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Strategies & Market Trends : e-Commerce the Next 100 Months...... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AugustWest who wrote (1560)	9/24/1998 7:15:00 PM
From: cm	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2882

Well, Well, Well, The Usual Suspects I See... Guys, I just got back from PLANET 98, the supply chain summit and user conference for i2 Technologies, the leader in that space. Kevin Rollins, Vice Chairman of Dell, which is an ITWO customer, talked about how, thanks to better supply chain management, they've cut inventory from an average of 30 days to an average of 6 days. Now, that ain't e-commerce, it's e-business, linking up with all your up and downstream partners BY THE WEB. Met with a senior IT guy at J. P. Stevens, the huge textile company. They're soon to launch what they call an "e-commerce" but is really an e-business initiative... building extranets for their key retail and distribution partners to facilitate purchases, etc. Saw Larry Ellison's address in which he said, rather matter of factly, that the Web IS EVERYTHING... not just something... BUT EVERYTHING. Saw a guy named Nigel Ball of Hewlett-Packard talk about their relatively new product initiative called WebQofS... or Web Quality of Service... a family of hardware and software solutions that, among other things... *Sorts an e-commerce site's web traffic into KNOWN BUYERS (based on prior visits and cookies) and SURFERS, etc. After all, you don't want your known buyers to have to wait in long queues. * Gives site visitors a message about current traffic to a VERY BUSY site... giving them the option of coming back in 30 seconds... and perhaps an incentive (some small premium) to do so. Got a working demo of ITWO's new e-BPO or E-Business Process Optimization products and philosophy. They're now taking all their decision support, knowledge management and planning capabilities---honed in multi-enterprise supply chain management--and applying them to ALL OF AN ENTERPRISE'S BUSINESS PROCESSES... including marketing, product planning, sales, and financials. Again, these are more properly e-business offerings than e-commerce per se. But, some of their software is now or will soon be used by Amazon.com. Saw a demo today of John Scully's Live Technologies banner ad product. They're in a quiet period before a planned IPO... which seems to get put off depending upon how tricky the market looks. This banner technology enables the "viewer" to pan through a scene... as if operating a camera... and look, say, at a TV on a mantle in a living room in a house that's along the ocean. You can "pan" into the TV and see a commercial and even click on the commercial and get more information. All in the size of banner ad. And workable without fancy client side capabilities like Java... workable even through a lame 14.4 modem. They're already doing rather interesting banner work for PLAYBOY... as one MIGHT be able to imagine. And a little e-commerce PC client of ours---now averaging a meager 30 units in sales a day (which isn't all that bad, all things considered)---has discovered that their order entry costs aren't just 1/8th of what they would be if they were taking phone orders. They're 1/10th. The Web IS everything. It's almost impossible to over-hype it. Best Regards, c m