AllThingsD » benefits

Amazon Job Descriptions Hint at More Perks Coming to Prime

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:00:52 +0000

First, Amazon Prime offered free two-day shipping for $79. Then it started offering add-on services for no additional cost, like streaming videos and Kindle books.

And now it appears the e-commerce giant has even more plans in the works.

A Wells Fargo Equity Research note distributed this week writes: “A key discovery this month is that Amazon has plans to expand the Prime membership benefits beyond the Amazon.com platform.”

The note points to a number of job descriptions, disclosing that Amazon is creating a “Prime Expansion” team, tasked with driving awareness of the Prime program and expanding the scope of its benefits, geographically and on and off Amazon.

So what areas or new benefits might Amazon be expanding into?

It’s not clear, and an Amazon spokesperson did not return emails seeking comment.

But first, let’s throw out the areas where Amazon won’t be expanding to — other online retailers. Today, Amazon sells pretty much everything under the sun, so it would be very hard for it to find a retailer that would be comfortable with letting Amazon run its loyalty program, even if it does mean offering perks like free shipping.

“I think any retailer would have to have their head examined if they allowed themselves to be a customer-acquisition tool for Amazon Prime,” said Mike Golden, president of ShopRunner. “Especially if it’s under the assumption that Amazon won’t compete with them. Because people have been proven false every single time.”

Of course, Golden has his biases.

ShopRunner, which includes eBay as an investor, operates a service — much like Prime — that offers shoppers free two-day shipping across a variety of retailers, including Toys “R” Us and PetSmart, for $79 a year.

But even if other retailers are out of the question, there are still some opportunities Amazon could be pursuing. For instance, it could work with other delivery services that don’t compete with Amazon.

ShopRunner has already demonstrated this through a partnership with Domino’s Pizza, which provides free delivery to ShopRunner members. Other scenarios with national scale could include Ticketmaster or Fandango, which have service fees at checkout.

Another internal program that Amazon is working on that could be a candidate for Prime is free access to Amazon Locker, which allows consumers to pick up packages from secure mailboxes at 7-Eleven. The lockers address a segment of the market that can’t receive packages at their homes because people work during the day and there’s nowhere for a delivery to be dropped off, or because it’s likely to get stolen.

So far, Amazon Prime is considered a very successful program that increases loyalty to Amazon.com — for an annual fee. As is typical with Amazon, it does not disclose how many Prime members it has, but Baird Equity Research estimates that there’s somewhere between seven million and 11 million members.

With even more benefits, it will make Prime — and Amazon overall — even harder for consumers to walk away from.

(Image courtesy of www.cicadamania.com)

Why ADP Is the Biggest Cloud Company You've Never Heard Of

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 01:00:28 +0000

Take a look at your last paycheck. If you work in the U.S., there’s a one in six chance that somewhere on it, or on the stub, you’ll find the logo of a company you’ve probably never heard of, never given much thought to, but which plays a significant role in the day-to-day lives of many companies around the world.

It’s called ADP, and it’s a $10 billion (fiscal 2011 sales) outfit that processes the paychecks received last year by some 33 million people around the world — and which processed some $1.2 trillion in payments to workers in the U.S. And it does almost all of it in the cloud.

Long before companies like Salesforce.com and Amazon popularized “the cloud” as the important technology force shaping business, before we even had the phrase “software as a service,” ADP was selling its clients on a service that in hindsight sounds very “cloudy.” Rather than shoulder the cost associated with running a payroll on their own, companies large and small would hire ADP to take that business function on for them, on a contract basis.

“If you go back enough years, we were known as a ‘service bureau,’” says ADP’s CIO Mike Capone. “It was all run off a mainframe. Payrolls would come in on a Monday or a Tuesday, and paychecks would go out on a Friday. That was the model.”

And though for a time it sold some traditional software, by early last decade ADP starting pushing its customers toward the Internet, with no software to install or manage on-site. It was so logical that no one really gave it any thought, Capone says. In the same way it made sense to outsource payroll to a third party, it also made sense to do it without selling any software, but rather let customers run it via the Web. “Back then, it was just obvious that this was the way to do it,” Capone says. “And so we just did it this way.”

And so it has been for years. About half of ADP’s revenue comes from payroll services; the other half from other things — benefits, human resources, time and attendance management, taxes — that any business with more than, say, two employees, needs to varying degrees. And ADP’s 570,000 clients run the gamut from tiny mom-and-pops to huge global companies, and more than 200,000 are cloud-based clients. Among ADP’s bigger customers are giants like Sodexo, Alcoa and Swiss Re.

