platform.  This paper has discussed the real-world example of my organization Capgemini SAP BI/BW Netweaver 7.1 implementation at Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco, CA and how the four key capabilities of BI have been leveraged by Levi Strauss & Co and discussed the business benefits realized by Levi Strauss & Co for their supply chain management, retail business, apparel and footwear solutions with enterprise memory, information integration, insight creation and presentation capabilities with dashboard and visualization tools for real-time replication of the data from the Infocubes of SAP BI.

References

Cronin, C.  (2012).  BW Table Types (MD tbl, SID tbl, DIM tbl, etc).  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/BW+Table+Types+(MD+tbl,+SID+tbl,+DIM+tbl,+etc)

Henschen, D.  (2011).  12 Brawny Business Intelligence Products For SMBs.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/12-brawny-business-intelligence-products/230600071

Howson, C.  (2013).  7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/7-top-business-intelligence-trends-for-2/240146994

Levi Strauss & Co.  Selects Capgemini for Global Business Intelligence Services [Magazine].  (2011, October 06).  BusinessWire.  Retrieved from http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111005005351/en/Levi-Strauss-Selects-Capgemini-Global-Business-Intelligence

SAP (2013).  BI Information Integration: Key Areas.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/0c/58497f411a7848985ae2aa0dda0bd3/content.htm

SAP (2013).  Teradata Foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from https://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp02/helpdata/en/7c/969fdb60a44f35ba38e66fa965d7fc/content.htm?frameset=/en/8f/c08b3baaa59649e10000000a11402f/frameset.htm

Sabherwal, R., & Fernandez, I.  B.  (2010).  Business Intelligence: Practices, Technologies and Management (1st ed.).  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Strategy Focus

Nvidia is a global technology corporation based in Santa Clara, California, which
specializes in manufacturing the products for GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) for PCs and
notebooks, also the founder of world’s first Graphical Processing Unit, through it’s product
launch GeForce 256. Popular science, the world’s largest science and
technology magazine has rated Nvidia ION which is a graphical processor that boosts the
performance of the PC graphics by 10X over integrated graphics. Thus Popular science
magazine has rated Nvidia as one of the most technology innovations that made it to the Top 100
innovations in the December issue of 2009. Due to the specialization of it’s graphics processing
manufacturing units and many successful product launches it has even entered the gaming
platform to develop graphics and hardware acceleration for Microsoft’s Xbox game console in
2000. In 2004, they also progressed towards a major move by making an announcement to
prototype and design the build of the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3 which resulted
as a successful product that helped Nvidia to be official GPU manufacturer for Sony and Toshiba
which led to fallout of their contract agreement with Microsoft Xbox due to its business strategy
in the market as Xbox and Playstation were facing competitive rivalry.

I/O Based Model of Above-Average returns.
Though Nvidia can’t directly compete with Intel in making the core chips for PCs and
notebooks, Nvidia always is a global leader in GPUs design, manufacturing and production of
GPUs. But always responded to various challenges and demands of the market by meeting the
demands and exploration of opportunities with a complete set of dynamic market variables to
demonstrate the competitive advantage. Nvidia’s average returns with it’s Tegra 2 in the first 3
quarters of 2011 were stagnated and were forecasted to remain in the fourth quarter flat as well.
In the recent times it has entered the mobile computing market space by launching it’s new
product Tegra 3 Quad-core chip which is a low-powered efficient chip that can directly compete
with Arm processors such as Snapdragon, Cortex, ARM9, ARM11, Samsung Humming bird,
Apple A4, Apple A5 chips in the market for powering Tablets, smartphones and Infotainment
systems. As of today Tegra 3 Quad-core chip for Tablet is the world’s first Quad-core mobile
processor released on November 9 th , 2011, which has easily dominated it’s market biggest threat
Apple A5 chip and also demonstrating this chip at Mobile World Congress to be held in
Barcelona, Spain from February 27 th , 2012 through 1 st March 2012. Thus strategically
controlling the segment of PCs, Notebooks in GPUs and segments of Quad core chips in
Smartphones and Tablets, the shares of Nvidia rose by 3.5% on November 11 th , 2011 after the
announcement of Tegra 3 Quad core chip trading to $14.98 on Dow Jones Industrial average
index thus drawing several stake holders who expects above-average returns from Nvidia.

External Environment: Competition and Opportunities

Nvidia has a close watch on the external environment that can change the composition and
launch of it’s designs and innovations. There has always been threat of new entrants into the
market, in 2000 ATI technologies launched its response to Nvidia GEForce 256 by launching
R100 a fully DirectX 7 compliant GPU. Though in the initial stages Nvidia was the market
leader in GPUs and captured the gaming platform by signing up the contract with Microsoft
Xbox gaming console, eventually manufacturing the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3
has led Microsoft to sign up it’s new contract with ATI technologies to keep it’s competitive
advantage in the market which impacted the stakeholders of Nvidia, ATI continued to evolve as
new and powerful suppliers of the market till they were acquired by AMD (Advanced Micro
Devices) in 2006. This acquisition marked the importance of fusion generation of computer
processors for AMD and went completely with the logo of AMD by removing the ATI
terminology/logo from 2010. More product substitutes grew in the market by Apple and
Samsung with their Cortex and A4, A5 chips which impacted Nvidia market share. This led to
more technological exploration of opportunities within Nvidia to advance their product
innovations and apply the knowledge of their Tegra 2 Dual Core to Tegra 3 Quad Core

4Case Study I Strategic Focus Page
evolution, thus captured the market by releasing the world’s first mobile quad-core processor.
Due to this new launch, Nvidia is predicting the growth of $4.7 bn to $5 bn in 2013 to exceed the
expectations of $4.45 bn. Clearly Nvidia has dominated the market in 2010 with a market share
of 31.5% as opposed to it’s direct rival AMD with a market share of 24%.

Applying strategic competitiveness in my current organization
Capgemini a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and local professional services
is headquartered in Paris, France and operates in more than 40 countries. With over 115,000
people in North and South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions, with major income
derived from North America. Capgemini strengths mainly are resources, capabilities and core
competencies. Capgemini closely monitors and scans its competitors such as IBM, Deloitte
Consulting, Accenture to be a game changer in the niche market. After acquisition of Earnest and
Young and Kanbay International in 2000 and 2006, it started expanding their operations of
outsourcing and consulting in Information Technology, Financials and BPO.
Capgemini has a specific outsourcing model called Rightshore by launching outsourcing centers
for software development and IT services across the globe, people are critical resources for
Capgemini in terms of providing leading edge software solutions and product innovations and
strategic business transformation plans to various industrial clients in the segments of Aerospace,
Defence, Oil, Utilities, Energy, Power, Retail, Automotive, AFS, Media. Capgemini has costly-
to-imitate product innovations in terms of providing solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning
software solutions such as SAP software and it’s pricing structure in terms of building the rate
cards for client IT services has allowed Capgemini to win several IT projects in competition to
it’s rivals IBM, Deloitte, Accenture.

5Case Study I Strategic Focus Page

References
1. Laptopmag.com
2. Wikipedia
3. CNET Articles on CES (Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas in January 2012)
4. www.marketwatch.com

5. Popular science magazine http://www.popsci.com/
6. www.wired.com

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Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem .

A Brave New Mobile World

This paper evaluates the business models of Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the light of IoT and emerging mobile OS.  Microsoft has a unique component model that generates the revenues on a global scale capturing 95% of the PC market by collaborating with the strategic vendors of the corporate enterprises.  The high-tech innovators Apple have an end-to-end business model that has tighter integration with the highest quality of software, hardware, embedded iOS for IoT with more than 800,000 apps on Apple app store.  Google continues to prevail as the marketing leader in mobile computing by 2014.

Introduction

Mobile computing network and communication a emerging trends of the Internet age connecting consumers on the smartphones with a wide range of applications that can allow to even connect to virtual desktops remotely from the smartphones.  The evolution of multiple mobile networking protocols and convergence into a single version of digital mobile computing in the form of LTE (Long Term Evolution) network and 5G, 4G, 3G, 2G networks gave rise to create a new brave mobile world for the consumers in terms of big data transmission and connectivity on a larger scale of distributed network.

Analysis

In the digital age of recent evolution of technology, there are two business models that have been extremely successful; one is the integral model that constitutes as an embedded element into the core of the hardware and edge-to-edge inherent model that is pushed through into the market place to create new horizons of revenue opportunities. Microsoft has championed the integral embedded business model for few decades, while Apple has championed the edge-to-edge business model in the last decade.  In the integrated model, large number of enterprises either creates software applications like operating systems for IoT and computers, MS Office and other utility applications or hardware components such as processors, motherboards, and peripherals on an integrated platform.

The final product is assembled with the blend of software manufacturers and hardware manufacturers, though each application or chipset is not architected keeping in view of a specific operating system or a target software application platform.  There are some nuances and risks when such models are not built for perfection.  However in the edge-to-edge models a single enterprise architects the hardware keeping in view of the software applications and operating system that runs on the platform, therefore the rendering of the final product is impeccable, but the pricing strategy proves to be expensive with a single version of the final product either as a phone or as a notebook.  In the battle for conquering the computer industry, Microsoft has evolved as a marketing leader due to the specialization of operating system and software applications.

The business models of computer manufacturers are equipped with several component procurement suppliers with build-to-order just in time calls for piecing the components together such as Dell, Sony Vaio etc.  The computer manufacturers have established themselves as the strategic vendors such as IBM, Dell, HP for several corporate enterprises with contracts running over several years, thus Microsoft has pushed the envelope to renew the licenses with their latest operating systems and Microsoft software applications including Microsoft SQL server for the database storage applications. On the other hand, Apple could not evolve as a strategic vendor for enterprises as it has not tied up with hardware partners or establishing collaboration licensing agreements thus the Mac operating system did not soar above the competition.

The market trends have been shifting in the recent times, Apple has developed the go to market strategy to build edge-to-edge model building hardware such as Mac books, iMacs, music players such as iPods, iTouchs, Apple TV for streaming apple devices, mobile phones such as iPhones and mobile tablets such as iPads that can serve either as mobile consumption devices or gaming devices. Apple has championed the integration of software and hardware by building the iCloud platform with Apple servers storing data for mobile accessibility 24 x 7 on any of these devices.

