For SAP Business By Design, the Software-as-a-Service offering, using cloud based services is natural, because Business By Design is delivered in the cloud.
The largest consumer product companies have seen their chief marketing officers engage with software asaservice (SaaS) providers to design and run their outbound marketing programs to launch new products and animate their loyalty programs, without a word with their internal IT organizations.
How do you designa system that not only allows new compute resources to begin to operate as part of your service, but also folds in an up-to-date copy of the data your users and customers depend on?
Is your community management program in place asa PR or promotional vehicle, or do you actively design and manage it as customer insight and service outpost as well?