Software + Services + Support

Way back in 2008, Corevist was founded to provide an industry disrupting SAP® Integrated eCommerce solution by offering the first ever solution to be exclusively delivered via the Cloud.  Our mindset was that we would bring an affordable solution to the market and help our clients be successful by:

1. providing a world class, feature rich, software application,
2. guiding them to a successful GoLive with our iterative “Threaten to Put it Into Production” Methodology and Services, and
3. delivering production support ensuring that their customers would have access to their B2B eCommerce websites 24×7.

We knew that we were dealing with a very complex software stack with many moving parts so we anticipated that things might occasionally go “bump in the night” after GoLive.  To that end, we knew that we would have to provide timely “break-fix”, or the occasional “how-to”,  support to our clients.  That’s where our cloud delivery model was going to help us out.

Delivering our SAP®-integrated ecommerce software via the cloud was going to minimize our support resolution times and effort because unlike with the on-premise software model:

1. our clients couldn’t touch our software, which meant debugging would be much easier.
2. we would always have instantaneous access to the software 24×7 and from anywhere in the world.
3. developing, testing and deploying fixes would be much simpler.

Because ongoing client satisfaction was going to be a differentiating aspect of our business model, we also generously gave (still do) 40 hours of free Production Support hours to make sure that our clients were getting the most out of their investments in Corevist.

After our fist couple of clients went Live with their projects, we noticed a funny thing…our software wasn’t breaking.

To be totally transparent, there were (and still are) the occasional website errors or outages.  However, they are almost always due to either SAP® Master Data issues or the client’s SAP® or network not being available to us.  Consequently, our clients simply weren’t using their free Production Support hours because there was nothing to spend them on.

Our SAP®-integrated eCommerce software wasn’t breaking.

With that said, we were constantly in touch with our clients but the kind of conversations we were having weren’t about things not working but about ways they wanted our systems to keep up with their evolving business needs.  I wrote about this in February of 2010 in my “The Evolution of b2b2dot0 (now Corevist sic) Customer Services” blog post.  More than 4.5 years later, nothing has changed.  As I write this blog post today, here are some of the Post GoLive items that we’re supporting our clients with:

1. Bring one of their recent corporate acquisitions onto the Corevist/Magento platform
2. Support a new credit card payment solution
3. Extend the initial pilot B2B SAP® eCommerce solution into a B2C model
4. Roll out the Corevist service to the Asian territory
5. Recover from a client’s accidental corruption of catalog master data
6. Effect an orderly transition of roles and responsibilities due to Client personnel changes (at 3 separate clients!)
7. Develop a technical proof of concept for the integration of our service with hybris since it is being considered as a corporate wide Product Information Management Platform (PIM)
8. Develop a technical proof of concept of a mobile responsive design for a dealer/salesperson use case for inventory and order checking
9. Deliver a graphical dashboard of consolidated operational information (based on role) to our client’s customers
10. Provide strategic advice on best options to evolve the current B2B solution into a direct to consumer approach without disintermediating the channel.

There aren’t any “production” support items here because our software isn’t breaking.  What we’re providing is Post GoLive support for the ongoing evolution of our client’s businesses.  So to close out today’s blog post, I have to circle back to our 2008 mindset and update it to reflect who we are today.

The first three items of our mission still hold true.  We still see ourselves helping our clients succeed by:

1. providing a world class, feature rich, software application,
2. guiding our clients to a successful GoLive with our iterative “Threaten to Put it Into Production” Methodology and Services, and
3. delivering production support ensuring that their customers would have access to their B2B eCommerce websites 24×7.

However, after almost seven years of experience of putting over 40 SAP® integrated eCommerce websites into production, and speaking to literally hundreds of manufacturers, consultants, technology companies and industry analysts, we’ve both earned the right, and now have the responsibility, to add a fourth item to our mission list:

4.  providing Post GoLive consultation and support to ensure that the Corevist eCommerce platform is aligning with the evolving business needs of our clients.

In summary:

Yes, Corevist provides a great SAP® eCommerce platform that leverages (relies on) your SAP® investments 100%.
Yes, Corevist has an incredible project implementation methodology that guarantees success on your SAP®-integrated eCommerce project.
Yes, Corevist guarantees 99.9% availability of your website.

And now, I want to make sure that all of our employees, clients and future clients understand that:

Yes, Corevist is your partner in making sure you get the most business value out of your investments in our company…today and in the future.

By the way, those annual 40 hours of free production support that we used to provide (and no one ever used), they can now be redeemed for  any Post GoLive support requests.  That’s simply our way of saying we really want our clients to succeed.

Sam