Microsoft continue to clone some of the business processes from Apple business model in terms of building video game devices such as Xbox 360 which in turn is an edge-to-edge business model but with only limited success.  Apple in the recent times also started building Apple iTV which is in the R&D for conquering the households of the United States that can serve as a media explosion with music, video, Internet enable device as a hardware component as well as a software component.  The market capitalization of Apple continued to dominate with the evolution of end-to-end models thus reaching the position of most valuable company in the world.  Microsoft also launched cloud-based platform with Microsoft servers similar to Apple cloud-platform, however due to the lack of end-to-end model Microsoft could not generates as there are not many consumers of music or tablets, cell phones who would like to store their data on the cloud (Mossberg, 2006).

Google is a search giant with 90% of the worldwide population leveraging the Google as the search engine; their business model is heavily relied upon generation of revenues via ads. Microsoft’s Bing search model a competitor to Google, currently holds 5% of the market place for search-based industry generating ad-based revenues (Delaney, 2005).  Google also launched a digital library project to build the largest body of knowledge in the world for the human race.  On this platform, Google started ads; though American association of publishers and guild writers raised concerns regarding the copyrights of the books, Google finally settled down the books agreement to grant the part of the revenues to the publishers and for those who have opted out of the books project, they can opt in to allow 20% of the snippets of the books thus generating revenues for both publishers and Google.  The majority of Google revenues are coming from their AdSense and Adwords launched on search engine, YouTube.

Google has launched Android operating system for enabling the advance mobile computing for cell phones. Google generated $14 billion revenues for the Q4 of 2012 with profits at $2.9 billion; mainly the profits were generated from ads with 67% of the revenues generated on Google search engine and Google associated products and sites.

Google has created a new wave of technology on mobile computing with Android operating system with open source software created open handset consortium with Samsung, Sony, HTC, hp, and LG etc.  By 2010, Google’s android mobile operating system has evolved as a game changer on the mobile computing taking a quantum leap over Apple, RIM (now blackberry) and Microsoft Windows mobile phones worldwide.  The research firm Gartner projected that Google’s Android will evolve as number 1 mobile computing operating system by 2014 even surpassing Nokia’s Symbian OS and handsets.

Table 1

Rise of the smartphones and mobile computing OS by 2014 projections by Gartner Inc.

Google faces certain challenges in surpassing Nokia Symbian and Apple iOS and prevailing as a market leader. Oracle has recently sued Google for $1 billion dollars for manufacturing Android operating system with Java UI for violation of patents from Oracle the owner of Java’s Sun Microsystems.  A victory for Oracle could mean derivation of the shared percentage of revenues from Google, on the other hand; a loss for Oracle could catapult their leading software marketing position on the Internet Java based applications development.  The loss for Google could mean a roadblock for prevailing as a market leader (Bailey, 2012).

In 2012, Google won the law suit over Oracle and the jury in the case found that Google did not infringe any Oracle’s patents and the structure of the Java APIs used by the Google was so abstract that it cannot be copyrighted by Java, therefore both Google and Oracle settled down on zero dollars in statutory penalties.  Google now has built algorithms on all Android phones to extract the data related to search performed on the mobile platforms thus it can increase the ad revenues and can pool the Big data generated by the smartphones in making intelligent product launch decisions.

Conclusion

This paper has evaluated different business models of Google, Apple and Microsoft by drawing comparisons on their component and end-to-end models.  Microsoft continued to dominate the PC-era by building the operating systems and software applications by collaborating with the assemblers of the computer machines such as Dell, HP and IBM and occupied 95% of the PC market.  Apple’s business strategy relies on building end-to-end model for tighter integration between hardware and software including music players, gaming consoles, mobile computing devices, tablets, cell phones etc. This strategy made Apple as the most valuable company on the planet.  Google has developed Android operating system to dominate the mobile computing to compete with Apple and soar above the competition.  Google faced some patent challenges but it has now settled the suit with Oracle.  Google is on the trajectory path of prevailing as the market leader in the mobile computing with a projected 30% share of the market by 2014.

Levi’s Strauss & Co SAP BI Implementation

Abstract

This paper evaluates the importance of BI capabilities in an organization.  The business intelligence in today’s world is called differently as business intelligence, business analytics, business warehousing, and big data.  This paper examines the SAP BI project at Levi Strauss & Co.  This paper discusses the key capabilities required for an organization in terms of the storage capabilities of the data for the business that can be fetched at any point of time from the information cubes, and how to integrate the data integration points of the information, and provide insights for making product intelligent decisions, and dashboarding and visualization capabilities of the BI reports in terms of presenting the data with nuts and bolts of the data attributes in the organization.

Keywords: SAP BI, storage capabilities, information integration, insight creation, dashboards

Introduction

Business Intelligence is extremely far-reaching métier in the organization.  The BI primarily has four critical capabilities in the enterprise; these are enterprise memory, information assimilation, product intelligent intuitive decision-making capabilities, and dashboards and visualization capabilities.         s

Analysis

            There are different BI platforms with several and vendors in the market with different product lines supporting the enterprises with different infrastructure with cloud suite capabilities.  Some of the major BI products include SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Oracle & Hyperion, Microsoft BI & PerformancePoint, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SAS BI, Pentaho, Dundas, QlikTech, Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and JasperSoft.

Capgemini, the systems integrator for Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI to management their enterprises business intelligence solutions across the globe with data warehousing capabilities in SAP BW Netweaver 7.1 EHP1 platform with BI crystal reports, SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 with Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence reporting capabilities (BusinessWire, 2011).

The first capability of BI is to have the ability of storing the rising flood of the data in the organization by storing them in various BW InfoCubes for storing the master data attributes table, time dependent attributes, time independent attributes, dimension tables, external hierarchy tables, fact tables, navigational attributes tables, P tables, SID tables, text tables (Cronin, 2012).  Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BW/BI 7.1 with Teradata foundation layer that helped provided the enterprise as a horizontal and vertical scalability of the database as a DBMS (database management system tool) with Teradata 13.10 that runs on Linux for massively parallel processing of the data extraction, transformation and loading.  The following figure 1 depicts the organizational memory database layer as Teradata 13.10 for Levi Strauss & Co for their SAP BI implementation project.

Figure 1.  Enterprise Memory Teradata 13.0 on Linux for SAP BI Netweaver

(SAP, 2013).

SAP BI Netweaver provides the second capability of BI information integration as part of SAP’s multiple integration layers of the SAP NetWeaver product.  Such integration capabilities would provide TREX (Tree regular expressions for XML) capabilities for the enterprise for text mining and search and classifying capabilities by integrating the links between unstructured and structured data with check-in and check-out capabilities and version control management.  Such creation of taxonomies can keep the organizations on leading edge with knowledge management concepts and capabilities.  The following figure 1 shows the information integration capability as part of SAP BI solution (SAP, 2013).

Figure 2.  SAP BI Information Integration Capability

(SAP, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented the information integration by linking various sources of their retail physical outlets by linking the structured and unstructured data from more than 80 legacy systems with SAP BW/BI Netweaver 7.1 Teradata implementation that helped them to build a knowledge management tool for search and classification purposes of their apparel and footwear solutions product management, master data management in the organization (BusinessWire, 2011).

Insight creation for launching new products and making product intelligent decisions is the third capability of BI for creating strategic roadmap for the business enterprise with different data sizes, different locations, regions across the globe help organizations realize their goals and objectives on-time with real-time interactive BI capabilities (Howson, 2013).  Levi Strauss & Co.  has added an array of new capabilities for insight creations by implementing SAP BI project that had provided results with Teradata foundation layer extremely quicker and faster, to explore, visualize, and navigate the data attributes for their product lifecycle management (BusinessWire, 2011).

The fourth capability of BI is innovative and intuitive dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities that will help an organization to maximize the revenues by providing the insights into the organization with real-time data thus allowing the stakeholders of the organization to make product intelligent decisions.  These dashboard and visualization tools help the organization to display the data with green, red, and yellow statuses of different scorecards on various aspects of the organization such as supply chain management, financials management, business process consolidation, logistics, inventory, and materials management (Howson, 2013).

The coming together of the dashboards and visualization tools enable the organization to maximize their return on investment and create golden standards and measurement for the enterprise performance management with key performance indicators on several business processes with sales revenues, volumes, pipeline management, marketing segmentation, web channel sales, physical store sales by affiliate, territory, and region  (Howson, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI, BW, BusinessObjects products for their supply chain management, and apparel and footwear business retail stores for displaying the data for next 18 months for advanced planning optimization, demand planning, supply network planning, supplier network collaboration implemented by the systems integrator Capgemini consulting.  SAP BI tools have been instrumental in providing the dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities for their supply chain management by adding value premium in the organization to improve their merchandise and planning operations, global supply chain management capabilities, product line planning (BusinessWire, 2011).

Conclusion

This paper has examined the various BI vendors providing BI products on the BI platform.  This paper has discussed the real-world example of my organization Capgemini SAP BI/BW Netweaver 7.1 implementation at Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco, CA and how the four key capabilities of BI have been leveraged by Levi Strauss & Co and discussed the business benefits realized by Levi Strauss & Co for their supply chain management, retail business, apparel and footwear solutions with enterprise memory, information integration, insight creation and presentation capabilities with dashboard and visualization tools for real-time replication of the data from the Infocubes of SAP BI.

References

Cronin, C.  (2012).  BW Table Types (MD tbl, SID tbl, DIM tbl, etc).  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/BW+Table+Types+(MD+tbl,+SID+tbl,+DIM+tbl,+etc)

Henschen, D.  (2011).  12 Brawny Business Intelligence Products For SMBs.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/12-brawny-business-intelligence-products/230600071

Howson, C.  (2013).  7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/7-top-business-intelligence-trends-for-2/240146994

Levi Strauss & Co.  Selects Capgemini for Global Business Intelligence Services [Magazine].  (2011, October 06).  BusinessWire.  Retrieved from http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111005005351/en/Levi-Strauss-Selects-Capgemini-Global-Business-Intelligence

SAP (2013).  BI Information Integration: Key Areas.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/0c/58497f411a7848985ae2aa0dda0bd3/content.htm

SAP (2013).  Teradata Foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from https://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp02/helpdata/en/7c/969fdb60a44f35ba38e66fa965d7fc/content.htm?frameset=/en/8f/c08b3baaa59649e10000000a11402f/frameset.htm

Sabherwal, R., & Fernandez, I.  B.  (2010).  Business Intelligence: Practices, Technologies and Management (1st ed.).  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Strategy Focus

Nvidia is a global technology corporation based in Santa Clara, California, which
specializes in manufacturing the products for GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) for PCs and
notebooks, also the founder of world’s first Graphical Processing Unit, through it’s product
launch GeForce 256. Popular science, the world’s largest science and
technology magazine has rated Nvidia ION which is a graphical processor that boosts the
performance of the PC graphics by 10X over integrated graphics. Thus Popular science
magazine has rated Nvidia as one of the most technology innovations that made it to the Top 100
innovations in the December issue of 2009. Due to the specialization of it’s graphics processing
manufacturing units and many successful product launches it has even entered the gaming
platform to develop graphics and hardware acceleration for Microsoft’s Xbox game console in
2000. In 2004, they also progressed towards a major move by making an announcement to
prototype and design the build of the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3 which resulted
as a successful product that helped Nvidia to be official GPU manufacturer for Sony and Toshiba
which led to fallout of their contract agreement with Microsoft Xbox due to its business strategy
in the market as Xbox and Playstation were facing competitive rivalry.

