We operate global b2b trading communities for our customers all over the world.  The statistics are fascinating.  I’ve spoken in the past about how our largest growing segment of users is based in Asia, and primarily China.  Today, as we were reviewing our logs, we also noticed an interesting trend .. an OVERWHELMING adoption of Internet Explorer continues to be very pervasive throughout our user base, which is primarily corporate and international.

Over 86% of our users for the last 6 months ran Internet Explorer. Of that, over 90% ran IE 8 or lower, and a whopping 30% run IE 7 or less.
The statistics get even more overwhelming when looking at operating systems. 94% are running Microsoft Windows, of various flavors but over 68% are running XP or LOWER to run their business, with majority (55%) running XP.

Apple products didn’t even register a rounding error (.1% for MAC).

So to sum it up, regardless of the hype of various “new” technologies – in the day to day, get it done world of business-to-business commerce.  Microsoft still rules and will apparently for some time.

Collaborative Commerce enables retailers, suppliers, and distributors to share information with one another in a standard business language, benefiting all members of the supply chain. This initiative includes the processes, technologies, and supporting standards that allow continuous and automated communication of electronic information between trading partners.

In today’s global commerce environment, the need for accurate, standards-based information is critical for conducting business efficiently. By standardizing the way information is communicated, and by having all trading partners accessing the same information, the opportunity for errors decreases dramatically, costs are reduced, and supply chains operate more efficiently.

Collaborative Commerce is based on the GS1 System — a suite of integrated supply chain standards. The GS1 System is accepted worldwide, accommodating the needs of all trading partners within the global trade community. The standards allow for products, services, and raw materials to be sourced and sold anywhere in the world.

After a global search for a partner, the GS1 standard organization selected Summa Technology Group (Appterra) to manage the GS1-GDSN Global Registry.

Today, SummaTG operates the GDSN Global Registry, part of the GS1 system.  As GDSN’s technology partner, we provide application development, support, management and hosting services to GDSN and other GS1 organizations.

For more information, see

For More Information About the Services provided by GS1

http://www.internap.com/2013/01/22/will-cloud-slas-keep-pace-with-the-demands-of-enterprise-saas/

By Charlie Alsmiller, CEO, SummaTG

I recently spoke with an enterprise software company that had launched a “Cloud” initiative. Like so many others, ourselves included, they had flocked to the variety of services available from Amazon, Azure, Softlayer, Rackspace and others to “scale” their business using the latest cloud technology.

I have examined all these services in some level of detail, and have found them all to be very good when paired with the right job. In our business, we rely on our technology partnerships to help ensure 100% uptimefor our customers. In turn, our customers rely on us for dependable service that allows their business to run smoothly. Downtime is a really big problem. As such, they expect us to write a fairly intense SLA (Service Level Agreement) into our contracts, because if we are down, they are down. There are usually substantial financial implications of downtime, and it’s important to ensure that all parties are fully “incented” to react quickly if a downtime situation arises.

As we all know, downtime has been a problem with many of the larger providers recently. I understand that downtime happens, but where this gets to be a challenge is in the SLAs of these firms. Are you willing to bet your business on this? Below is an excerpt from a leading firm’s Service Level Agreement, which is typical.

“XXXXXX will use commercially reasonable efforts to make XXXXXX available with an Annual Uptime Percentage (defined below) of at least 99.95% during the Service Year. In the event XXXXXX does not meet the Annual Uptime Percentage commitment, you will be eligible to receive a Service Credit.”

This firm goes on to note that the service credit will equal 10% of your bill for the affected period. Thanks.

I have a former customer that once calculated downtime costs for his business at $1000/minute. I also have a current customer that received EU 500/minute penalties for downtime in their ability to communicate and take orders from their customers. So, let’s run some quick math. 99.5% uptime translates into approximately four hours and 23 minutes of downtime per year, or around 22 minutes per month. In the case of my former customer, 22 minutes of downtime per month equals $22,000 of lost revenue. If a business pays $10,000/month for cloud services, they would only receive a $1000 credit for their loss. That’s not acceptable, and I can assure you, they won’t wait around for it to happen again – they WILL look elsewhere.

The bottom line is that while the outage will have financial impact, both in terms of lost revenue and SLA payouts, the major hit will be that of customer confidence. Any credits offered will be insignificant in replacing either revenue or customer perception.

As a SaaS company, we have a lot of moving parts — our network, hardware, operating systems, database systems, our code base, etc. All must work flawlessly together to ensure a great end customer experience. As enterprises seriously consider cloud services, take a cold, hard look at the Service Level Agreements and the real commitment to uptime that the supplier can provide. I think you will be surprised and choose your partner very carefully

By Charlie Alsmiller, CEO, SummaTG February 5 2013

As a westerner, I am used to being able to navigate throughout the world.  Primarily in English.   Not that I am lazy, but typically western.   The facts are, most countries you can get around with limited knowledge of the local language.   I’ve done business in Latin America, Asia and Europe for years and the only real items I know is how to say are “hello”, order dinner and get to the airport.   I can usually vaguely understand what is going on because of our phonetic and general similarities.  But real understanding, that’s missing unless we talk the common language.  English.

Consider the following.   The word “Hammer” in English translates (according to Babelfish), the following:

Appterra Architecture – Key features

• Common single platform across all Applications
• Layered Architecture where application is stacked in groups providing ultimate flexibility and maintainability.
• n-Tier deployment  provides improved scalability, availability, manageability and resource utilization
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Extensible – Custom features and components can be easily added.
• Different components can have their own data repository
• Built in exception handling

Functional Improvements

• End to End Document tracking – Currently a transaction / document can be tracked only when SDI processes the file. In the 3.0, document can be tracked from the time it reaches Appterra and time it leaves.
• User Document Synchronization – Completely redesigned user document synchronization functionality where new users can view the relevant documents almost immediately.
• Double-byte support – SDI can now process double-byte characters
• Enhanced Language support – Various language supports are available in 3.0 and new languages can be added pretty quickly as needed.
• New UI – Significantly improved UI where user can filter, sort, export data.
• Default Application Role – When creating a new partner, the system will auto-configure a default application role with all available functions/documents for the new partner, then automatically assign the admin user to the default application role.
• Delete Organization Type – Users can now delete Organization Type.
• Delete Application Role – Users now can delete Application Roles.

 Security

• User Permission – Configurable user permissions where Admin can configure page, feature, and function permission based on user groups.
• Audit Trail – New audit trail is available throughout the application
• User Credential Encryption – Improved SHA256 bit encryption for user login credential

Extensibility

• SDI Services – SDI Workflow services can be exposed as external service.
• Web Services – Business rules are services instead of COM objects and easy to configure and deploy

 High Performance

• Larger files and High volume data – Appterra 3.0 is designed to handle much larger file size and high volume of data
• Multithread processing – Multithread processing results in efficient high volume data processing

System

• Pre and Post Processor – 3.0 almost completely eliminates the need for pre or post processors through the enhanced configuration capability. This results in significantly less infrastructure support and less development work.
• Error Reprocessing Module – This new module allows Support team to reprocess the files much more smoothly compared to the current process where they need to manually reprocess the files by accessing multiple servers.
• SDI Listener Directory – SDI listener directories can be added and configured through System Admin module. This allows us to scale SDI easily.