Weaving a digital web

IT portal Digital Planet has operated in the local Web sphere for nine years. Founded by Neil Watson and Mark Levy in 1999, the company today has both business-to-business and business-to-consumer offerings.

The better known part of its offering, the Digital Planet Web site, is an online retail portal offering a vast range of IT products for sale. The company's business-to-business division, Digital Enterprise, provides a procurement system called e-Procure, which customers use to manage their IT procurement. Digital Planet centrally switches the transactions generated by e-Procure.

"It's very much a back-end tool," says Watson. "We have acquired numerous large customers over the years, although sales cycles tend to be slow."

Naturally, Digital Planet's business is very much driven by its IT systems. The operations on the online retail side can be divided into three operational areas: pre-sales, sales and post-sales. Pre-sales relates to the site itself, including content and catalogue updating.

"This is one unit of the Digital Planet network and all work done is Web-based," says Watson.

Sales refers to sales transactions completed both on the site and via the call centre. Customers can place online or telephone orders, says Watson, noting that the company decided to "get both sides of the market".

Post-sales includes the operational side of the business, including warehousing and dispatch. As an online enterprise, which is constantly expanding its operations, Watson says Digital Planet has ongoing problems regarding having enough physical space in which to operate.

"We were having problems with people spending hours sitting in traffic, so we made the decision to spread the operation. This has resulted in less time wasted by, for example, senior developers taking four hours and a day to get to and from Pretoria; it has also increased staff satisfaction and reduced some of the physical space problems."

The company's distributed operations are supported by its network, which facilitates development work, internal IT requirements, marketing needs, e-mail activities (both operational and marketing-driven) and its call centre. Digital Planet's development team has also been completely virtualised.

Says Watson: "We develop our own products and are constantly developing our sites. All of our employed developers work from home, and outsourced developers work from their respective offices. The developers built VPN into the system. Version control ensures the servers (inside and outside the Digital Planet LAN) contain the same information."

Version control ensures that the servers (inside and outside the LAN) contain the same information.

Neil Watson, director and co-founder, Digital Planet

The company's production servers and live servers are all hosted off-site at Internet Solutions and linked into the VPN. The central e-Procure server is also hosted there, although Watson says that for some large customers, servers are hosted on local intranets. Digital Planet's internal IT (for want of a more elegant phrase) is outsourced to Netsurit, which remotely manages said systems.

From a marketing perspective (in this case, referring to site maintenance, product catalogue maintenance and site promotions), marketing team members can upload content to its live servers from anywhere at any time, whether from the office during business hours or from home after-hours.

"We send out a ton of e-mail on a weekly basis," says Watson, "and the fees charged by local service providers are exorbitant."

As a result, Digital Planet uses a Canadian company that sends out its e-mail newsletters and other electronic mailers on a weekly basis. The service provider maintains Digital Planet's databases and handles distribution.

"Marketing creates a mailer, uploads it to the servers in Canada and the service provider mails it to the relevant database," says Watson.

Digital Planet uses least-cost routing as well as VOIP (via an Asterisk solution) in its call centre, which handles call-in orders, queries on orders already placed and switchboard duty.

"We have four ADSL lines and some 3G connections," says Watson. "The call centre gets one of those ADSL lines."

The 15 agents in the centre handle call volumes of between 12 000 and 15 000 calls per month, he adds.

Watson says Digital Planet is searching for a larger warehouse; its current facility is housed in the same building as its head office, and just isn't big enough.

"Our biggest problem is with back orders, so we're moving all fast-moving items into stock. Over time, we want to dissect the business and spread it out," he states.

"The whole system is Web-based, so we can do anything from anywhere. However, I don't think it will be realistic for us to move the call centre 'home' in the short-term; as broadband pricing gets better, maybe. You can't always guarantee the connection will be up or the quality good enough to handle a voice call, so for us this [technology] isn't there yet."