I/O Based Model of Above-Average returns.
Though Nvidia can’t directly compete with Intel in making the core chips for PCs and
notebooks, Nvidia always is a global leader in GPUs design, manufacturing and production of
GPUs. But always responded to various challenges and demands of the market by meeting the
demands and exploration of opportunities with a complete set of dynamic market variables to
demonstrate the competitive advantage. Nvidia’s average returns with it’s Tegra 2 in the first 3
quarters of 2011 were stagnated and were forecasted to remain in the fourth quarter flat as well.
In the recent times it has entered the mobile computing market space by launching it’s new
product Tegra 3 Quad-core chip which is a low-powered efficient chip that can directly compete
with Arm processors such as Snapdragon, Cortex, ARM9, ARM11, Samsung Humming bird,
Apple A4, Apple A5 chips in the market for powering Tablets, smartphones and Infotainment
systems. As of today Tegra 3 Quad-core chip for Tablet is the world’s first Quad-core mobile
processor released on November 9 th , 2011, which has easily dominated it’s market biggest threat
Apple A5 chip and also demonstrating this chip at Mobile World Congress to be held in
Barcelona, Spain from February 27 th , 2012 through 1 st March 2012. Thus strategically
controlling the segment of PCs, Notebooks in GPUs and segments of Quad core chips in
Smartphones and Tablets, the shares of Nvidia rose by 3.5% on November 11 th , 2011 after the
announcement of Tegra 3 Quad core chip trading to $14.98 on Dow Jones Industrial average
index thus drawing several stake holders who expects above-average returns from Nvidia.

External Environment: Competition and Opportunities

Nvidia has a close watch on the external environment that can change the composition and
launch of it’s designs and innovations. There has always been threat of new entrants into the
market, in 2000 ATI technologies launched its response to Nvidia GEForce 256 by launching
R100 a fully DirectX 7 compliant GPU. Though in the initial stages Nvidia was the market
leader in GPUs and captured the gaming platform by signing up the contract with Microsoft
Xbox gaming console, eventually manufacturing the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3
has led Microsoft to sign up it’s new contract with ATI technologies to keep it’s competitive
advantage in the market which impacted the stakeholders of Nvidia, ATI continued to evolve as
new and powerful suppliers of the market till they were acquired by AMD (Advanced Micro
Devices) in 2006. This acquisition marked the importance of fusion generation of computer
processors for AMD and went completely with the logo of AMD by removing the ATI
terminology/logo from 2010. More product substitutes grew in the market by Apple and
Samsung with their Cortex and A4, A5 chips which impacted Nvidia market share. This led to
more technological exploration of opportunities within Nvidia to advance their product
innovations and apply the knowledge of their Tegra 2 Dual Core to Tegra 3 Quad Core

4Case Study I Strategic Focus Page
evolution, thus captured the market by releasing the world’s first mobile quad-core processor.
Due to this new launch, Nvidia is predicting the growth of $4.7 bn to $5 bn in 2013 to exceed the
expectations of $4.45 bn. Clearly Nvidia has dominated the market in 2010 with a market share
of 31.5% as opposed to it’s direct rival AMD with a market share of 24%.

Applying strategic competitiveness in my current organization
Capgemini a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and local professional services
is headquartered in Paris, France and operates in more than 40 countries. With over 115,000
people in North and South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions, with major income
derived from North America. Capgemini strengths mainly are resources, capabilities and core
competencies. Capgemini closely monitors and scans its competitors such as IBM, Deloitte
Consulting, Accenture to be a game changer in the niche market. After acquisition of Earnest and
Young and Kanbay International in 2000 and 2006, it started expanding their operations of
outsourcing and consulting in Information Technology, Financials and BPO.
Capgemini has a specific outsourcing model called Rightshore by launching outsourcing centers
for software development and IT services across the globe, people are critical resources for
Capgemini in terms of providing leading edge software solutions and product innovations and
strategic business transformation plans to various industrial clients in the segments of Aerospace,
Defence, Oil, Utilities, Energy, Power, Retail, Automotive, AFS, Media. Capgemini has costly-
to-imitate product innovations in terms of providing solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning
software solutions such as SAP software and it’s pricing structure in terms of building the rate
cards for client IT services has allowed Capgemini to win several IT projects in competition to
it’s rivals IBM, Deloitte, Accenture.

5Case Study I Strategic Focus Page

References
1. Laptopmag.com
2. Wikipedia
3. CNET Articles on CES (Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas in January 2012)
4. www.marketwatch.com

5. Popular science magazine http://www.popsci.com/
6. www.wired.com

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A Brave New Mobile World

This paper evaluates the business models of Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the light of IoT and emerging mobile OS.  Microsoft has a unique component model that generates the revenues on a global scale capturing 95% of the PC market by collaborating with the strategic vendors of the corporate enterprises.  The high-tech innovators Apple have an end-to-end business model that has tighter integration with the highest quality of software, hardware, embedded iOS for IoT with more than 800,000 apps on Apple app store.  Google continues to prevail as the marketing leader in mobile computing by 2014.

Introduction

Mobile computing network and communication a emerging trends of the Internet age connecting consumers on the smartphones with a wide range of applications that can allow to even connect to virtual desktops remotely from the smartphones.  The evolution of multiple mobile networking protocols and convergence into a single version of digital mobile computing in the form of LTE (Long Term Evolution) network and 5G, 4G, 3G, 2G networks gave rise to create a new brave mobile world for the consumers in terms of big data transmission and connectivity on a larger scale of distributed network.

Analysis

In the digital age of recent evolution of technology, there are two business models that have been extremely successful; one is the integral model that constitutes as an embedded element into the core of the hardware and edge-to-edge inherent model that is pushed through into the market place to create new horizons of revenue opportunities. Microsoft has championed the integral embedded business model for few decades, while Apple has championed the edge-to-edge business model in the last decade.  In the integrated model, large number of enterprises either creates software applications like operating systems for IoT and computers, MS Office and other utility applications or hardware components such as processors, motherboards, and peripherals on an integrated platform.

The final product is assembled with the blend of software manufacturers and hardware manufacturers, though each application or chipset is not architected keeping in view of a specific operating system or a target software application platform.  There are some nuances and risks when such models are not built for perfection.  However in the edge-to-edge models a single enterprise architects the hardware keeping in view of the software applications and operating system that runs on the platform, therefore the rendering of the final product is impeccable, but the pricing strategy proves to be expensive with a single version of the final product either as a phone or as a notebook.  In the battle for conquering the computer industry, Microsoft has evolved as a marketing leader due to the specialization of operating system and software applications.

The business models of computer manufacturers are equipped with several component procurement suppliers with build-to-order just in time calls for piecing the components together such as Dell, Sony Vaio etc.  The computer manufacturers have established themselves as the strategic vendors such as IBM, Dell, HP for several corporate enterprises with contracts running over several years, thus Microsoft has pushed the envelope to renew the licenses with their latest operating systems and Microsoft software applications including Microsoft SQL server for the database storage applications. On the other hand, Apple could not evolve as a strategic vendor for enterprises as it has not tied up with hardware partners or establishing collaboration licensing agreements thus the Mac operating system did not soar above the competition.

The market trends have been shifting in the recent times, Apple has developed the go to market strategy to build edge-to-edge model building hardware such as Mac books, iMacs, music players such as iPods, iTouchs, Apple TV for streaming apple devices, mobile phones such as iPhones and mobile tablets such as iPads that can serve either as mobile consumption devices or gaming devices. Apple has championed the integration of software and hardware by building the iCloud platform with Apple servers storing data for mobile accessibility 24 x 7 on any of these devices.

Microsoft continue to clone some of the business processes from Apple business model in terms of building video game devices such as Xbox 360 which in turn is an edge-to-edge business model but with only limited success.  Apple in the recent times also started building Apple iTV which is in the R&D for conquering the households of the United States that can serve as a media explosion with music, video, Internet enable device as a hardware component as well as a software component.  The market capitalization of Apple continued to dominate with the evolution of end-to-end models thus reaching the position of most valuable company in the world.  Microsoft also launched cloud-based platform with Microsoft servers similar to Apple cloud-platform, however due to the lack of end-to-end model Microsoft could not generates as there are not many consumers of music or tablets, cell phones who would like to store their data on the cloud (Mossberg, 2006).

Google is a search giant with 90% of the worldwide population leveraging the Google as the search engine; their business model is heavily relied upon generation of revenues via ads. Microsoft’s Bing search model a competitor to Google, currently holds 5% of the market place for search-based industry generating ad-based revenues (Delaney, 2005).  Google also launched a digital library project to build the largest body of knowledge in the world for the human race.  On this platform, Google started ads; though American association of publishers and guild writers raised concerns regarding the copyrights of the books, Google finally settled down the books agreement to grant the part of the revenues to the publishers and for those who have opted out of the books project, they can opt in to allow 20% of the snippets of the books thus generating revenues for both publishers and Google.  The majority of Google revenues are coming from their AdSense and Adwords launched on search engine, YouTube.

Google has launched Android operating system for enabling the advance mobile computing for cell phones. Google generated $14 billion revenues for the Q4 of 2012 with profits at $2.9 billion; mainly the profits were generated from ads with 67% of the revenues generated on Google search engine and Google associated products and sites.

Google has created a new wave of technology on mobile computing with Android operating system with open source software created open handset consortium with Samsung, Sony, HTC, hp, and LG etc.  By 2010, Google’s android mobile operating system has evolved as a game changer on the mobile computing taking a quantum leap over Apple, RIM (now blackberry) and Microsoft Windows mobile phones worldwide.  The research firm Gartner projected that Google’s Android will evolve as number 1 mobile computing operating system by 2014 even surpassing Nokia’s Symbian OS and handsets.