Its rivals run the gamut, too. There’s Paychex in the payroll business; SuccessFactors and Workday in various bits of the human capital management business. Lawson and SAP and even Oracle’s PeopleSoft unit overlap with other parts of its business.

However, on Monday, ADP is doubling down on the cloud with what it’s describing as a “big bet” product that brings its entire stack of service offerings into one. The company has dubbed it “Vantage,” and it is essentially aimed at unifying payroll, recruiting, talent management, benefits and a batch of other things that businesses large and small need on a day-to-day basis, into a single cloud service. The company says it spent $600 million and 18 months researching and building it, and will announce it at a conference in Las Vegas.

I talked with Don Weinstein, a senior vice president at ADP’s headquarters in Roseland, N.J., recently. He told me that often companies get all these services from different vendors. The result is that data from one application ends up being trapped, because there’s no easy to way to move it into a related application from another vendor. The result is a messy kludge of in-house combinations that have been integrated, often badly.

And all these processes have costs. A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that large companies spend an average $1,400 per employee per year on things like payroll, workforce administration, time and attendance, and health benefits, and at midsized companies of between 100 and 1,000 employees, the costs reach nearly $2,000 per employee per year. They’re also the kind of processes that any self-respecting CIO will want to make more efficient or less costly.

The aim with Vantage, Weinstein says, is to give businesses a single vendor and a single stack of services they can use with all these processes, and with the data shared easily across applications. The result, he hopes, is that businesses will like what they see and start using more of ADP’s stuff, and add on other services over time. “We’re expecting to sell a broader array of product,” he says. “Half our business still comes just from payroll. But our intent is to offer this one integrated solution, and win a bigger share of their wallet.”

I also saw a demo, and while it’s not exactly as exciting as seeing the demo of the latest iPhone, you can see how it might make the lives of people in the back office of many companies easier. As with any SaaS application, all the data is stored in a single database, and everything runs through a common browser. Years of analysis of business processes has given it some idea of how things tend to flow in companies, and so it suggests logical next steps in every process.

It works along the same lines that Amazon does when it suggests books you might like based on the last one you bought or looked at. If you just added a new employee — say, in the job of a janitor — your next logical step may be to order him a uniform, so the system will suggest you do so, and take you to the process for doing that. Add a new sales exec, and you are guided to enable his or her access to company sales and performance tools. Not exactly riveting stuff, but if you run a company, it’s all very necessary.

Necessary enough that analysts covering ADP’s stock say it will grow its annual sales to about $11.4 billion. That’s a serious cloud.

It's Business Time for Apple's iPad

John Paczkowski — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 12:00:01 +0000

Though there’s no dedicated salesforce selling it in the enterprise market, Apple’s iPad has gained significant traction there. Since its debut, more than 65 percent of the Fortune 100 have deployed or piloted the device. This despite Apple’s continued focus on the consumer market.

“We haven’t pushed it real hard in business, and it’s being grabbed out of our hands,” Steve Jobs said last year. “And I talk to people everyday in all kinds of businesses that are using iPads, all the way from boards of directors that are shipping iPads around instead of board books, down to nurses and doctors in hospitals and other large and small businesses.”

If Apple’s not pushing the iPad into the enterprise market, how is it getting there? Carried in by the rank and file–just as smartphones were. Employees are buying iPads, and other mobile devices as well, and enterprise is increasingly supporting them on the back end and sometimes even subsidizing them, or their use.

In other words, the consumer market has evolved into a de facto evangelist for Apple in enterprise, a lucky development for the company, which is uniquely positioned to benefit from it.

“This trend should mean that the key to corporate success over the long term is being strong in consumer devices that you use everyday,” says Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes. “As a result, the purchase pattern is shifting toward laptops, tablets and smart phones being bought by consumers (all key areas of Apple’s strength), while direct sales of corporate products have shorter and smaller upgrade cycles. We call this trend the “Consumerization of IT,” which benefits companies with strong consumer appeal and customer service reputations….We believe Apple has a large lead in terms of driving this trend, while it presents challenges for traditional PC vendors, in our opinion. We believe the iPad’s success in the enterprise will help Apple make further inroads into the corporate market with other products eventually.”

