Established, traditional companies are more successful at e-commerce than many dot.com start-ups.
This is the finding of independent research by the London School of Economics (LSE) and E-Audits, a UK based Internet research company. The report surveyed the world's 100 fastest growing companies as defined by Deloitte Consulting/Braxton Associates, and analysed their e-commerce and e-business offerings through their Web sites.
"The world's largest, best-established 'brick and mortar' organisations have proved themselves to be better performers than smaller, emerging companies in applying themselves to e-business. Many high-flying dot.com companies have failed to pass the starting point.
"Large companies (with over $10 billion in sales) have more sophisticated and innovative e-business capabilities than smaller ones (under $1 billion)," quotes the report.
"These findings are not surprising," says Ralf Boes, product manager: e-commerce at SAP Africa. "In the race to the Web and to stake their claim in new territories, companies often neglect IT infrastructure, with negative results.
"Sophisticated and powerful enterprise resource planning platforms, already implemented by many traditional companies, are vital to true e-commerce. Once this strategic platform is in place, providing real-time, on-line information about the business, the stage is set for a fairly easy transition into e-commerce."
SAP offers existing SAP enterprise customers a natural progression into the world of e-commerce via its Internet strategy, mySAP.com.
"SAP business solutions have enabled integration within thousands of single organisations: now mySAP.com delivers collaboration to entire markets by spanning enterprise boundaries," says Boes. "mySAP.com is the e-business platform for the new world, which unleashes the ultimate power of the Internet: people in different enterprises and their customers working together as one.
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mySAP.com
mySAP.com is the Internet solution that connects employees, customers, suppliers and business partners as if they were all in one company.
mySAP.com is the open, collaborative Internet solution for the new world, ready today to unleash the ultimate power of the Internet: People in different enterprises and their customers working together as one.
SAP business solutions have enabled integration within thousands of single organisations: now mySAP.com delivers collaboration to entire markets by spanning enterprise boundaries.
This new way of doing business is called collaborative business (c-business).
c-business enhances service while offering new business opportunities, eliminating costs, and delivering real-time satisfaction for all concerned.
mySAP.com delivers these benefits through four key elements:
- mySAP.com Marketplaces are business hubs on the Internet that provide a collaboration infrastructure for c-business. Hosted application suites provide c-business solutions. Dedicated communities help organisations quickly find products and services and join their customers, suppliers and business partners in c-business processes.
- mySAP.com Workplaces are ent erprise portals for empowering all the employees, customers, suppliers and partners of a company. They enjoy a highly personalised, single point of Web-access to everything they need in their business role to get the job done easily.
- mySAP.com Business Scenarios combine intra- and inter-enterprise services, information and application components. These form collaborative business scenarios in the areas of e-Commerce, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Resource Management.
- mySAP.com Application Hosting reduces the risk, time and investment needed to participate in c-business.
An application service provider ensures a whole software solution or parts of it are provided to a company as a service over the Internet - the enterprise does not need run the software itself and consequently saves investments in hardware, maintenance, and system management.
mySAP.com is built on the Internet-Business Framework, which provides an open solution architecture with the flexibility, scalability, performance and robustness essential to serve as a reliable integration platform, especially across enterprise boundaries.