BM Event Readiness: A New Service to Explore

This past Tuesday, IBM added a new service to its commerce suit calledEvent Readiness, with the purpose of helping “brands prepare for unexpected — as well as expected — surges in online traffic” (Maddox, 2015). These often occur around holidays, special days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and after newsworthy events (particularly in the stock market). The main target audience for this service are “market and IT experts in retail, banking, consumer products and manufacturing industries” (Maddox, 2015).

Why is this service needed?

From a business stand point, the Event Readiness service that IBM is offering will allow companies to seize the revenue opportunities that these special days signify if traffic is handled appropriately, and site crashes are avoided. For example, “According to the Ponemon Institute, online outages or site crashes can cost a business $5,600 per minute. With incident lengths averaging 90 minutes, a single event can drive away loyal customers, tarnish the brand’s reputation and threaten critical revenue streams” (Fraim et al., 2015). In short, since the steep online competition allows for a very thin margin of error in what regards the delivery of information, such incident will likely drive the company’s loyal audience towards a different provider.

How It Works

Throughout the service offering, IBM plans to work closely with its clients in order to understand their current system infrastructure, find the areas of vulnerability, and rectify the potential issues. Among the offerings within this new service we can find “educating clients on best practices”, software and analytics services that can send customers alerts when a sold-out item is back in stock” , and more (Infotech Lead, 2015).

Works Cited:

Fraim, D., & Kodama, L. (2015, June 23). IBM Readies Brands to Capture New Sales Opportunities Driven By Unexpected Spikes in Traffic. Retrieved June 27, 2015, from http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/47183.wss

IBM brings Event Readiness services to boost online sales. (2015, June 25). Retrieved June 27, 2015, from http://www.infotechlead.com/news-2/ibm-brings-event-readiness-services-to-boost-online-sales-31425

Maddox, K. (2015, June 24). IBM Debuts Service to Help Brands Prepare for Spikes in Demand. AdAge.