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To: TechMkt who wrote (138460)	8/4/1999 11:33:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 176387

*** E-Commerce Means Businesses' Savings...FYI <<By MARTHA MENDOZA AP Business Writer wednesday August 4 8:00 PM ET SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Cisco Systems saved $250 million last year distributing software to its business customers over the Internet. U.S. 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 new study being released Thursday 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 amount 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 Cisco'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.'' Kevin Brown, director of marketing for Inktomi Corp. (Nasdaq:INKT - news), which creates search engines for Internet companies such as Yahoo! Inc., said the company Web site saves them money by allowing potential customers to review marketing information online. ''People championing our products at their company are armed with white papers, diagrams and demos they can show their management team,'' he said. Internet analysts at Giga say that just as the telephone affected more than communications and jet airplanes affected more than travel, the Internet will continue to drive significant changes in the way industrialized nations do business. ''The Internet is more than just a new way to sell products and services, it's a way to efficiently run a business, resulting in significant cost savings that add to an organization's bottom line,'' said Andrew Bartels, a Giga vice president. Bartels said that for the most part, the savings are business to business, on internal processes, finances, procurement or human resources. Money that companies save from changing their business ways is often reinvested internally, helping pay for the Internet programmers and establish the infrastructure that allows the companies to conduct e-commerce effectively. In some cases the savings are trickling down to consumers who can find some lower prices online, Bartels said. ''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.''>>