Any company of the ones in the Quesation paper Case Study

Any company of the ones in the Quesation paper - Case Study Example Key elements of IBM's web strength are listed below: 1) IBM has highly reliable web infrastructure used to host its website and is available 24X7. 2) It has adopted its own web services platform known as Websphere for hosting its web services. 3) Back-end is hosted on its robust server infrastructure consisting of IBM mainframes. 4) The website is intuitive and easy to use, without complicated English or too much of technical words - IBM's site is one of the simplest to read and understand. 5) The web services are country-specific covering all services for a given country. This is a huge competitive advantage because IBM operates out of more than 170 countries! 6) The 'support and services' part of its website is designed very well - it is simple and easy to use. 7) It's e-commerce facilities are built on its own CommercePOINT platform - The platform details are shown below: Picture 2 - Source: wolrath.com 8) It has solid partner services in the form of 'IBM Partnerworld' - All partner business facilities are available as part of this website. 9) It has a very robust data warehouse and business intelligence back-end to interpret web requests and serve the relevant information. Competitive Advantages of web services The key elements that make IBM stand out apart from its competitors such as HP, Accenture and others are as follows: a) The Websphere web services platform has become very popular and it is even used by competitors today for packaging and use web application services. b) Its back-end mainframes are very robust and are built with the longest duration of research and development within the market. c) Its country-specific services are completely localized to individual countries and this has proven very useful for marketing and sales targeted at...It is therefore chosen as the subject of this business analysis. The analysis is divided into three parts as follows: d) IBM is a big supporter of open source development. It has built a separate web facility called 'DeveloperWorks' to help software and IT professionals. This is hugely popular and is seen as an advantage over competitors. e) The PartnerWorld web portal for its developers is used very well by its several partners. IBM has been a strong partnering company right from the beginning and this strength has come over to its web services for the partners as well. IBM has been a company of radical change all through its decades of existence. The Organization is traditionally known to be very conservative and formal in its management style - but surprisingly, it has made very strong and firm moves repeatedly to meet changing market conditions and demands. Major changes are discussed below: i. The turning point in IBM's history was when the company decided to enter the field of digital computers (manufacturing) in the early 1950's.