The booming business of Mountain Doozy Donuts (MDD) has forced the Internet-based company to look for a new solution for its e-commerce operations. The company wants to outsource its entire e-commerce offerings to a single provider and needs both application outsourcing services and a hosting solution.
In this scenario, corporate accounting and financial reporting will continue to be hosted on a legacy IBM AS/400 system at MDD's headquarters in Green Bay, Wis.
MDD seeks an e-commerce integrator to develop, deploy and maintain a complete e-commerce solution for its B2C operations. The system must meet the organization's needs for inventory control and order fulfillment, Web-based order-taking and credit-card processing, customer order tracking, and exchanging business data with its back-end accounting system. For this scenario, we assume XML is used to update and will continue as the method of data exchange.
The solution will need to include content management with a defined SLA (service-level agreement) on change-management procedures and responsiveness, reporting of performance and transactional data, a method of visitor relationship management for tracking the success of marketing and sales campaigns, hosting services, and a way to ensure SLA compliance.
Management at MDD headquarters will require access to transaction and performance data via scheduled e-mail reporting, the Web or, optimally, both.
Data integrity is also a significant concern to MDD. Vendors are required to explain the provisions they have made for disaster recovery and security in terms of both their hosting platform and their network provisioning.
Finally, the company seeks a "verifiable service-level agreement" stated in metrics that can be monitored via a remote console providing access to the vendor's application, platform, and network-management and -monitoring tools. Moreover, the company requires monitoring services to ensure that the performance of the solution conforms to SLA specifications. This service should be provided by an independent third party.
MDD is also concerned about the potential for overwhelming either the content-management capabilities of the site or the hosting service, and seeks a clear and concise description of what resources -- in both technology and personnel -- will be dedicated to meet the company's needs. Also of importance will be the certifications and qualifications of staff assigned to support the deployment and operation of the company's hosted applications.
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