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The case describes the selection of an information technology (IT) product to support the operations of 1-888-Junk-Van, a small waste-collection business based in Ontario, Canada. Marcus Kingo, the business owner, had five alternatives from which to choose, namely a database upgrade, contracting out development of a new software application, using Google Docs, using an online tool framed as Platform as a Service (PaaS), or implementing a small-business enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Each option presents strengths and weaknesses, and students are left to make a decision. The case exemplifies the IT deployment challenges faced by small companies. The case emphasizes the general industry characteristics and the particular operational circumstances that led the owner to identify the need for IT. Such circumstances, as well as the particular features and commercial conditions of each alternative, should serve as the main background for arriving at a decision.

"The case is set in mid-2009, about six months before the scheduled worldwide launch of Microsoft Azure. The group director of cloud computing for Microsoft India is mulling over the relative merits and demerits of launching Azure simultaneously in India with the rest of the world. Cloud computing is a paradigm shift in the information technology (IT) industry that fundamentally changes the way software and services are delivered to an end-user's desktop. Cloud computing enables shared resources - software, hardware and information - to be provided to consumers on demand, charging them based on usage. Azure is Microsoft's offering in this space, providing software and infrastructure as a service and also a platform to develop new applications on a pay-per-use model. Microsoft has always made its products available to users in the traditional license model, and Azure would be a paradigm shift not only in terms of technology but also in terms of the business model - from a one-time license fee and periodical maintenance contracts to a pay-as-you-use flexible model. The director had to decide whether the nascent Indian market was ready to adopt this new technology and business model. He also had to decide which segments of the Indian industry Microsoft Azure should target. There were a lot of reasons - presence of a strong IT development community, increasing IT adoption trends across Indian industries and presence of a very big potential customer base in terms of the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) - why the Indian market looked very lucrative. On the flip side, there were concerns such as poor current IT adoption, highly rampant piracy, low-to-average availability of infrastructure (essential to the success of Azure), such as electricity and broadband penetration in India, and the unique 'do-it-for-me' attitude of the Indian businessperson, which translated to significant initial costs in terms of time and effort required to increase awareness."

Web analytic tools provide companies with a wealth of information about the behavior of visitors to their websites. Quality Alloys, a small business-to-business supplier, has hired an advisor to analyze the value of its website through traditional metrics, as well as the associated financial measures of sales, profits, and amount of merchandize sold. In this case, students recommend how Quality Alloys should market its business to improve sales and assess the value of the company's recent promotional efforts.

Web analytic tools provide companies with a wealth of information about the behavior of visitors to their websites. Quality Alloys, a small business-to-business supplier, has hired an advisor to analyze the value of its website through traditional metrics, as well as the associated financial measures of sales, profits, and amount of merchandize sold. In this case, students recommend how Quality Alloys should market its business to improve sales and assess the value of the company's recent promotional efforts.

After Port Aventura's launch as a theme park in 1995, it continued to invest heavily in new shows, rides, hotels, golf courses, a convention center, and a shopping mall, all with the aim of adjusting to seasonal adjusted demand. This transformation from a theme park to a resort posed new challenges for Port Aventura's executive team. In particular, as a theme park, the analysis of its commercial activity focused on aggregated statistical information about groups of customers. By contrast, as a resort, management now needed to know and target individual customers. Yet, the company's existing information management processes and systems were not ready to support such a one-to-one marketing approach. This case is situated in mid-2009 when the general manager asked the chief financial officer and the director of information systems to find a solution to address the marketing needs of the resort. The case discussion encourages students to identify and assess the business problems and relate them to the existing information management processes and systems. Students will also have to present a proposal that addresses this one-to-one marketing strategy.

This case uses first-person sources to put the reader inside the teams that developed and marketed the Firefox browser. A brief overview of the Open Source Software (OSS) development process and the various roles played by members of a software development community, as well as a brief summary of the browser wars of the 1990s that saw Netscape Navigator fall from the dominant browser in the market to a distant second place behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer, help provide context for the case. In order to adapt the OSS development model to support a consumer-oriented product, Firefox developers adopted four rules: 'We want it to be small,' 'Let's not keep too many cooks,' 'All patches are not created equal,' and 'All users are not created equal.' The development team established a goal of 10 million downloads in the first 100 days and a 10% market share in the first year as measures of success for the new browser. In order to compete with Microsoft in the browser market, the Firefox team needed to leverage the development community to reach millions of potential end users. By providing a web-based structure for collaboration, and through a series of top-down initiatives (providing marketing tools to the community), and bottom-up initiatives (receiving and disseminating marketing ideas from the community at large), the team was able to achieve its marketing goals. In so doing, the SpreadFirefox initiative created a marketing community with roles analogous to a software development community.

