Current Practice Segments
Industry Focus - The Multi-Billion Dollar Pet Industry
Our current initiatives have the common theme of community development and pet interaction, primarily dogs.
The pet industry has been growing steadily and impressively over the past 3-5 years with a total market estimated at approximately $US40.8 billion, which is up from $US35.8 billion, in 2006.
The Silicon Valley has many creative, entrepreneurial "pet people" that have been looking for a way to bring their great ideas to market. A surprising number of pet product retailers and pet service providers have sprung up, not only locally but nationally and internationally.
This industry divides into several product and service segments. We are currently involved in the following:
Consumer Focus - Evolving How we Serve Customers and How we Market to Customers
With a slow economy, the time is right for shifts in consumer demand. The environment and energy costs weigh heavy on every tax payer and income earner in this country. Entire communities have been uprooted because of the mortgage meltdown. Consumers are pinching their pennies like never before, yet certain expenses are unavoidable. Then, there's the grey area - most of us still have a travel budget but it may be greatly reduced an we may be changing our vacation plans.
While we may be less flexible in roaming, communication tools are evolving. The world can come to us thanks to the internet's very real impact on telecommuncations, entertainment, purchasing, and, ultimately on the way we socialize. This creates new marketing opportunities and new ways of building bundles of services to consumers. Accron Group has been studying this evolution for some time and is analyzing acquisition opportunities that will bring some of our findings to life.
'Nuff said, for now.
Enterprise Focus - Internet Technology's Service-Oriented Architecture
(areas under analysis)
How the Network Relieves Application Management
Enterprises have a major problem in the data center. Applications continue to demand more infrastructure. Integrating disparate applications across the network requires expensive adapter technology and professional services.
A new architecture has been discussed for a long time in which the capabilities that applications provide are viewed as services. And these services are required by enterprise consumers at varying levels of urgency. This new architecture, a Service-Oriented Architecture (or SOA), can potentially require applications to be developed very differently from the way they are developed and distributed today. Technology implications and, ultimately, impact on the enterprise, can be dramatic. SOA in your enterprise information management system can dramatically reduce infrastructure requirements and therefore reduce opex. It can also minimize capex moving forward.
Our team of systems and solutions architects, and our industry alliance partners, have been on the cutting edge of this issue for many years, can help your enterprise think through a controlled evolution to this new model, and can help you acquire and rollout additional equipment or upgrade your current equipment and systems to enable you to scale your business while getting more from your current IT investment.
For those who are more familiar with latest SOA developments, middleware solutions, appliances and servers have been the typical way of providing management at the message level. Recent developments now make it possible for the network itself to be "message aware." Networks now have the ability to not only process data packets but also to process entire messages, thereby off-loading some application and middleware burdens like protocol translation, xml acceleration, transformation, visibility, message-level security, and web services. Our current areas of involvement include:
- Business case articulation
- Enterprise use case development
- Advising on equipment and personnel requirements
The Rising Need for Technology in Healthcare
According to Census data from the US Census bureau (published as
CPU09-02, on
January 23, 2009), Health Care and Social Assistance revenue is increasing in a time where there are sharp decreases in other key areas of the economy such as wholesale and distribution, and retail and food services. Even at the top level indicator of US Business Total Business Sales (released on January 15th, 2009) shows a sharp decrease in productivity across the nation.
Yet, in the same period, the US Census Bureau points to a rising trend in Healthcare. Furthermore, a new government in Washington, D.C, is prioritizing the improvement of healthcare with the use of technology.
Specifically, the US Census bureau states:
"Overall, health care and social assistance revenue increased 6.8 percent in 2007 to $1.66 trillion, up from $1.56 trillion in 2006. Revenue for continuing care retirement communities grew 10.1 percent to $20 billion. Revenue for hospitals grew 6.5 percent in 2007 to $687 billion. Revenue for physicians’ offices increased 5.6 percent to $346 billion and revenue for dentists’ offices increased 6.5 percent to $94 billion.
These tabulations, and more, come from the 2007 Service Annual Survey: Health Care and Social Assistance, which focuses on health care and social assistance providers for individuals, and gives estimates and sources of revenue for businesses with paid employees."
Accron Group is evaluating partnerships to address emerging needs in small to medium sized healthcare operations.
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