Interesting, this vision of the iPad as Apple’s Trojan Horse for enterprise, particularly since it appears to be a natural evolution of the consumer market. And if it accelerates corporate adoption of the device as well as other Apple hardware over the long term–well then, it truly is magical and revolutionary.

In Case You Needed Reminding, Social Enterprise Software Is Going to Be Big

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 05:00:43 +0000

Just in case today’s launch of Chatter by Salesforce.com wasn’t enough, the fine folks at Jive Software would like to remind you again how important social enterprise software is going to be, and they have survey data to prove it.

The company asked 500 people at 300 companies, many of them large companies with 10,000 or more employees, about the benefits they were seeing from using social business software, which in this case is Jive, naturally, though an independent firm did the survey itself.

Some of the results were a little vague. For instance, respondents reported a 39 percent increase in “employee connectedness.” Others were more concrete: Jive users generated 32 percent more ideas, sent 27 percent less email and found answers to questions 32 percent faster

And there were benefits for customers. For one thing, employees spent 42 percent more time communicating with them, which in turn led to a better rate of customer retention, 31 percent, while the volume of support calls dropped by 28 percent and sales to new customers jumped by 27 percent.

The survey also found that 83 percent of companies in the survey are preparing to deploy some kind of social enterprise solution across the entire company this year. That finding is at least validated in part by a Gartner study that forecasts spending on enterprise social software will grow a little more than 15 percent this year to reach about $770 million.

Jive, you’ll remember, is the company that landed a $30 million venture capital investment from Kleiner Perkins last summer, and hired former Mercury Interactive head Tony Zingale as its CEO.

BoomTown’s Kara Swisher visited its offices last August, and her video interview with Zingale and Ted Schlein–Kleiner partner and Jive director–is below:

[ See post to watch video ]

AT&T Plans $2.7 Billion Charge

Roger Cheng — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 22:28:35 +0000

AT&T Inc. will take a pretax charge of about $2.7 billion in the fourth quarter in a move to simplify how it accounts for pension and other post-retirement benefits.

The Dallas-based telecommunications company said Thursday it would now recognize gains and losses in the year in which they are incurred, using a practice called mark-to-market accounting, rather than spread them out over several years.

The accounting change clarifies one of the more volatile aspects of a large employer’s financial results, better tying performance to the current economic state. It would eliminate the “smoothing out” of gains and losses over several years. Under the old system, some of the pension-plan losses recorded during the stock market decline in 2008 would still be on the books for 2010.

AT&T joins a number of large U.S. corporations including Honeywell International, General Electric Co. and International Business Machines Corp. in revamping pension-accounting practices.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Viacom Sold Rock Band for a Song. A Really, Really Cheap Song.

Peter Kafka — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 11:30:34 +0000

Here’s what happens when a red-hot videogame franchise goes cold: You can buy the whole company for the same price as a single copy of the game.

I had a hunch that Viacom sold off Harmonix, which makes the Rock Band games, at a steep discount last month. But I’m still surprised it was this cheap: I’m told that investment group Columbus Nova paid $49.99–the list price for “Rock Band 3″–and got the entire company.

There’s more to the story, of course: People familiar with the transaction tell me Harmonix’s buyers also assumed the game company’s liabilities. That includes expensive music rights fees, and responsibility for lots of unsold games and equipment sitting on warehouse shelves.

And I’m told that the deal is structured in a way that will let Viacom net something like $150 million in tax benefits, similar to the AOL/Bebo fire sale last year. Given that Viacom paid $175 million for Harmonix a few years ago, things could be worse.

[UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times reports that Viacom will actually receive a $50 million tax benefit, and offload $100 million in liabilities. That makes more sense, and I've since confirmed it myself. My apology for the error.]

Still, it’s a fire sale price no matter how you look at it. And that can’t be comforting to Harmonix’s remaining employees, who are likely going to be facing a very serious restructuring.

Columbus Nova’s PR reps wouldn’t comment on the sale terms (neither would Viacom) but pointed me to an earlier statement from the company, which said it was “really excited about backing the world-class team that has consistently produced such great games and helping them grow the company and its brands.”

HP Reverses Hurd-Era Pay Cuts, Unveils Benefits

Benjamin Pimentel — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 21:14:25 +0000

After a rocky start, new Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Officer Leo Apotheker is trying to settle into his role with a Thanksgiving gift for his employees.

