BroadVision: eBusiness for everyone

The BroadVision e-Business Framework: Extending e-Business to Everyone

Executive Summary

As organizations look to replace their aging first-generation and second-generation e-business applications, they must once again face an old dilemma: Do we best achieve our business goals by building our e-business applications through custom development or via buying a packaged application? The experiences of previous e-business generations have taught them a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of each approach:

• While building e-business applications provides greater control and potential for differentiation, it has left many organizations with a higher cost structure and an inability to react quickly to changes in the business. IT teams are spending a significant proportion of their e-business budgets maintaining code that was written by people who have left the organization and that cannot be reused for other projects.
• Buying a packaged e-business application may give organizations faster time-to-value but creates risks when business requirements diverge from out-of-the-box capabilities. Inflexible data models and hard-coded application functionality mean that IT must often force business and creative teams to change their processes to fit the packaged application or rewrite components at high cost.

BroadVision has been developing and deploying e-business applications for 15 years, and we recognize that the best solution to the “build versus buy” dilemma is one that combines the best elements of each approach. We designed the BroadVision® e-Business Framework, a set of modular application services, agile toolsets and proven methodologies, to do just that. The e-Business Framework:

• Saves Time: Eliminates the need for custom development of commonly used, “commodity” e-business features
• Puts IT Resources to the Best Use: Puts power in the hands of business users and lower-cost junior development resources to configure this functionality to fit your unique processes
• Saves Money: Makes custom development, where needed, more effective, faster, cheaper and lower risk

This White Paper explores the business considerations of today’s e-business application teams in further detail. It then describes each element of the BroadVision e-Business Framework™ solution: the Kona™ platform, application services library, Kukini™ developer toolset and the BroadVision’s K2 Methodology. Finally, it describes the benefits of the BroadVision approach, including:

• Lower development costs and risks
• Greater business agility
• Flexibility in both implementation and deployment resource allocation
• Easier ongoing maintenance
• Higher business user satisfaction