Table 1

Rise of the smartphones and mobile computing OS by 2014 projections by Gartner Inc.

Google faces certain challenges in surpassing Nokia Symbian and Apple iOS and prevailing as a market leader. Oracle has recently sued Google for $1 billion dollars for manufacturing Android operating system with Java UI for violation of patents from Oracle the owner of Java’s Sun Microsystems.  A victory for Oracle could mean derivation of the shared percentage of revenues from Google, on the other hand; a loss for Oracle could catapult their leading software marketing position on the Internet Java based applications development.  The loss for Google could mean a roadblock for prevailing as a market leader (Bailey, 2012).

In 2012, Google won the law suit over Oracle and the jury in the case found that Google did not infringe any Oracle’s patents and the structure of the Java APIs used by the Google was so abstract that it cannot be copyrighted by Java, therefore both Google and Oracle settled down on zero dollars in statutory penalties.  Google now has built algorithms on all Android phones to extract the data related to search performed on the mobile platforms thus it can increase the ad revenues and can pool the Big data generated by the smartphones in making intelligent product launch decisions.

Conclusion

This paper has evaluated different business models of Google, Apple and Microsoft by drawing comparisons on their component and end-to-end models.  Microsoft continued to dominate the PC-era by building the operating systems and software applications by collaborating with the assemblers of the computer machines such as Dell, HP and IBM and occupied 95% of the PC market.  Apple’s business strategy relies on building end-to-end model for tighter integration between hardware and software including music players, gaming consoles, mobile computing devices, tablets, cell phones etc. This strategy made Apple as the most valuable company on the planet.  Google has developed Android operating system to dominate the mobile computing to compete with Apple and soar above the competition.  Google faced some patent challenges but it has now settled the suit with Oracle.  Google is on the trajectory path of prevailing as the market leader in the mobile computing with a projected 30% share of the market by 2014.

Levi’s Strauss & Co SAP BI Implementation

Abstract

This paper evaluates the importance of BI capabilities in an organization.  The business intelligence in today’s world is called differently as business intelligence, business analytics, business warehousing, and big data.  This paper examines the SAP BI project at Levi Strauss & Co.  This paper discusses the key capabilities required for an organization in terms of the storage capabilities of the data for the business that can be fetched at any point of time from the information cubes, and how to integrate the data integration points of the information, and provide insights for making product intelligent decisions, and dashboarding and visualization capabilities of the BI reports in terms of presenting the data with nuts and bolts of the data attributes in the organization.

Keywords: SAP BI, storage capabilities, information integration, insight creation, dashboards

Introduction

Business Intelligence is extremely far-reaching métier in the organization.  The BI primarily has four critical capabilities in the enterprise; these are enterprise memory, information assimilation, product intelligent intuitive decision-making capabilities, and dashboards and visualization capabilities.         s

Analysis

            There are different BI platforms with several and vendors in the market with different product lines supporting the enterprises with different infrastructure with cloud suite capabilities.  Some of the major BI products include SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Oracle & Hyperion, Microsoft BI & PerformancePoint, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SAS BI, Pentaho, Dundas, QlikTech, Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and JasperSoft.

Capgemini, the systems integrator for Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI to management their enterprises business intelligence solutions across the globe with data warehousing capabilities in SAP BW Netweaver 7.1 EHP1 platform with BI crystal reports, SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 with Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence reporting capabilities (BusinessWire, 2011).

The first capability of BI is to have the ability of storing the rising flood of the data in the organization by storing them in various BW InfoCubes for storing the master data attributes table, time dependent attributes, time independent attributes, dimension tables, external hierarchy tables, fact tables, navigational attributes tables, P tables, SID tables, text tables (Cronin, 2012).  Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BW/BI 7.1 with Teradata foundation layer that helped provided the enterprise as a horizontal and vertical scalability of the database as a DBMS (database management system tool) with Teradata 13.10 that runs on Linux for massively parallel processing of the data extraction, transformation and loading.  The following figure 1 depicts the organizational memory database layer as Teradata 13.10 for Levi Strauss & Co for their SAP BI implementation project.

Figure 1.  Enterprise Memory Teradata 13.0 on Linux for SAP BI Netweaver

(SAP, 2013).

SAP BI Netweaver provides the second capability of BI information integration as part of SAP’s multiple integration layers of the SAP NetWeaver product.  Such integration capabilities would provide TREX (Tree regular expressions for XML) capabilities for the enterprise for text mining and search and classifying capabilities by integrating the links between unstructured and structured data with check-in and check-out capabilities and version control management.  Such creation of taxonomies can keep the organizations on leading edge with knowledge management concepts and capabilities.  The following figure 1 shows the information integration capability as part of SAP BI solution (SAP, 2013).

Figure 2.  SAP BI Information Integration Capability

(SAP, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented the information integration by linking various sources of their retail physical outlets by linking the structured and unstructured data from more than 80 legacy systems with SAP BW/BI Netweaver 7.1 Teradata implementation that helped them to build a knowledge management tool for search and classification purposes of their apparel and footwear solutions product management, master data management in the organization (BusinessWire, 2011).

Insight creation for launching new products and making product intelligent decisions is the third capability of BI for creating strategic roadmap for the business enterprise with different data sizes, different locations, regions across the globe help organizations realize their goals and objectives on-time with real-time interactive BI capabilities (Howson, 2013).  Levi Strauss & Co.  has added an array of new capabilities for insight creations by implementing SAP BI project that had provided results with Teradata foundation layer extremely quicker and faster, to explore, visualize, and navigate the data attributes for their product lifecycle management (BusinessWire, 2011).

The fourth capability of BI is innovative and intuitive dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities that will help an organization to maximize the revenues by providing the insights into the organization with real-time data thus allowing the stakeholders of the organization to make product intelligent decisions.  These dashboard and visualization tools help the organization to display the data with green, red, and yellow statuses of different scorecards on various aspects of the organization such as supply chain management, financials management, business process consolidation, logistics, inventory, and materials management (Howson, 2013).

The coming together of the dashboards and visualization tools enable the organization to maximize their return on investment and create golden standards and measurement for the enterprise performance management with key performance indicators on several business processes with sales revenues, volumes, pipeline management, marketing segmentation, web channel sales, physical store sales by affiliate, territory, and region  (Howson, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI, BW, BusinessObjects products for their supply chain management, and apparel and footwear business retail stores for displaying the data for next 18 months for advanced planning optimization, demand planning, supply network planning, supplier network collaboration implemented by the systems integrator Capgemini consulting.  SAP BI tools have been instrumental in providing the dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities for their supply chain management by adding value premium in the organization to improve their merchandise and planning operations, global supply chain management capabilities, product line planning (BusinessWire, 2011).

Conclusion

This paper has examined the various BI vendors providing BI products on the BI platform.  This paper has discussed the real-world example of my organization Capgemini SAP BI/BW Netweaver 7.1 implementation at Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco, CA and how the four key capabilities of BI have been leveraged by Levi Strauss & Co and discussed the business benefits realized by Levi Strauss & Co for their supply chain management, retail business, apparel and footwear solutions with enterprise memory, information integration, insight creation and presentation capabilities with dashboard and visualization tools for real-time replication of the data from the Infocubes of SAP BI.

References

Cronin, C.  (2012).  BW Table Types (MD tbl, SID tbl, DIM tbl, etc).  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/BW+Table+Types+(MD+tbl,+SID+tbl,+DIM+tbl,+etc)

Henschen, D.  (2011).  12 Brawny Business Intelligence Products For SMBs.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/12-brawny-business-intelligence-products/230600071

Howson, C.  (2013).  7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/7-top-business-intelligence-trends-for-2/240146994

Levi Strauss & Co.  Selects Capgemini for Global Business Intelligence Services [Magazine].  (2011, October 06).  BusinessWire.  Retrieved from http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111005005351/en/Levi-Strauss-Selects-Capgemini-Global-Business-Intelligence

SAP (2013).  BI Information Integration: Key Areas.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/0c/58497f411a7848985ae2aa0dda0bd3/content.htm

SAP (2013).  Teradata Foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from https://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp02/helpdata/en/7c/969fdb60a44f35ba38e66fa965d7fc/content.htm?frameset=/en/8f/c08b3baaa59649e10000000a11402f/frameset.htm

Sabherwal, R., & Fernandez, I.  B.  (2010).  Business Intelligence: Practices, Technologies and Management (1st ed.).  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Strategy Focus

Nvidia is a global technology corporation based in Santa Clara, California, which
specializes in manufacturing the products for GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) for PCs and
notebooks, also the founder of world’s first Graphical Processing Unit, through it’s product
launch GeForce 256. Popular science, the world’s largest science and
technology magazine has rated Nvidia ION which is a graphical processor that boosts the
performance of the PC graphics by 10X over integrated graphics. Thus Popular science
magazine has rated Nvidia as one of the most technology innovations that made it to the Top 100
innovations in the December issue of 2009. Due to the specialization of it’s graphics processing
manufacturing units and many successful product launches it has even entered the gaming
platform to develop graphics and hardware acceleration for Microsoft’s Xbox game console in
2000. In 2004, they also progressed towards a major move by making an announcement to
prototype and design the build of the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3 which resulted
as a successful product that helped Nvidia to be official GPU manufacturer for Sony and Toshiba
which led to fallout of their contract agreement with Microsoft Xbox due to its business strategy
in the market as Xbox and Playstation were facing competitive rivalry.

I/O Based Model of Above-Average returns.
Though Nvidia can’t directly compete with Intel in making the core chips for PCs and
notebooks, Nvidia always is a global leader in GPUs design, manufacturing and production of
GPUs. But always responded to various challenges and demands of the market by meeting the
demands and exploration of opportunities with a complete set of dynamic market variables to
demonstrate the competitive advantage. Nvidia’s average returns with it’s Tegra 2 in the first 3
quarters of 2011 were stagnated and were forecasted to remain in the fourth quarter flat as well.
In the recent times it has entered the mobile computing market space by launching it’s new
product Tegra 3 Quad-core chip which is a low-powered efficient chip that can directly compete
with Arm processors such as Snapdragon, Cortex, ARM9, ARM11, Samsung Humming bird,
Apple A4, Apple A5 chips in the market for powering Tablets, smartphones and Infotainment
systems. As of today Tegra 3 Quad-core chip for Tablet is the world’s first Quad-core mobile
processor released on November 9 th , 2011, which has easily dominated it’s market biggest threat
Apple A5 chip and also demonstrating this chip at Mobile World Congress to be held in
Barcelona, Spain from February 27 th , 2012 through 1 st March 2012. Thus strategically
controlling the segment of PCs, Notebooks in GPUs and segments of Quad core chips in
Smartphones and Tablets, the shares of Nvidia rose by 3.5% on November 11 th , 2011 after the
announcement of Tegra 3 Quad core chip trading to $14.98 on Dow Jones Industrial average
index thus drawing several stake holders who expects above-average returns from Nvidia.