This is an MIT Sloan Management Review article. Talking about "green technology"gets people excited. It's thrilling to think that a new wave of inventions and discoveries will revolutionize the way we live, halt the degradation of our planet, and conserve resources for future generations. And it's more than just talk: investors are committing real dollars. As the level of activity increases, however, discussions about green technology raise as many questions as they answer. Addressing the key questions is complicated by the fundamental uncertainties that are at the heart of the green technology market. The evolution of this market space depends on forces that are beyond the control of any individual entrepreneur or investor: government policies; availability of capital; and wild cards such as oil price volatility, geopolitical conflicts, the rate of economic growth, and public attitudes toward warnings of global climate change. History shows that the road to technological innovation is a long and winding one. Between 2005 and 2007, runaway enthusiasm led to the proliferation of hundreds of new green technology ventures, many of which ran into trouble during the great recession. Green technology companies need to develop staying power. In addition to understanding the opportunities, they need to get ahead-and stay ahead-of competitors.

Adam Famularo, general manager, Cloud Computing business, CA Technologies, and David Dobson, WVP and group executive, Customer Solutions Group, were preparing for a presentation on communicating and positioning CA Technologies' new strategy for cloud computing. Analysts had voiced concern over several 2010 acquisitions, and highlighted CA Technologies' need to clearly state its strategy and objectives and identify a compelling way to position and differentiate its cloud offerings. Industry pundits claimed the mainframe- CA Technologies' bread and butter- was dead and would go away. Famularo knew CA Technologies' line of products was anything but outdated, having evolved to help enterprises manage and secure their increasingly complex IT environments. In 2010, analysts reported that CA Technologies' mainframe business was strong and accounted for over 60% of the firm's revenues and a majority of its profits, with no sign of slowing down. But given the attractiveness of CA Technologies' current mainframe and distributed business lines, how firmly would the company back the emergent cloud business? Should CA Technologies' cloud business be positioned as an incremental, complementary addition to its mainframe and client-server businesses or should it be framed as a disruptive and entirely revolutionary technology?

Excel spreadsheet for case W11086.

This case is set five years after the Stanford Graduate School of Business case "Infosys Consulting in 2006: Leading the Next Generation of Business and Information Technology Consulting." Since then Infosys Consulting (IC) had become quite successful in the IT consulting world through its model of offsite technology development and its new Value Realization Method, which had driven IC's profits and reputation while becoming the company's key differentiator. The method involved quantitatively linking IC programs back to the creation of shareholder value on one side and to customer value on the other. While IC brought in zero dollars of revenue in 2004, in fiscal year 2011 direct revenue hit $200 million. In addition, IC drove another $600 million in revenue for its India-based parent company, Infosys Technology Limited (ITL). IC also had an operating margin of 25 percent. The company had grown very rapidly - by 2011 it counted 700 consultants worldwide and 42 partners. This quick growth provided both opportunities and challenges for the new company. IC's parent company ITL was also growing extremely rapidly, and the case discusses IC relationship with its parent company, which was across the world and had a much more formalized method of operation. By contrast, IC described itself as a maverick culture, which it saw as a great asset and helped the company attract and retain top-notch consultants.

This case presents a situation in which a large financial institution has acquired a sizable portfolio of new clients of travel (corporate expense) cards. The bank must decide on the optimal mix of clients to retain in order to achieve their goals of maximizing profitability, entering a new product market successfully and maintaining reputation. The optimal mix depends on a number of different factors, including annual account spend level, complexity of serving the account, the number of cards in each account, account risk and account retention level. The selection and number of clients chosen will affect the bank's future profitability and long term strategy. The bank is limited by attempting to achieve a three-year payback, and facing costs that can vary significantly (and which are not in the bank's control).

India's wireless giant Bharti Airtel (Airtel) exemplifies many of the tenets set forth in the book The New Age of Innovation by CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan. Divided into two segments, Case (A) asks students to analyze the Indian environment and Airtel's capabilities in order to determine strategies for growth. Case (B) reviews the strategies Airtel pursued and the subsequent results.

Brands rushed into social media, viewing social networks, video sharing, online communities, and microblogging sites as the panacea to diminishing returns for traditional brand building routes. But as more branding activity moves to the Web, marketers are confronted with the stark realization that social media was made for people, not for brands. In this article, we explore the emergent cultural landscape of open source branding, and identify marketing strategies directed at the hunt for consumer engagement on the People's Web. These strategies present a paradox, for to gain coveted resonance, the brand must relinquish control. We discuss how Web-based power struggles between marketers and consumer brand authors challenge accepted branding truths and paradigms: where short-term brands can trump long-term icons; where marketing looks more like public relations; where brand building gives way to brand protection; and brand value is driven by risk, not returns.

Marketing is evolving into true participatory conversations. Once-tidy, controlled marketing communications with distinct, identifiable corporate spokespeople are giving way to a messy tangle of market-based communications consisting of multiple authors including customers, competitors, observers, employees, and interested collectives. Amidst this, we find consumer-generated content (CGC) that is predominantly antithetical to previous studies, which assumed CGC to be inspired by personal brand attachment and/or the desire to see discrete-authored CGC disseminated, or even motivated by monetary reward. Authorship of collaboratively-produced CGC is virtually untraceable, unknown, and monetarily uncompensated. The true reward is the process, and the outcome is not reliant on technical prowess but rather semiotic manipulation, narrative manipulation, and complex brand character development. Consumers-especially those who are members of active consumer collectives-are skillful, proficient, and prolific in the creation of CGC, with high resonance among very engaged consumers. We advocate harnessing collaborative CGC efforts toward long-term marketing objectives, and offer a brief tutorial.

