The Capgemini eBusiness group has been specifically formed to assist organisations in responding to the dynamics and opportunities that now exist.

It brings over a decade of experience in technology implementation and systems integration in the enterprise online and customer relationship space forward into the new context of social customers, open communities, multi-channel expectations, smartphones everywhere and cloud computing provided applications. A context where online technologies and approaches become the default way to enable a business.

Hence the Capgemini eBusiness Group helps organisations adopt and implement online approaches and technologies in a way that puts online at the core of the business, the major component pieces of which include:

• Web platforms and propositions

• Digital commerce and media

• Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)
• Social CRM

Capgemini’s Immediate offering, as used by the Royal Mail Group and others, provides an integrated approach to all of these issues and more.

Web platforms and propositions

We help you plan, build and run the most modern and robust online sites and services in a world where all customers expect high quality digital interactions, and they expect them to be social, open and real-time. This includes establishing optimal presences for modern digital marketing, instant publishing, customer self-service, and communities of interest. Our multi-disciplinary teams can work with you to identify the most appropriate technologies in the fast-changing world of the web, for example:

• Web design, visualisation, UX and information architecture
• Digital marketing, advertising and SEO management
• Web platform development (including LAMP, MVC Frameworks, AJAX)
• Web content management (including Drupal, SDL Tridion, Wordpress)
• Web analytics and optimisation (including Adobe Omniture, Google Analytics)
• Hosting and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (including VMware, Amazon Web Services)
• Web search, facetting, semantics (including Apache, Solr, Google, Endeca, RDFa)
• Realtime web and NoSQL (Memcached, MongoDB, Hadoop, Node.js)
• Web security technology (including SAML, OAuth, SSL, OpenSSO/AM)

Digital commerce and media

Over the last decade, more and more industries have discovered ways to earn direct revenues online, whether by offering products, services or content. As well as allowing disintermediation, this approach can reduce cost-to-serve and create growth areas in industries where growth has slowed. It also uses online approaches as the method of finally achieving consistent and customer-centric multi-channel journeys across digital, in-person and over the phone models. Sectors with significant direct customer contact such as: retail, telcoms, transport and travel financial services and media and entertainment

There are opportunities to provide products and services to support these sectors’ digital strategies. Offers include:

• Product reviews and recommendations (including Baynote, BazaarVoice, PowerReviews)
• Product search and merchandising (including Endeca, Apache Solr)
• Product and catalogue management (incluing hybris, ATG)
• Digital asset management
• Order and fulfilment management (Sterling)
• B2B transactions and process integration and white-label web services and APIs

Whether you are a provider or a user of products and services for digital commerce and media, we can help you develop transactional sites that increase revenues and generate valuable cross-channel customer interactions.

Software as a Service and Platform as a Service

The ability to deliver software services and platforms from the cloud is revolutionising enterprise IT and changing the economics of IT service provision. Cloud’s speed of deployment and rich innovation makes it an attractive platform for eBusiness. Options include:

• PaaS platforms (including Force.com, Heroku, and Microsoft Azure)
• SaaS integration (Cast Iron, Informatica, Mule)

Cloud allows organisations to evolve and adapt close to where their eBusiness customers already are with services like:

• Customer management, customer services, and sales force automation (including Salesforce.com Sales and Service Clouds)
• Marketing campaign management (including Eloqua, ExactTarget)
• Social community tools (including Lithium, Salesforce.com Ideas, Chatter, Drupal)
• Quotations and complex pricing (including BigMachines)

We can help you evaluate all the options, and use them to obtain maximum agility.

Social CRM

According to recent estimates, half of the populations of many western countries use Facebook, and around 50% of those users log in every day. Evidently, enterprises must now consider social web and mobile conversations alongside their traditional broadcast, transaction and contact channels. That means the enterprises must deal with channels that they do not control.

We can help you understand and respond to the opportunities and threats. We’ll show you how to participate in conversations with your customers, build trust and advocacy, break down silos between marketing, customer services and commerce, personalise experiences and responses, and respond faster and more intelligently to trends and issues. Relevant technologies include:

• Customer communities (including Lithium, Jive, Drupal, Salesforce Ideas and Chatter, Drupal)
• User-generated content (including Baynote, BazaarVoice, Discus)
• Social monitoring and sentiment analysis  (including Radian6, Attensity)
• Social intelligence dashboard (including Adobe Omniture)
• Social identities (including Facebook Connect and Open Graph, Janrain, OpenID)

Capgemini Immediate

Immediate provides eBusiness services via a federation of leading-edge SaaS and open source technologies, managed as an evolving ecosystem and delivered as a commercially integrated service. With Immediate, leading organisations can move beyond using these technologies as a departmental solution or quick fix, and instead deploy them strategically to enhance the flexibility and agility of the enterprise as a whole.

Success story

Royal Mail Group

Capgemini is helping Royal Mail Group (RMG) to transform its business and consumer online services, reduce annual website IT costs, and support expansion and diversification into new web-based business opportunities without the delays and expense of traditional IT. The cloud technology used can be readily reconfigured to support RMG in launching new business ventures and bringing new services to market. The cloud approach also helps RMG to keep pace with the technologies and media being adopted by consumers. For example, a key area for expansion is innovative parcel delivery services to meet the needs of online shoppers.

Related Links

• Integrated Digital Services for CPR
• Social Insight into Action
• Our joint research project with MIT