JAMCRACKERS

Company Overview

The company was founded in the name of “VitalTone” in July 1999 initially by K.B
Chandrasekhar, Herald Chen and Mark Terbeek. The company renamed itself “Jamcracker” in
February 2000. Fortuned profile the company as a “cool company” while Red Herring declared
it as one of “the 100 most important companies in the world”. It had managed to bring $115
million in equity dollars & $38 million in equipment financing. It had more than 100 customers
& 250 employees by June 2001 and offered more than 35 different application services.

Vision

To reside at the center of an expanding network of service providers, achieving increasing

profits & market influence from the position.

Key Activities
1. ASP aggregation: Combine application services through its enterprise IT management
platform, Jamcracker Enterprise, into comprehensive offerings such as technical
support and billing.
2. Cooperation with Application Service Providers (ASP) partners
3. Provide a single point of contact for technical support

Cost Structure

1. Cost involved in required hardware to authenticate users to ASP partners

2. Cost involved in engineering, sales and service delivery and support

Revenue Stream

1. Monthly fees paid by customer for using Jamcracker enterprise

2. Set-up fee for access to the Jamcracker Service Infrastructure
3. Monthly per user fees for ASP usage
Competitors:
 Most companies were prospective partners rather than competitors.
 Microsoft was a partner to Jamcracker instead a competitor because of acquisition of
Great plains, Jamcracker’s ASP partner.
 Apart from some of the companies with similar business models, larger companies like
Sprint might offer ASP customers aggregation.
 IBM, Oracle could be close competitors in near future

Challenges in front of the company to achieve its objective:

 Infrastructure and industry relationships are required to make the company business
model practically viable
 Challenges to educate customer about the new approach of distributing IT services
 Lack of industry established standards and integration issue with ASP
 Robustness of infrastructure as business grows.
 Need of professional services to assist customers in setting up initial system
configurations and transferring data from legacy systems to ASP based systems
 Need of addressing customer concerns related to service levels, security, and privacy.

Evaluation of Business, Organization and IS Strategy on the basis of Strategic Alignment

Model:

 The business strategy of Jamcracker was ASP aggregation: to combine application

services through its enterprise IT management platform, Jamcracker Enterprise, into
comprehensive offerings such as technical support and billing
 Provide world class support and make customers happy
 They decided to focus sales efforts on mid-sized companies.
 Initially they focused on basic applications such as email, expense reporting and later
on complex applications like Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) or Enterprise
Resource Planning (ERP).
 Jam cracker’s web-based technology supported companies to achieve their respective
business objectives smoothly with no ‘IT log jam’.
 Strategic partnership with giants like Accenture to gain access to larger companies.
 This partnership is in alignment of Jamcracker’s vision to expand continuously.
 The company hosted the data of their partner ASPs in its expensive data centers. The
ASP is executed from the customer location and the data is stored to Jamcracker’s data
center.