During HP’s earnings call on Monday, Apotheker announced that the company was reversing pay cuts for a majority of the employees affected by a February 2009 salary-reduction plan under former CEO Mark Hurd.

HP also reinstated a company 401(k) plan matching contributions as a fixed benefit, and instituted a new share-ownership plan that would allow employees to buy company shares at a five percent discount.

“HP employees are a highly competitive group who want to win,” Apotheker said on a call with analysts. “They also want to be rewarded for their performance….I believe in the performance-driven culture, and our employees have been performing.”

The moves appear aimed at lifting the morale of a company that’s been reeling from yet another turbulent leadership transition, and helping Apotheker feel more welcome at the iconic Silicon Valley company once admired for its employee-friendly culture.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Adding Insult to Injury: Yahoo Is Prepping Layoffs, but Limited to Product Group and More Like 10 Percent

Kara Swisher — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 22:40:06 +0000

Yahoo is indeed preparing to lay off employees, in a reduction in force that will be done in December.

But the layoffs, first reported in TechCrunch at 20 percent, will be closer to 10 percent and be almost completely centered on the product organization under Chief Product Officer Blake Irving, said sources close to the situation.

That would mean layoffs of about 650, since that part of Yahoo has about 6,500 employees.

Yahoo, in fact, just put out a statement saying the 20 percent figure was “inaccurate.”

Said the company in a statement: “Yahoo! is always evaluating expenses to align with the company’s financial goals. However, a 20% reduction in Yahoo’s workforce across the board is misleading and inaccurate.”

Well, kind of, because it is a big layoff nonetheless.

In addition, said sources, the layoffs might result in the outsourcing of some functions at the company.

Even at a lower figure, the move will surely be yet another blow to morale at the much-buffeted Silicon Valley Internet giant.

Just this week, for example, Google gave each of its employees a 10 percent pay raise and $1,000. Facebook, similarly, is showering benefits on its fast-growing pool of workers.

Along with a spate of top-level executive departures, Yahoo is under scrutiny by Wall Street, as well as the subject of much takeover speculation.

This has put Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz under even more pressure to show results after almost two years as top manager.

Known as an exec who knows how to cut costs, she has yet to prove she can grow the Yahoo business with new innovations.

Yahoo has just over 14,000 employees. It has undergone many layoffs and restructurings, but only once in a major one under Bartz.

Yahoo's M&A Strategy–Maybe Local Commerce Rather Than Content (Hello, Groupon!)

Kara Swisher — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 17:08:07 +0000

It’s no secret in Silicon Valley dealmaking circles that Yahoo has been looking at what insiders have called a “transformative” acquisition to jumpstart the company.

And while many think that has to mean grabbing one of the big content companies–such as AOL (AOL) or Demand Media–right in Yahoo’s wheelhouse, sources said it is actually training its attention on, drum roll, commerce.

That would be local commerce, most specifically, innovative companies such as the hot start-up Groupon, which dominates social couponing across cities globally.

Sources said Yahoo (YHOO) has been eyeing it for possible acquisition, which would put it smack dab in the hot space around local purchasing and consumer information.

Such a deal is far from done, and Groupon investors have expressed a desire to stay independent many times.

In any case, it is an interesting shift for Yahoo, which–after a lot of executive turmoil–could use something interesting right about now.

The Internet giant, as well as Google (GOOG), had looked at social reviews site Yelp for purchase previously, and everyone is watching Groupon’s quick progress.

Sources close to the situation said that Yahoo execs involved in the strategy think of such efforts as content, providing its users with relevancy and also definite benefits.

In addition, these kinds of sites are profitable and increasing in revenue–think accretive!–and also fast-growing, which Yahoo desperately needs.

They’re also expensive, with Groupon recently garnering a valuation of well above $1 billion in a massive venture funding.

That means Yahoo might have to pay much more, up to $2 billion. It certainly has more than enough cash on hand and, of course, has its moribund stock. Yahoo has a market cap of $19.5 billion.

Groupon has been buying up companies in the U.S. and internationally with that cash, trying to solidify itself as the dominant player.

Such a move would be bold for Yahoo, which it has lacked in its merger and acquisition strategies over the years, as others like Google have bought big properties such as YouTube.

Yahoo almost bought the massive online video site, as well as Facebook, many years ago.

It also tried, and failed, to buy Foursquare, the social check-in start-up, recently.

