B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

364 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
for the gathering, processing and sharing of information throughout the
company has remained unchanged.
As alluded to earlier, another revolution is sweeping the business
world: the Internet is becoming untethered and there is a demonstrated
need for B2E (business-to-employee) interactions. Employees no longer
need to be shackled to fixed Ethernet connections to send and receive
data. Handheld devices can now connect them to customers, colleagues
and data wherever they may roam. In short, the mobile Internet is
finally forcing companies to question the previous notion that the office
was indispensable as a physical presence for information to be gathered,
processed and passed. The result is that now an office can be wherever
employees, their colleagues and customers want it to be.
Each industry has unique ways of approaching the mobile Internet
and there cannot be a single or even small set of solutions for different
industries. As an illustration, Figure 12.6 outlines a typical pathway for
mobile content delivery.
Two general ways that firms can exploit mobile technology are
internally and externally. Internally focused mobile applications leverage
" VaTTous"
Back-End
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p Provides device
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• Adds additional layerfoi*
scalability
• Enables rapid application
development
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