External Environment: Competition and Opportunities

Nvidia has a close watch on the external environment that can change the composition and
launch of it’s designs and innovations. There has always been threat of new entrants into the
market, in 2000 ATI technologies launched its response to Nvidia GEForce 256 by launching
R100 a fully DirectX 7 compliant GPU. Though in the initial stages Nvidia was the market
leader in GPUs and captured the gaming platform by signing up the contract with Microsoft
Xbox gaming console, eventually manufacturing the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3
has led Microsoft to sign up it’s new contract with ATI technologies to keep it’s competitive
advantage in the market which impacted the stakeholders of Nvidia, ATI continued to evolve as
new and powerful suppliers of the market till they were acquired by AMD (Advanced Micro
Devices) in 2006. This acquisition marked the importance of fusion generation of computer
processors for AMD and went completely with the logo of AMD by removing the ATI
terminology/logo from 2010. More product substitutes grew in the market by Apple and
Samsung with their Cortex and A4, A5 chips which impacted Nvidia market share. This led to
more technological exploration of opportunities within Nvidia to advance their product
innovations and apply the knowledge of their Tegra 2 Dual Core to Tegra 3 Quad Core

4Case Study I Strategic Focus Page
evolution, thus captured the market by releasing the world’s first mobile quad-core processor.
Due to this new launch, Nvidia is predicting the growth of $4.7 bn to $5 bn in 2013 to exceed the
expectations of $4.45 bn. Clearly Nvidia has dominated the market in 2010 with a market share
of 31.5% as opposed to it’s direct rival AMD with a market share of 24%.

Applying strategic competitiveness in my current organization
Capgemini a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and local professional services
is headquartered in Paris, France and operates in more than 40 countries. With over 115,000
people in North and South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions, with major income
derived from North America. Capgemini strengths mainly are resources, capabilities and core
competencies. Capgemini closely monitors and scans its competitors such as IBM, Deloitte
Consulting, Accenture to be a game changer in the niche market. After acquisition of Earnest and
Young and Kanbay International in 2000 and 2006, it started expanding their operations of
outsourcing and consulting in Information Technology, Financials and BPO.
Capgemini has a specific outsourcing model called Rightshore by launching outsourcing centers
for software development and IT services across the globe, people are critical resources for
Capgemini in terms of providing leading edge software solutions and product innovations and
strategic business transformation plans to various industrial clients in the segments of Aerospace,
Defence, Oil, Utilities, Energy, Power, Retail, Automotive, AFS, Media. Capgemini has costly-
to-imitate product innovations in terms of providing solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning
software solutions such as SAP software and it’s pricing structure in terms of building the rate
cards for client IT services has allowed Capgemini to win several IT projects in competition to
it’s rivals IBM, Deloitte, Accenture.

5Case Study I Strategic Focus Page

References
1. Laptopmag.com
2. Wikipedia
3. CNET Articles on CES (Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas in January 2012)
4. www.marketwatch.com

5. Popular science magazine http://www.popsci.com/
6. www.wired.com

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium.

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem .

A Brave New Mobile World

This paper evaluates the business models of Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the light of IoT and emerging mobile OS.  Microsoft has a unique component model that generates the revenues on a global scale capturing 95% of the PC market by collaborating with the strategic vendors of the corporate enterprises.  The high-tech innovators Apple have an end-to-end business model that has tighter integration with the highest quality of software, hardware, embedded iOS for IoT with more than 800,000 apps on Apple app store.  Google continues to prevail as the marketing leader in mobile computing by 2014.

Introduction

Mobile computing network and communication a emerging trends of the Internet age connecting consumers on the smartphones with a wide range of applications that can allow to even connect to virtual desktops remotely from the smartphones.  The evolution of multiple mobile networking protocols and convergence into a single version of digital mobile computing in the form of LTE (Long Term Evolution) network and 5G, 4G, 3G, 2G networks gave rise to create a new brave mobile world for the consumers in terms of big data transmission and connectivity on a larger scale of distributed network.

Analysis

In the digital age of recent evolution of technology, there are two business models that have been extremely successful; one is the integral model that constitutes as an embedded element into the core of the hardware and edge-to-edge inherent model that is pushed through into the market place to create new horizons of revenue opportunities. Microsoft has championed the integral embedded business model for few decades, while Apple has championed the edge-to-edge business model in the last decade.  In the integrated model, large number of enterprises either creates software applications like operating systems for IoT and computers, MS Office and other utility applications or hardware components such as processors, motherboards, and peripherals on an integrated platform.

The final product is assembled with the blend of software manufacturers and hardware manufacturers, though each application or chipset is not architected keeping in view of a specific operating system or a target software application platform.  There are some nuances and risks when such models are not built for perfection.  However in the edge-to-edge models a single enterprise architects the hardware keeping in view of the software applications and operating system that runs on the platform, therefore the rendering of the final product is impeccable, but the pricing strategy proves to be expensive with a single version of the final product either as a phone or as a notebook.  In the battle for conquering the computer industry, Microsoft has evolved as a marketing leader due to the specialization of operating system and software applications.

The business models of computer manufacturers are equipped with several component procurement suppliers with build-to-order just in time calls for piecing the components together such as Dell, Sony Vaio etc.  The computer manufacturers have established themselves as the strategic vendors such as IBM, Dell, HP for several corporate enterprises with contracts running over several years, thus Microsoft has pushed the envelope to renew the licenses with their latest operating systems and Microsoft software applications including Microsoft SQL server for the database storage applications. On the other hand, Apple could not evolve as a strategic vendor for enterprises as it has not tied up with hardware partners or establishing collaboration licensing agreements thus the Mac operating system did not soar above the competition.

The market trends have been shifting in the recent times, Apple has developed the go to market strategy to build edge-to-edge model building hardware such as Mac books, iMacs, music players such as iPods, iTouchs, Apple TV for streaming apple devices, mobile phones such as iPhones and mobile tablets such as iPads that can serve either as mobile consumption devices or gaming devices. Apple has championed the integration of software and hardware by building the iCloud platform with Apple servers storing data for mobile accessibility 24 x 7 on any of these devices.

Microsoft continue to clone some of the business processes from Apple business model in terms of building video game devices such as Xbox 360 which in turn is an edge-to-edge business model but with only limited success.  Apple in the recent times also started building Apple iTV which is in the R&D for conquering the households of the United States that can serve as a media explosion with music, video, Internet enable device as a hardware component as well as a software component.  The market capitalization of Apple continued to dominate with the evolution of end-to-end models thus reaching the position of most valuable company in the world.  Microsoft also launched cloud-based platform with Microsoft servers similar to Apple cloud-platform, however due to the lack of end-to-end model Microsoft could not generates as there are not many consumers of music or tablets, cell phones who would like to store their data on the cloud (Mossberg, 2006).

Google is a search giant with 90% of the worldwide population leveraging the Google as the search engine; their business model is heavily relied upon generation of revenues via ads. Microsoft’s Bing search model a competitor to Google, currently holds 5% of the market place for search-based industry generating ad-based revenues (Delaney, 2005).  Google also launched a digital library project to build the largest body of knowledge in the world for the human race.  On this platform, Google started ads; though American association of publishers and guild writers raised concerns regarding the copyrights of the books, Google finally settled down the books agreement to grant the part of the revenues to the publishers and for those who have opted out of the books project, they can opt in to allow 20% of the snippets of the books thus generating revenues for both publishers and Google.  The majority of Google revenues are coming from their AdSense and Adwords launched on search engine, YouTube.

Google has launched Android operating system for enabling the advance mobile computing for cell phones. Google generated $14 billion revenues for the Q4 of 2012 with profits at $2.9 billion; mainly the profits were generated from ads with 67% of the revenues generated on Google search engine and Google associated products and sites.

Google has created a new wave of technology on mobile computing with Android operating system with open source software created open handset consortium with Samsung, Sony, HTC, hp, and LG etc.  By 2010, Google’s android mobile operating system has evolved as a game changer on the mobile computing taking a quantum leap over Apple, RIM (now blackberry) and Microsoft Windows mobile phones worldwide.  The research firm Gartner projected that Google’s Android will evolve as number 1 mobile computing operating system by 2014 even surpassing Nokia’s Symbian OS and handsets.

Table 1

Rise of the smartphones and mobile computing OS by 2014 projections by Gartner Inc.

Google faces certain challenges in surpassing Nokia Symbian and Apple iOS and prevailing as a market leader. Oracle has recently sued Google for $1 billion dollars for manufacturing Android operating system with Java UI for violation of patents from Oracle the owner of Java’s Sun Microsystems.  A victory for Oracle could mean derivation of the shared percentage of revenues from Google, on the other hand; a loss for Oracle could catapult their leading software marketing position on the Internet Java based applications development.  The loss for Google could mean a roadblock for prevailing as a market leader (Bailey, 2012).

In 2012, Google won the law suit over Oracle and the jury in the case found that Google did not infringe any Oracle’s patents and the structure of the Java APIs used by the Google was so abstract that it cannot be copyrighted by Java, therefore both Google and Oracle settled down on zero dollars in statutory penalties.  Google now has built algorithms on all Android phones to extract the data related to search performed on the mobile platforms thus it can increase the ad revenues and can pool the Big data generated by the smartphones in making intelligent product launch decisions.

Conclusion

This paper has evaluated different business models of Google, Apple and Microsoft by drawing comparisons on their component and end-to-end models.  Microsoft continued to dominate the PC-era by building the operating systems and software applications by collaborating with the assemblers of the computer machines such as Dell, HP and IBM and occupied 95% of the PC market.  Apple’s business strategy relies on building end-to-end model for tighter integration between hardware and software including music players, gaming consoles, mobile computing devices, tablets, cell phones etc. This strategy made Apple as the most valuable company on the planet.  Google has developed Android operating system to dominate the mobile computing to compete with Apple and soar above the competition.  Google faced some patent challenges but it has now settled the suit with Oracle.  Google is on the trajectory path of prevailing as the market leader in the mobile computing with a projected 30% share of the market by 2014.

