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FRIDAY JUNE 5 1998ÿÿComputingÿ
INTERNET: Company use to surge
By Paul Taylor in London
Use of the internet and internet technologies by European businesses is set to surge over the next few years as companies adopt internet protocol (IP) services and applications for electronic commerce and other business activities, says a report published by Schema, the London-based IT consultancy.
"The dramatic growth of the internet represents the fastest ever take-up of new technology," said Robin Duke-Woolley, the report's author.
Some 2.6m companies - or roughly a third of the total in Europe - are using IP services on the internet, in their corporate intranets or in extended extranets, according to the report. This usage is spread over 4.1m business sites or about a quarter of the total, but within five years this usage will have more than doubled with 10.6m corporate sites using internet technologies for a wide range of business applications.
The main corporate use of IP services is for messaging, web surfing and information retrieval, but within three years 46 per cent of companies will be using IP services for e-commerce, says the report which is based on a pan-European survey of more than 500 companies.
"The rapid growth in the use of IP services will also see a substantial change in the mix of real time and non-real time [or off-line] applications," said the report.
By 2003, the report suggests, 3m companies will be engaged in e-commerce, up from around 250,000 today, and electronic trading will account for almost a quarter of their revenues.
In addition, almost 40 per cent of companies will be using internet technologies for transaction-orientated process applications, 21 per cent for IP telephony and 16 per cent real time video.
This surge in the corporate use of internet technologies will also be reflected in the traffic on company networks, and the internet. Corporate network data traffic is expected to be five times greater than voice traffic in five years, and IP traffic will represent 75 per cent of this. Business user on-line traffic on the public switched telephone networks, which totals around 51bn minutes a year, will jump to 298bn minutes a year by 2003, while IP traffic on leased lines will grow by 2500 per cent.
Meanwhile, Schema predicts that revenues from IP telephony on managed IP networks for international calls will grow to about $2.5bn as companies seize the opportunity to cut their telecoms costs using intranet telephony.
At the same time Schema predicts that residential internet subscriptions will grow from 6.3m to 30m by 2003, with the fastest percentage growth coming in Spain, Italy and France. In part this reflects the rapid development of local language web sites. "By the turn of the century growth rates in Europe will be faster than those in the US," says Mr Duke-Woolley. 'Communications in the Internet Era: The Market for IP-based Services in Europe'. Available from Schema, +44 (0)171 497 0708>>>> |
