MERCEDES-BENZ USA:
INVESTING IN IT INFRASTRUCTURE

Question 1. How should Settle and his team evaluate the e-learning option? What factors should they consider when deciding between eLearning and traditional, classroom-based education?
Settle should evaluate the eLearning option based on the following principles for delivering value:
(1) Have a clearly defined portfolio value management process. In the case, Settle has had a basically financial budget already. There are two vendors that clearly listed to choose, one is RealServer, and the other is Microsoft.
(2) Aim for chunks of value. ELearning would enable MBUSA to scale its training systems without building additional training facilities. It improves employee productivity by …show more content…

The cost associated with a Real Networks is paid as a royalty to Real Networks for using its encoding and decoding protocols, or “codec”. MBUSA did not have any hands-on experience with the RealServer, so it did not have any information as to the total costs of ownership for a system based on it. Differently from RealServer, MBUSA had significant experience with Microsoft technologies. MBUS estimated the total cost of ownership for Windows 2000 to be $4,000 for a multi-purpose Intel-based server and $1,000 for Microsoft Windows 2000 Server. Thus, stand on the point of cost effective to deploy and management, Microsoft is a better choice.
(2) Simple to integrate with the Web-based training application. Real Networks was selling version 7 of RealOne, which was worldwide using to deliver streaming media. RealServer implementation included the media server software, the supporting hardware platform from Sun Microsystems and the licensing fees for each stream delivered. Microsoft integrated all its technologies as a standard feature of the Windows 2000 server. Besides, MBUSA ran more than 50 Windows 2000 servers in its data centers for a variety of applications. Therefore, Microsoft’s technology is simpler to integrate with the Web-based training application.
(3) Easy and fast for technicians to use. MBUSA never apply with RealOne Player before, while it had standardized the personal computers at the dealerships and internally on the