Levi’s Strauss & Co SAP BI Implementation

Abstract

This paper evaluates the importance of BI capabilities in an organization.  The business intelligence in today’s world is called differently as business intelligence, business analytics, business warehousing, and big data.  This paper examines the SAP BI project at Levi Strauss & Co.  This paper discusses the key capabilities required for an organization in terms of the storage capabilities of the data for the business that can be fetched at any point of time from the information cubes, and how to integrate the data integration points of the information, and provide insights for making product intelligent decisions, and dashboarding and visualization capabilities of the BI reports in terms of presenting the data with nuts and bolts of the data attributes in the organization.

Keywords: SAP BI, storage capabilities, information integration, insight creation, dashboards

Introduction

Business Intelligence is extremely far-reaching métier in the organization.  The BI primarily has four critical capabilities in the enterprise; these are enterprise memory, information assimilation, product intelligent intuitive decision-making capabilities, and dashboards and visualization capabilities.         s

Analysis

            There are different BI platforms with several and vendors in the market with different product lines supporting the enterprises with different infrastructure with cloud suite capabilities.  Some of the major BI products include SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Oracle & Hyperion, Microsoft BI & PerformancePoint, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SAS BI, Pentaho, Dundas, QlikTech, Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and JasperSoft.

Capgemini, the systems integrator for Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI to management their enterprises business intelligence solutions across the globe with data warehousing capabilities in SAP BW Netweaver 7.1 EHP1 platform with BI crystal reports, SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 with Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence reporting capabilities (BusinessWire, 2011).

The first capability of BI is to have the ability of storing the rising flood of the data in the organization by storing them in various BW InfoCubes for storing the master data attributes table, time dependent attributes, time independent attributes, dimension tables, external hierarchy tables, fact tables, navigational attributes tables, P tables, SID tables, text tables (Cronin, 2012).  Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BW/BI 7.1 with Teradata foundation layer that helped provided the enterprise as a horizontal and vertical scalability of the database as a DBMS (database management system tool) with Teradata 13.10 that runs on Linux for massively parallel processing of the data extraction, transformation and loading.  The following figure 1 depicts the organizational memory database layer as Teradata 13.10 for Levi Strauss & Co for their SAP BI implementation project.

Figure 1.  Enterprise Memory Teradata 13.0 on Linux for SAP BI Netweaver

(SAP, 2013).

SAP BI Netweaver provides the second capability of BI information integration as part of SAP’s multiple integration layers of the SAP NetWeaver product.  Such integration capabilities would provide TREX (Tree regular expressions for XML) capabilities for the enterprise for text mining and search and classifying capabilities by integrating the links between unstructured and structured data with check-in and check-out capabilities and version control management.  Such creation of taxonomies can keep the organizations on leading edge with knowledge management concepts and capabilities.  The following figure 1 shows the information integration capability as part of SAP BI solution (SAP, 2013).

Figure 2.  SAP BI Information Integration Capability

(SAP, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented the information integration by linking various sources of their retail physical outlets by linking the structured and unstructured data from more than 80 legacy systems with SAP BW/BI Netweaver 7.1 Teradata implementation that helped them to build a knowledge management tool for search and classification purposes of their apparel and footwear solutions product management, master data management in the organization (BusinessWire, 2011).

Insight creation for launching new products and making product intelligent decisions is the third capability of BI for creating strategic roadmap for the business enterprise with different data sizes, different locations, regions across the globe help organizations realize their goals and objectives on-time with real-time interactive BI capabilities (Howson, 2013).  Levi Strauss & Co.  has added an array of new capabilities for insight creations by implementing SAP BI project that had provided results with Teradata foundation layer extremely quicker and faster, to explore, visualize, and navigate the data attributes for their product lifecycle management (BusinessWire, 2011).

The fourth capability of BI is innovative and intuitive dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities that will help an organization to maximize the revenues by providing the insights into the organization with real-time data thus allowing the stakeholders of the organization to make product intelligent decisions.  These dashboard and visualization tools help the organization to display the data with green, red, and yellow statuses of different scorecards on various aspects of the organization such as supply chain management, financials management, business process consolidation, logistics, inventory, and materials management (Howson, 2013).

The coming together of the dashboards and visualization tools enable the organization to maximize their return on investment and create golden standards and measurement for the enterprise performance management with key performance indicators on several business processes with sales revenues, volumes, pipeline management, marketing segmentation, web channel sales, physical store sales by affiliate, territory, and region  (Howson, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI, BW, BusinessObjects products for their supply chain management, and apparel and footwear business retail stores for displaying the data for next 18 months for advanced planning optimization, demand planning, supply network planning, supplier network collaboration implemented by the systems integrator Capgemini consulting.  SAP BI tools have been instrumental in providing the dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities for their supply chain management by adding value premium in the organization to improve their merchandise and planning operations, global supply chain management capabilities, product line planning (BusinessWire, 2011).

Conclusion

This paper has examined the various BI vendors providing BI products on the BI platform.  This paper has discussed the real-world example of my organization Capgemini SAP BI/BW Netweaver 7.1 implementation at Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco, CA and how the four key capabilities of BI have been leveraged by Levi Strauss & Co and discussed the business benefits realized by Levi Strauss & Co for their supply chain management, retail business, apparel and footwear solutions with enterprise memory, information integration, insight creation and presentation capabilities with dashboard and visualization tools for real-time replication of the data from the Infocubes of SAP BI.

References

Cronin, C.  (2012).  BW Table Types (MD tbl, SID tbl, DIM tbl, etc).  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/BW+Table+Types+(MD+tbl,+SID+tbl,+DIM+tbl,+etc)

Henschen, D.  (2011).  12 Brawny Business Intelligence Products For SMBs.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/12-brawny-business-intelligence-products/230600071

Howson, C.  (2013).  7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/7-top-business-intelligence-trends-for-2/240146994

Levi Strauss & Co.  Selects Capgemini for Global Business Intelligence Services [Magazine].  (2011, October 06).  BusinessWire.  Retrieved from http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111005005351/en/Levi-Strauss-Selects-Capgemini-Global-Business-Intelligence

SAP (2013).  BI Information Integration: Key Areas.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/0c/58497f411a7848985ae2aa0dda0bd3/content.htm

SAP (2013).  Teradata Foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from https://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp02/helpdata/en/7c/969fdb60a44f35ba38e66fa965d7fc/content.htm?frameset=/en/8f/c08b3baaa59649e10000000a11402f/frameset.htm

Sabherwal, R., & Fernandez, I.  B.  (2010).  Business Intelligence: Practices, Technologies and Management (1st ed.).  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Strategy Focus

Nvidia is a global technology corporation based in Santa Clara, California, which
specializes in manufacturing the products for GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) for PCs and
notebooks, also the founder of world’s first Graphical Processing Unit, through it’s product
launch GeForce 256. Popular science, the world’s largest science and
technology magazine has rated Nvidia ION which is a graphical processor that boosts the
performance of the PC graphics by 10X over integrated graphics. Thus Popular science
magazine has rated Nvidia as one of the most technology innovations that made it to the Top 100
innovations in the December issue of 2009. Due to the specialization of it’s graphics processing
manufacturing units and many successful product launches it has even entered the gaming
platform to develop graphics and hardware acceleration for Microsoft’s Xbox game console in
2000. In 2004, they also progressed towards a major move by making an announcement to
prototype and design the build of the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3 which resulted
as a successful product that helped Nvidia to be official GPU manufacturer for Sony and Toshiba
which led to fallout of their contract agreement with Microsoft Xbox due to its business strategy
in the market as Xbox and Playstation were facing competitive rivalry.

I/O Based Model of Above-Average returns.
Though Nvidia can’t directly compete with Intel in making the core chips for PCs and
notebooks, Nvidia always is a global leader in GPUs design, manufacturing and production of
GPUs. But always responded to various challenges and demands of the market by meeting the
demands and exploration of opportunities with a complete set of dynamic market variables to
demonstrate the competitive advantage. Nvidia’s average returns with it’s Tegra 2 in the first 3
quarters of 2011 were stagnated and were forecasted to remain in the fourth quarter flat as well.
In the recent times it has entered the mobile computing market space by launching it’s new
product Tegra 3 Quad-core chip which is a low-powered efficient chip that can directly compete
with Arm processors such as Snapdragon, Cortex, ARM9, ARM11, Samsung Humming bird,
Apple A4, Apple A5 chips in the market for powering Tablets, smartphones and Infotainment
systems. As of today Tegra 3 Quad-core chip for Tablet is the world’s first Quad-core mobile
processor released on November 9 th , 2011, which has easily dominated it’s market biggest threat
Apple A5 chip and also demonstrating this chip at Mobile World Congress to be held in
Barcelona, Spain from February 27 th , 2012 through 1 st March 2012. Thus strategically
controlling the segment of PCs, Notebooks in GPUs and segments of Quad core chips in
Smartphones and Tablets, the shares of Nvidia rose by 3.5% on November 11 th , 2011 after the
announcement of Tegra 3 Quad core chip trading to $14.98 on Dow Jones Industrial average
index thus drawing several stake holders who expects above-average returns from Nvidia.

External Environment: Competition and Opportunities

Nvidia has a close watch on the external environment that can change the composition and
launch of it’s designs and innovations. There has always been threat of new entrants into the
market, in 2000 ATI technologies launched its response to Nvidia GEForce 256 by launching
R100 a fully DirectX 7 compliant GPU. Though in the initial stages Nvidia was the market
leader in GPUs and captured the gaming platform by signing up the contract with Microsoft
Xbox gaming console, eventually manufacturing the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3
has led Microsoft to sign up it’s new contract with ATI technologies to keep it’s competitive
advantage in the market which impacted the stakeholders of Nvidia, ATI continued to evolve as
new and powerful suppliers of the market till they were acquired by AMD (Advanced Micro
Devices) in 2006. This acquisition marked the importance of fusion generation of computer
processors for AMD and went completely with the logo of AMD by removing the ATI
terminology/logo from 2010. More product substitutes grew in the market by Apple and
Samsung with their Cortex and A4, A5 chips which impacted Nvidia market share. This led to
more technological exploration of opportunities within Nvidia to advance their product
innovations and apply the knowledge of their Tegra 2 Dual Core to Tegra 3 Quad Core

4Case Study I Strategic Focus Page
evolution, thus captured the market by releasing the world’s first mobile quad-core processor.
Due to this new launch, Nvidia is predicting the growth of $4.7 bn to $5 bn in 2013 to exceed the
expectations of $4.45 bn. Clearly Nvidia has dominated the market in 2010 with a market share
of 31.5% as opposed to it’s direct rival AMD with a market share of 24%.

