Case of Orateme Inc
Problem: In January 2012 the board of directors of Orateme has to decide what would be the best use to invest the company’s financial resources.
Alternatives: During the meeting that took place on January 13th 2012, the board identified a few alternatives: 1) Leverage the current job boards to appropriate client associations, providing access to the network of associations and their respective members e.g. Nursing cheer network (David Flowers, current President). 2) Getting more serious with continuing education (CE) on the web even though there are some doubts regarding the future possibilities in terms of the large players that are already in the market, and it might take several years to develop a competitive product (Karolynn Matheson, Vice President of Operations). 3) Investing in managing content that is a burgeoning market opportunity since has no market penetration in the association market; I.e. webMD (Ramesh Visnaramathan ,Vice President of Engineering). 4) Waiting one additional year and hope that there will be more market place stability (John Bushel, Controller).
Recommendation: Our group agrees with the alternative identified by Karolynn Matheson. She underlined the fact that CE has become a mature market, a $4 billion market that currently delivers almost one percent (1%) of all of its content online. Researches found out that this market is highly segmented with third party players offering alternatives opportunities and solutions. The actual players are competing with the associations rather than collaborating with them (e.g. legal and accounting). The idea is to combine the benefit for Orateme and for those associations. It may take several years in order to develop a competitive product and a suggestion would be to collaborate with a smaller industry player or to directly acquire it in order to get at least 1 percent (1%) of the CE market, sharing a half of that 1 percent (1%) with a partner will not be a problem.
Rationale
Market & Customers:
Alternatives: During the meeting that took place on January 13th 2012, the board identified a few alternatives: 1) Leverage the current job boards to appropriate client associations, providing access to the network of associations and their respective members e.g. Nursing cheer network (David Flowers, current President). 2) Getting more serious with continuing education (CE) on the web even though there are some doubts regarding the future possibilities in terms of the large players that are already in the market, and it might take several years to develop a competitive product (Karolynn Matheson, Vice President of Operations). 3) Investing in managing content that is a burgeoning market opportunity since has no market penetration in the association market; I.e. webMD (Ramesh Visnaramathan ,Vice President of Engineering). 4) Waiting one additional year and hope that there will be more market place stability (John Bushel, Controller).
Recommendation: Our group agrees with the alternative identified by Karolynn Matheson. She underlined the fact that CE has become a mature market, a $4 billion market that currently delivers almost one percent (1%) of all of its content online. Researches found out that this market is highly segmented with third party players offering alternatives opportunities and solutions. The actual players are competing with the associations rather than collaborating with them (e.g. legal and accounting). The idea is to combine the benefit for Orateme and for those associations. It may take several years in order to develop a competitive product and a suggestion would be to collaborate with a smaller industry player or to directly acquire it in order to get at least 1 percent (1%) of the CE market, sharing a half of that 1 percent (1%) with a partner will not be a problem.
Rationale
Market & Customers: