Peaceful,
Whether FNTN is involved in E- Commerce, depends on the definition of
E-Commerce. If E-Commerce is defined, as just including business
to consumer transactions, perhaps you're on target, (although it's FNTN's intent to also connect the individual investor to their member broker-dealers,
and mutual funds), but if the definition of E-commerce includes business to
business transactions, FNTN is definitely involved with E-commerce
(broker-dealers to mutual funds).
A recent article addresses the definition of E-Commerce:
November 16, 1998
E-BUSINESS CLICK ON PROFIT -- ELECTRONIC COMMERCE
REACHES BEYOND SIMPLE TRANSACTIONS. IT'S A WHOLE NEW
WAY OF DOING BUSINESS.
Peter Jordan
techweb.com
Several quotes from the article:
1. What Is E-Biz?
"Although its more visible practitioners are the business-to-consumer
Web marketeers, such as Amazon.com and Priceline.com, e-commerce
means more than just consumer sales over the Internet: It's the
automation of any business-to-business or consumer-to-business
relationship."
2. Defining e-commerce as "the enablement of trade between companies
through electronic means," Stacie McCullough, a Forrester analyst,
agrees that the low cost, simplicity and ubiquity of the Internet are
driving the e-commerce explosion: "With traditional EDI, it was
tremendously expensive to do cross-company collaboration. The Internet
brought this wave of enablement by making information and
communication accessible, and has driven this new era of the boom in
commerce during the past two years."
Business-to-business e-commerce activity-which in most cases means
extranets over the Internet-is far more significant than the more visible
business-to-consumer sales activity, says McCullough. "In looking at
how companies are going to be doing business, we believe extranets
will be the dominant trade medium. That's where we see the value in
e-commerce-they can share information that's not readily accessible
to the open market."
Although Forrester predicts business-to-consumer e-commerce activity
to grow at only 9 percent a year, the extranet spending at a typical
Fortune 1000 company is growing at an extraordinary pace, from
$200,000 annually today to some $5 million a year by 2002, says
McCullough.
3. When asked which businesses are VAR targets for an e-commerce
sale, "everybody" is the answer of Alyse Terhune, research director
for the e-commerce and extranet application service of Gartner Group
Inc., a Stamford, Conn., research firm.
"Our client base is primarily the Fortune 1000 in all industries," Terhune
says. "They call us because they're launching a huge number of e-commerce
initiatives; chief among them is customer self-service."
Industries with information as a key component of their product such as
publishing and financial services will have to move faster than others, she
says, but everyone will eventually engage in some form of e-commerce."
Regards,
Streetwise |