Applying strategic competitiveness in my current organization
Capgemini a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and local professional services
is headquartered in Paris, France and operates in more than 40 countries. With over 115,000
people in North and South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions, with major income
derived from North America. Capgemini strengths mainly are resources, capabilities and core
competencies. Capgemini closely monitors and scans its competitors such as IBM, Deloitte
Consulting, Accenture to be a game changer in the niche market. After acquisition of Earnest and
Young and Kanbay International in 2000 and 2006, it started expanding their operations of
outsourcing and consulting in Information Technology, Financials and BPO.
Capgemini has a specific outsourcing model called Rightshore by launching outsourcing centers
for software development and IT services across the globe, people are critical resources for
Capgemini in terms of providing leading edge software solutions and product innovations and
strategic business transformation plans to various industrial clients in the segments of Aerospace,
Defence, Oil, Utilities, Energy, Power, Retail, Automotive, AFS, Media. Capgemini has costly-
to-imitate product innovations in terms of providing solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning
software solutions such as SAP software and it’s pricing structure in terms of building the rate
cards for client IT services has allowed Capgemini to win several IT projects in competition to
it’s rivals IBM, Deloitte, Accenture.

5Case Study I Strategic Focus Page

References
1. Laptopmag.com
2. Wikipedia
3. CNET Articles on CES (Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas in January 2012)
4. www.marketwatch.com

5. Popular science magazine http://www.popsci.com/
6. www.wired.com

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium.

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem .

Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium.

A Brave New Mobile World

This paper evaluates the business models of Apple, Google, and Microsoft in the light of IoT and emerging mobile OS.  Microsoft has a unique component model that generates the revenues on a global scale capturing 95% of the PC market by collaborating with the strategic vendors of the corporate enterprises.  The high-tech innovators Apple have an end-to-end business model that has tighter integration with the highest quality of software, hardware, embedded iOS for IoT with more than 800,000 apps on Apple app store.  Google continues to prevail as the marketing leader in mobile computing by 2014.

Introduction

Mobile computing network and communication a emerging trends of the Internet age connecting consumers on the smartphones with a wide range of applications that can allow to even connect to virtual desktops remotely from the smartphones.  The evolution of multiple mobile networking protocols and convergence into a single version of digital mobile computing in the form of LTE (Long Term Evolution) network and 5G, 4G, 3G, 2G networks gave rise to create a new brave mobile world for the consumers in terms of big data transmission and connectivity on a larger scale of distributed network.

Analysis

In the digital age of recent evolution of technology, there are two business models that have been extremely successful; one is the integral model that constitutes as an embedded element into the core of the hardware and edge-to-edge inherent model that is pushed through into the market place to create new horizons of revenue opportunities. Microsoft has championed the integral embedded business model for few decades, while Apple has championed the edge-to-edge business model in the last decade.  In the integrated model, large number of enterprises either creates software applications like operating systems for IoT and computers, MS Office and other utility applications or hardware components such as processors, motherboards, and peripherals on an integrated platform.

The final product is assembled with the blend of software manufacturers and hardware manufacturers, though each application or chipset is not architected keeping in view of a specific operating system or a target software application platform.  There are some nuances and risks when such models are not built for perfection.  However in the edge-to-edge models a single enterprise architects the hardware keeping in view of the software applications and operating system that runs on the platform, therefore the rendering of the final product is impeccable, but the pricing strategy proves to be expensive with a single version of the final product either as a phone or as a notebook.  In the battle for conquering the computer industry, Microsoft has evolved as a marketing leader due to the specialization of operating system and software applications.

The business models of computer manufacturers are equipped with several component procurement suppliers with build-to-order just in time calls for piecing the components together such as Dell, Sony Vaio etc.  The computer manufacturers have established themselves as the strategic vendors such as IBM, Dell, HP for several corporate enterprises with contracts running over several years, thus Microsoft has pushed the envelope to renew the licenses with their latest operating systems and Microsoft software applications including Microsoft SQL server for the database storage applications. On the other hand, Apple could not evolve as a strategic vendor for enterprises as it has not tied up with hardware partners or establishing collaboration licensing agreements thus the Mac operating system did not soar above the competition.

The market trends have been shifting in the recent times, Apple has developed the go to market strategy to build edge-to-edge model building hardware such as Mac books, iMacs, music players such as iPods, iTouchs, Apple TV for streaming apple devices, mobile phones such as iPhones and mobile tablets such as iPads that can serve either as mobile consumption devices or gaming devices. Apple has championed the integration of software and hardware by building the iCloud platform with Apple servers storing data for mobile accessibility 24 x 7 on any of these devices.

Microsoft continue to clone some of the business processes from Apple business model in terms of building video game devices such as Xbox 360 which in turn is an edge-to-edge business model but with only limited success.  Apple in the recent times also started building Apple iTV which is in the R&D for conquering the households of the United States that can serve as a media explosion with music, video, Internet enable device as a hardware component as well as a software component.  The market capitalization of Apple continued to dominate with the evolution of end-to-end models thus reaching the position of most valuable company in the world.  Microsoft also launched cloud-based platform with Microsoft servers similar to Apple cloud-platform, however due to the lack of end-to-end model Microsoft could not generates as there are not many consumers of music or tablets, cell phones who would like to store their data on the cloud (Mossberg, 2006).

Google is a search giant with 90% of the worldwide population leveraging the Google as the search engine; their business model is heavily relied upon generation of revenues via ads. Microsoft’s Bing search model a competitor to Google, currently holds 5% of the market place for search-based industry generating ad-based revenues (Delaney, 2005).  Google also launched a digital library project to build the largest body of knowledge in the world for the human race.  On this platform, Google started ads; though American association of publishers and guild writers raised concerns regarding the copyrights of the books, Google finally settled down the books agreement to grant the part of the revenues to the publishers and for those who have opted out of the books project, they can opt in to allow 20% of the snippets of the books thus generating revenues for both publishers and Google.  The majority of Google revenues are coming from their AdSense and Adwords launched on search engine, YouTube.

Google has launched Android operating system for enabling the advance mobile computing for cell phones. Google generated $14 billion revenues for the Q4 of 2012 with profits at $2.9 billion; mainly the profits were generated from ads with 67% of the revenues generated on Google search engine and Google associated products and sites.

Google has created a new wave of technology on mobile computing with Android operating system with open source software created open handset consortium with Samsung, Sony, HTC, hp, and LG etc.  By 2010, Google’s android mobile operating system has evolved as a game changer on the mobile computing taking a quantum leap over Apple, RIM (now blackberry) and Microsoft Windows mobile phones worldwide.  The research firm Gartner projected that Google’s Android will evolve as number 1 mobile computing operating system by 2014 even surpassing Nokia’s Symbian OS and handsets.

Table 1

Rise of the smartphones and mobile computing OS by 2014 projections by Gartner Inc.

Google faces certain challenges in surpassing Nokia Symbian and Apple iOS and prevailing as a market leader. Oracle has recently sued Google for $1 billion dollars for manufacturing Android operating system with Java UI for violation of patents from Oracle the owner of Java’s Sun Microsystems.  A victory for Oracle could mean derivation of the shared percentage of revenues from Google, on the other hand; a loss for Oracle could catapult their leading software marketing position on the Internet Java based applications development.  The loss for Google could mean a roadblock for prevailing as a market leader (Bailey, 2012).

In 2012, Google won the law suit over Oracle and the jury in the case found that Google did not infringe any Oracle’s patents and the structure of the Java APIs used by the Google was so abstract that it cannot be copyrighted by Java, therefore both Google and Oracle settled down on zero dollars in statutory penalties.  Google now has built algorithms on all Android phones to extract the data related to search performed on the mobile platforms thus it can increase the ad revenues and can pool the Big data generated by the smartphones in making intelligent product launch decisions.

Conclusion

This paper has evaluated different business models of Google, Apple and Microsoft by drawing comparisons on their component and end-to-end models.  Microsoft continued to dominate the PC-era by building the operating systems and software applications by collaborating with the assemblers of the computer machines such as Dell, HP and IBM and occupied 95% of the PC market.  Apple’s business strategy relies on building end-to-end model for tighter integration between hardware and software including music players, gaming consoles, mobile computing devices, tablets, cell phones etc. This strategy made Apple as the most valuable company on the planet.  Google has developed Android operating system to dominate the mobile computing to compete with Apple and soar above the competition.  Google faced some patent challenges but it has now settled the suit with Oracle.  Google is on the trajectory path of prevailing as the market leader in the mobile computing with a projected 30% share of the market by 2014.

Levi’s Strauss & Co SAP BI Implementation

Abstract

This paper evaluates the importance of BI capabilities in an organization.  The business intelligence in today’s world is called differently as business intelligence, business analytics, business warehousing, and big data.  This paper examines the SAP BI project at Levi Strauss & Co.  This paper discusses the key capabilities required for an organization in terms of the storage capabilities of the data for the business that can be fetched at any point of time from the information cubes, and how to integrate the data integration points of the information, and provide insights for making product intelligent decisions, and dashboarding and visualization capabilities of the BI reports in terms of presenting the data with nuts and bolts of the data attributes in the organization.

Keywords: SAP BI, storage capabilities, information integration, insight creation, dashboards

Introduction

Business Intelligence is extremely far-reaching métier in the organization.  The BI primarily has four critical capabilities in the enterprise; these are enterprise memory, information assimilation, product intelligent intuitive decision-making capabilities, and dashboards and visualization capabilities.         s

Analysis

            There are different BI platforms with several and vendors in the market with different product lines supporting the enterprises with different infrastructure with cloud suite capabilities.  Some of the major BI products include SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, Oracle & Hyperion, Microsoft BI & PerformancePoint, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SAS BI, Pentaho, Dundas, QlikTech, Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and JasperSoft.

Capgemini, the systems integrator for Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI to management their enterprises business intelligence solutions across the globe with data warehousing capabilities in SAP BW Netweaver 7.1 EHP1 platform with BI crystal reports, SAP BusinessObjects 4.1 with Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence reporting capabilities (BusinessWire, 2011).

The first capability of BI is to have the ability of storing the rising flood of the data in the organization by storing them in various BW InfoCubes for storing the master data attributes table, time dependent attributes, time independent attributes, dimension tables, external hierarchy tables, fact tables, navigational attributes tables, P tables, SID tables, text tables (Cronin, 2012).  Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BW/BI 7.1 with Teradata foundation layer that helped provided the enterprise as a horizontal and vertical scalability of the database as a DBMS (database management system tool) with Teradata 13.10 that runs on Linux for massively parallel processing of the data extraction, transformation and loading.  The following figure 1 depicts the organizational memory database layer as Teradata 13.10 for Levi Strauss & Co for their SAP BI implementation project.

