Recent News

According to a recent story in the Dow Jones Newswires, companies are saving money by doing business online. Their article, which was taken from the AP Newswires, read in part:

Cisco Systems saved $250 million last year distributing software to its business customers over the Internet. US banks saved $18 billion with online transactions. General Electric has lowered supplier costs by using online auctions.

The savings provided by E-Commerce are starting to add up.

A study released in early August by Giga Information Group predicts that corporations around the world will save up to $1.25 trillion--close to France's entire gross domestic product--doing business over the Internet by 2002.

Those savings range from reducing the number of people it takes to process a sales request to making it easier and less expensive to order office supplies online.

"Everything we do here is Internet business," said Cisco executive vice president Don Listwin.

That's partly because Cicso's customers are all companies that want to do business online. But Cisco also practices what it sells, conducting its own in-house business online as well.

For example, Cisco employees sign up for benefits online. Eighty percent of technical inquiries from customers are handled online. The company saved $8 million last year by recruiting and accepting job applications online.

Listwin said the paperless transactions that save money for Cisco and its customers are easily transferable to most other businesses.

"We don't have anything that's unique, that the market can't generally get at," he said. "What's unique is that our corporate culture accepts that we are conducting business online."

According to Andrew Bartels, a vice president of Giga Information Group, most money saved by using the Internet comes business to business, from internal processes, or from finances, procurement, or human resources. This money is often reinvested internally, helping pay for the Internet programmers and infrastructure that allows the companies to conduct E-Commerce effectively.

"Internet sales are just the tip of the iceberg of economic value that companies can derive from E-Commerce," he added. "Companies should consider E-Commerce as more than a way to sell products or services, they should focus at least as much attention on the business efficiencies and cost-savings opportunities presented by the Internet and related technologies."