A key concept underlying competitive strategy is that of WTP, representing the consumer's 'willingness to pay' a premium price for goods or services. Through branding and other efforts, companies strive to push their message out and create a high willingness to pay, whereby consumers feel there are few or no substitutes for what these companies are selling. Social media, however, are making push-based marketing anachronistic. Users of social media typically eschew professional communications forced on them by faceless and impersonal organizations, in favor of more personal conversations. These individuals seek greater engagement with their preferred brands, and involvement-with or without the company's approval-in creating brand personalities. Their affinity for these preferred brands might well auger the dawn of a new WTP: willingness to participate. This article presents a model of consumer engagement through social media, and argues for re-conceptualizing WTP by utilizing a series of examples which show how companies that engage consumers via social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) stand to reap the benefits of long-term competitive advantages.

Online customer reviews are an important type of user-generated content, through which consumers share their experiences with products and services in order to help others make informed purchasing decisions. In this article, we discuss the goals of online customer reviews and develop practical, actionable principles that can be used to improve the presentations of customer reviews. We identify four goals-two ultimate, and two intermediate-of online customer reviews. The two ultimate goals are: (1) to assist consumers in making accurate choices, and (2) to reduce the cognitive costs of making such choices. The two intermediate goals are: (1) to help consumers form an unbiased understanding of the product, and (2) to construct a set of evaluative criteria. Drawing on the constructive view of consumer judgment and choice, we present a conceptual model of online-review based consumer judgment and choice. We report principles that will improve the presentation of reviews, and discuss the benefits of the new design over the traditional presentation of online reviews.

Traditionally, consumers used the Internet to simply expend content: they read it, they watched it, and they used it to buy products and services. Increasingly, however, consumers are utilizing platforms-such as content sharing sites, blogs, social networking, and wikis-to create, modify, share, and discuss Internet content. This represents the social media phenomenon, which can now significantly impact a firm's reputation, sales, and even survival. Yet, many executives eschew or ignore this form of media because they don't understand what it is, the various forms it can take, and how to engage with it and learn. In response, we present a framework that defines social media by using seven functional building blocks: identity, presence, relationships, conversations, groups, reputations, and sharing. As different social media activities are defined by the extent to which they focus on some or all of these blocks, we explain the implications that each block can have for how firms should engage with social media. To conclude, we present a number of recommendations regarding how firms should develop strategies for monitoring, understanding, and responding to different social media activities.

The concept of viral marketing has been discussed in the literature for over 15 years, since Jeffrey Rayport first introduced the term in 1996. However, the more widespread use of social media has recently pushed this idea to a whole new level. We provide insight into the relationship between social media and viral marketing, and illustrate the six steps executives should take in order to dance the social media/viral marketing waltz. We define viral marketing as electronic word-of-mouth whereby some form of marketing message related to a company, brand, or product is transmitted in an exponentially growing way-often through the use of social media applications. We consider the three conditions that need to be fulfilled to create a viral marketing epidemic (i.e., giving the right message to the right messengers in the right environment) and present four different groups of social media viral marketing campaigns (nightmares, strokes-of-luck, homemade issues, and triumphs). We conclude with five points of caution that managers should heed when trying to launch their own viral marketing campaign.

Consumers are adopting increasingly active roles in co-creating marketing content with companies and their respective brands. In turn, companies and organizations are looking to online social marketing programs and campaigns in an effort to reach consumers where they 'live' online. However, the challenge facing many companies is that although they recognize the need to be active in social media, they do not truly understand how to do it effectively, what performance indicators they should be measuring, and how they should measure them. Further, as companies develop social media strategies, platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are too often treated as stand-alone elements rather than part of an integrated system. This article offers a systematic way of understanding and conceptualizing online social media, as an ecosystem of related elements involving both digital and traditional media. We highlight a best-practice case study of an organization's successful efforts to leverage social media in reaching an important audience of young consumers. Then, we conclude with several insights and lessons related to the strategic integration of social media into a firm's marketing communications strategy.

There is incessant demand for 'proof' of return on investment (ROI) for social media spending, and a significant degree of uncertainty among marketers with respect to allocating effort and budget to social media. In this article, we address these issues by identifying different ways that organizations use social media, highlighting important distinctions in these approaches and describing how to frame the spending decision for social media. Additionally, we identify dimensions that can be used to differentiate important types of social media in a social media mix, and relate this to tactical marketing execution. We also highlight the different nature of social objectives, the 'backward' process for meeting them, and the importance of establishing a social media 'mission control' as part of that process.