Figure 1.  Enterprise Memory Teradata 13.0 on Linux for SAP BI Netweaver

(SAP, 2013).

SAP BI Netweaver provides the second capability of BI information integration as part of SAP’s multiple integration layers of the SAP NetWeaver product.  Such integration capabilities would provide TREX (Tree regular expressions for XML) capabilities for the enterprise for text mining and search and classifying capabilities by integrating the links between unstructured and structured data with check-in and check-out capabilities and version control management.  Such creation of taxonomies can keep the organizations on leading edge with knowledge management concepts and capabilities.  The following figure 1 shows the information integration capability as part of SAP BI solution (SAP, 2013).

Figure 2.  SAP BI Information Integration Capability

(SAP, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented the information integration by linking various sources of their retail physical outlets by linking the structured and unstructured data from more than 80 legacy systems with SAP BW/BI Netweaver 7.1 Teradata implementation that helped them to build a knowledge management tool for search and classification purposes of their apparel and footwear solutions product management, master data management in the organization (BusinessWire, 2011).

Insight creation for launching new products and making product intelligent decisions is the third capability of BI for creating strategic roadmap for the business enterprise with different data sizes, different locations, regions across the globe help organizations realize their goals and objectives on-time with real-time interactive BI capabilities (Howson, 2013).  Levi Strauss & Co.  has added an array of new capabilities for insight creations by implementing SAP BI project that had provided results with Teradata foundation layer extremely quicker and faster, to explore, visualize, and navigate the data attributes for their product lifecycle management (BusinessWire, 2011).

The fourth capability of BI is innovative and intuitive dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities that will help an organization to maximize the revenues by providing the insights into the organization with real-time data thus allowing the stakeholders of the organization to make product intelligent decisions.  These dashboard and visualization tools help the organization to display the data with green, red, and yellow statuses of different scorecards on various aspects of the organization such as supply chain management, financials management, business process consolidation, logistics, inventory, and materials management (Howson, 2013).

The coming together of the dashboards and visualization tools enable the organization to maximize their return on investment and create golden standards and measurement for the enterprise performance management with key performance indicators on several business processes with sales revenues, volumes, pipeline management, marketing segmentation, web channel sales, physical store sales by affiliate, territory, and region  (Howson, 2013).

Levi Strauss & Co has implemented SAP BI, BW, BusinessObjects products for their supply chain management, and apparel and footwear business retail stores for displaying the data for next 18 months for advanced planning optimization, demand planning, supply network planning, supplier network collaboration implemented by the systems integrator Capgemini consulting.  SAP BI tools have been instrumental in providing the dashboard and visualization presentation capabilities for their supply chain management by adding value premium in the organization to improve their merchandise and planning operations, global supply chain management capabilities, product line planning (BusinessWire, 2011).

Conclusion

This paper has examined the various BI vendors providing BI products on the BI platform.  This paper has discussed the real-world example of my organization Capgemini SAP BI/BW Netweaver 7.1 implementation at Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco, CA and how the four key capabilities of BI have been leveraged by Levi Strauss & Co and discussed the business benefits realized by Levi Strauss & Co for their supply chain management, retail business, apparel and footwear solutions with enterprise memory, information integration, insight creation and presentation capabilities with dashboard and visualization tools for real-time replication of the data from the Infocubes of SAP BI.

References

Cronin, C.  (2012).  BW Table Types (MD tbl, SID tbl, DIM tbl, etc).  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://wiki.sdn.sap.com/wiki/display/BI/BW+Table+Types+(MD+tbl,+SID+tbl,+DIM+tbl,+etc)

Henschen, D.  (2011).  12 Brawny Business Intelligence Products For SMBs.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/smb/hardware-software/12-brawny-business-intelligence-products/230600071

Howson, C.  (2013).  7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/7-top-business-intelligence-trends-for-2/240146994

Levi Strauss & Co.  Selects Capgemini for Global Business Intelligence Services [Magazine].  (2011, October 06).  BusinessWire.  Retrieved from http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20111005005351/en/Levi-Strauss-Selects-Capgemini-Global-Business-Intelligence

SAP (2013).  BI Information Integration: Key Areas.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/0c/58497f411a7848985ae2aa0dda0bd3/content.htm

SAP (2013).  Teradata Foundation for SAP NetWeaver BW.  Retrieved May 26, 2013, from https://help.sap.com/saphelp_crm700_ehp02/helpdata/en/7c/969fdb60a44f35ba38e66fa965d7fc/content.htm?frameset=/en/8f/c08b3baaa59649e10000000a11402f/frameset.htm

Sabherwal, R., & Fernandez, I.  B.  (2010).  Business Intelligence: Practices, Technologies and Management (1st ed.).  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Strategy Focus

Nvidia is a global technology corporation based in Santa Clara, California, which
specializes in manufacturing the products for GPUs (Graphical Processing Units) for PCs and
notebooks, also the founder of world’s first Graphical Processing Unit, through it’s product
launch GeForce 256. Popular science, the world’s largest science and
technology magazine has rated Nvidia ION which is a graphical processor that boosts the
performance of the PC graphics by 10X over integrated graphics. Thus Popular science
magazine has rated Nvidia as one of the most technology innovations that made it to the Top 100
innovations in the December issue of 2009. Due to the specialization of it’s graphics processing
manufacturing units and many successful product launches it has even entered the gaming
platform to develop graphics and hardware acceleration for Microsoft’s Xbox game console in
2000. In 2004, they also progressed towards a major move by making an announcement to
prototype and design the build of the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3 which resulted
as a successful product that helped Nvidia to be official GPU manufacturer for Sony and Toshiba
which led to fallout of their contract agreement with Microsoft Xbox due to its business strategy
in the market as Xbox and Playstation were facing competitive rivalry.

I/O Based Model of Above-Average returns.
Though Nvidia can’t directly compete with Intel in making the core chips for PCs and
notebooks, Nvidia always is a global leader in GPUs design, manufacturing and production of
GPUs. But always responded to various challenges and demands of the market by meeting the
demands and exploration of opportunities with a complete set of dynamic market variables to
demonstrate the competitive advantage. Nvidia’s average returns with it’s Tegra 2 in the first 3
quarters of 2011 were stagnated and were forecasted to remain in the fourth quarter flat as well.
In the recent times it has entered the mobile computing market space by launching it’s new
product Tegra 3 Quad-core chip which is a low-powered efficient chip that can directly compete
with Arm processors such as Snapdragon, Cortex, ARM9, ARM11, Samsung Humming bird,
Apple A4, Apple A5 chips in the market for powering Tablets, smartphones and Infotainment
systems. As of today Tegra 3 Quad-core chip for Tablet is the world’s first Quad-core mobile
processor released on November 9 th , 2011, which has easily dominated it’s market biggest threat
Apple A5 chip and also demonstrating this chip at Mobile World Congress to be held in
Barcelona, Spain from February 27 th , 2012 through 1 st March 2012. Thus strategically
controlling the segment of PCs, Notebooks in GPUs and segments of Quad core chips in
Smartphones and Tablets, the shares of Nvidia rose by 3.5% on November 11 th , 2011 after the
announcement of Tegra 3 Quad core chip trading to $14.98 on Dow Jones Industrial average
index thus drawing several stake holders who expects above-average returns from Nvidia.

External Environment: Competition and Opportunities

Nvidia has a close watch on the external environment that can change the composition and
launch of it’s designs and innovations. There has always been threat of new entrants into the
market, in 2000 ATI technologies launched its response to Nvidia GEForce 256 by launching
R100 a fully DirectX 7 compliant GPU. Though in the initial stages Nvidia was the market
leader in GPUs and captured the gaming platform by signing up the contract with Microsoft
Xbox gaming console, eventually manufacturing the graphics processors for Sony Playstation 3
has led Microsoft to sign up it’s new contract with ATI technologies to keep it’s competitive
advantage in the market which impacted the stakeholders of Nvidia, ATI continued to evolve as
new and powerful suppliers of the market till they were acquired by AMD (Advanced Micro
Devices) in 2006. This acquisition marked the importance of fusion generation of computer
processors for AMD and went completely with the logo of AMD by removing the ATI
terminology/logo from 2010. More product substitutes grew in the market by Apple and
Samsung with their Cortex and A4, A5 chips which impacted Nvidia market share. This led to
more technological exploration of opportunities within Nvidia to advance their product
innovations and apply the knowledge of their Tegra 2 Dual Core to Tegra 3 Quad Core

4Case Study I Strategic Focus Page
evolution, thus captured the market by releasing the world’s first mobile quad-core processor.
Due to this new launch, Nvidia is predicting the growth of $4.7 bn to $5 bn in 2013 to exceed the
expectations of $4.45 bn. Clearly Nvidia has dominated the market in 2010 with a market share
of 31.5% as opposed to it’s direct rival AMD with a market share of 24%.

Applying strategic competitiveness in my current organization
Capgemini a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and local professional services
is headquartered in Paris, France and operates in more than 40 countries. With over 115,000
people in North and South America, Europe and the Asia Pacific regions, with major income
derived from North America. Capgemini strengths mainly are resources, capabilities and core
competencies. Capgemini closely monitors and scans its competitors such as IBM, Deloitte
Consulting, Accenture to be a game changer in the niche market. After acquisition of Earnest and
Young and Kanbay International in 2000 and 2006, it started expanding their operations of
outsourcing and consulting in Information Technology, Financials and BPO.
Capgemini has a specific outsourcing model called Rightshore by launching outsourcing centers
for software development and IT services across the globe, people are critical resources for
Capgemini in terms of providing leading edge software solutions and product innovations and
strategic business transformation plans to various industrial clients in the segments of Aerospace,
Defence, Oil, Utilities, Energy, Power, Retail, Automotive, AFS, Media. Capgemini has costly-
to-imitate product innovations in terms of providing solutions for Enterprise Resource Planning
software solutions such as SAP software and it’s pricing structure in terms of building the rate
cards for client IT services has allowed Capgemini to win several IT projects in competition to
it’s rivals IBM, Deloitte, Accenture.

5Case Study I Strategic Focus Page

References
1. Laptopmag.com
2. Wikipedia
3. CNET Articles on CES (Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas in January 2012)
4. www.marketwatch.com

5. Popular science magazine http://www.popsci.com/
6. www.wired.com

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