A Mixed Bag From the New York Times: Q2 Costs Got Better, Ads Got Worse, and Web Dollars Disappeared

Peter Kafka — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:00:07 +0000

We saw a mini-rally in newspaper shares yesterday, based on the hopeful notion that the worst may be over for the industry. Now investors are going nuts for the New York Times (NYT), at least in early trading, based on its Q2 results. But I think the results are a mixed bag.

The publisher was able to take a big chunk out of operating costs, knocking them down 20 percent. But revenue fell faster. The paper did say, though, that things got less bad as the quarter progressed, and that they’ll get slightly less bad next quarter, too.

The numbers: After factoring out one-time charges and benefits, the Times posted earnings of eight cents per share, well above the four-cent loss the Street was expecting. But revenue dropped 21 percent, to $585 million; the consensus was $603 million.

The Times posted an operating profit of $23.3 million; without one-time charges that number would have been $66.1 million. That’s worse than the $100 million the paper made a year ago, but much better than the $74.5 million it lost (net) in Q1.

But! Ad revenue declined 30.2 percent, an acceleration from last quarter’s 28 percent drop. In addition to the regular culprits, the Times noted a “lower volume of online advertising.” More details on that: Internet revenue dropped a shocking 14.3 percent, and Internet ad revenue was down 15.5 percent; last quarter they were down 5.6 percent and 6.1 percent.

The assessment from Times CEO Janet Robinson:

Based on what we have seen so far in July, we expect the advertising environment to continue to be challenging. We believe the rate of decline will moderate slightly in the third quarter from what we experienced in the second quarter.

As we look ahead, an enduring constant is the outstanding journalism of The New York Times Company and the esteem in which it is held by our readers. For the balance of the year, we are focused on developing innovative new products and platforms based on our high-quality journalism, particularly in the digital area, and continuing to aggressively lower our cost base to better align it with our revenues. When the economy and ad markets improve, we believe we will be very well positioned to benefit from the restructuring of our business.

Friending Without Benefits? But Facebook Keeps On Forging Into the Mobile Market!

Kara Swisher — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:00:42 +0000

In an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about an alliance being discussed between Facebook and Nokia, came news about the pair working on a deal to deeply integrate the hot social network with the handsets of the world’s largest maker of mobile phones.

Although BoomTown has seen this movie before–a similar mobile deal with a Nokia (NOK) investment in Facebook was being bandied about a year ago–expect more noise than ever when it comes to social-networking sites and mobile devices in 2009.

As you can see from the chart below, Facebook ran past MySpace in the number of unique visitors via mobile phone in the early fall of 2008 and kept climbing.

Said the Journal article: “In December, Facebook had seven million U.S. mobile users, compared with MySpace’s 5.7 million, according to Nielsen Co.” (Full disclosure: MySpace is owned by News Corp. (NWS), which also owns Dow Jones, the owner of this site.)

And, indeed, to get this kind of traction, Facebook has been very busy ferreting away to get a presence on all the big cellphone makers, so far mostly by building its popular Facebook application for smartphones like the BlackBerry from Research in Motion (RIMM) and iPhone from Apple (AAPL).

Facebook–the Journal piece said–has also been talking to Palm (PALM), which will launch its new Pre smartphone in the spring, and Motorola (MOT), about being integrated into their operating systems too.

The race to be present on mobile devices by everyone and their Internet mother has gotten all hopped up with the introduction of so many smartphones of late, since these devices make any Web app experience much better.

And consumer uptake of these kinds of phones, with big screens and multitouch capabilities, is widely expected to dramatically increase over the next five years,

But here is the dicey money–or nonmoney, actually–quote from the article:

“As with most of the cellphone-software industry, Facebook has yet to find a way to generate meaningful revenue from its mobile services, which include text-messaging features, a mobile Web site and downloadable software. But the number of users accessing its site from phones has grown.”

Oh dear–that roughly translates in Facebook-speak to friending without benefits, with costs rising without much (or any) revenue coming in, to speak of.

Of course, many would argue that both Facebook and MySpace, as well other big players, have to still play hard in the mobile market to gain users–given that consumers are on the move more than ever, digitally-speaking–even if it takes a while to see financial results.

So while efforts by mobile advertising services, such as AdMob, are trying to make that happen and are definitely promising, it’s still a game of growth and not revenue or, of course, profits.

[T-shirt image, courtesy of Zazzle.]

Macworld Announces Unexpected Jobs Loss

John Paczkowski — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 19:00:12 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]