Jay van Zyl, co-founder and joint CEO of Rubico Products, the Business Components Company, comments:
"The `should we` - `shouldn`t we` go e-business debate should be long dead by now despite all the dot-coms that have bombed this year. Certainly there are companies that have put on the brakes as far as e-business is concerned because of negative market sentiment, but I believe they are very misguided.
"According to a recent Forrester Research study online business trade is rocketing toward 2.7 trillion dollars in 2004 - and that is just in the US. This is giving rise to new dynamic pricing models, collaboration technologies and eMarketplaces. No South African company can afford to be out of such a trading loop even if their markets are exclusively SA-based.
"E-business should not be a debate. It is something that all companies should be considering. They need to ensure they understand how to use the Internet effectively to improve business processes, develop strategies to integrate their e-business technologies with legacy systems and discover ways to use the Internet to achieve the a competitive edge.
"E-business is still a valid business model that will form a critical and integral part of a company`s core business processes. The key words are `integral` and `part`. E-business is not an all or nothing decision. The Internet is just one channel to reach customers. It is not the only channel and, in many cases, it may not even be the biggest channel.
"What South African companies need to do now is see what those e-businesses that haven`t made it to date did wrong. I think they`ll find that the main reason is that they treated e-business as totally separate to their core business processes. It was not an integrated part of the whole process. It even had a separate management team in most cases.
"You can equate what has happened in e-business to the quality drives of the 1980s. The initial thinking was to set up a separate quality control team and your quality problems were over. Of course it didn`t work. Quality had to be integrated, and you needed total quality management to prevent defects at source rather than discover them when it was too late.
"Companies viewing their e-business options must also bear in mind emerging Internet based e-business paradigms. Web services, for example, are the new building blocks for e-businesses where companies will be able to `create` their own Web-based applications from available components.
"South African developers are now beginning to role out Web Services, so companies need to ensure they have the infrastructures in place to leverage this development. AMR Research says companies that embrace Web services will leapfrog their competition by being able to accelerate e-business infrastructure deployment and reduce total cost of ownership."
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Rubico delivers large-scale, mission critical business solutions for unique needs via a set of reusable components - a solutions development approach which GartnerGroup predicts will account for 70% of applications delivery by 2003. The company`s key market focus is the financial services sector, but it has delivered solutions across a wide range of industries.
Rubico`s clients include Sanlam, Bankfin, JD Group and Metropolitan. It has appointed local and international, value-added resellers as its main channel to market. For revenue growth, the company is looking for 80% of sales to be generated overseas by 2004.
The company has 180 staff members, 80% of whom are directly involved in product creation. Of these, two-thirds are business consultants - experts in fields other than IT, as delivering the Rubico solution never requires writing code.
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