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Andrew S. Grove DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: What I would like to talk to you about today is e-Business, e-Business economics and, later, about some of the issues companies all over the world face in the process of implementing e-Business. One of the basic beliefs that we have at Intel, and a lot of our partners in industry have, is that in some years' time there won't be any such thing as an Internet company. There will be companies that use the Internet in part of their business operations, or they won't be existing as viable, energetic companies operating in the world commerce. If you would like to put this into perspective, companies that ended up using the telegraph some years after the introduction of the telegraph weren't called telegraph companies -- they were just called companies. Companies that were relying on the telephone for their business weren't called telephone companies -- they were just called companies. And the Internet, in its essential, is a communication technology, business technology, much the same as the telegraph and the telephone were in their ages. But I would like to support this thesis by showing you a few pieces of data, and I apologize because the only data that I could put my hands on is based on the United States commerce department survey of US-based phenomena. This chart shows two things; the yellow line on the top shows the total US GDP today and projected in the years to come. The blue line below shows the portion of the total GDP that is and is expected to be done by e-commerce, e-business fashion. Now, I want to call your attention to this. This is a semilog chart. Each division represents a tenfold change in magnitude. So if I can direct your attention to 1999 -- when you look at 1999, you notice that we are two divisions below the yellow line with the blue, corresponding to the observation that 1% of the total US GDP is conducted by e-commerce way. I don't know how accurate this data is. It's very difficult to get a hold of data on an economy as large and as diverse in the US and put meaningful statistical information on it. But I'm comparing that with the data shown on this chart, which is Intel's e-commerce revenue, the portion of Intel's revenue that's conducted by electronic means, and I'm pretty comfortable with the data shown here. And this shows that in 1997, zero of our total revenues were conducted by e-commerce. By 1998, 28% of our revenues were conducted by e-commerce. In 1999, we estimate that over 40% of our revenues are going to be e-commerce revenues. Let's put this in perspective. Intel is a 25 to 30 billion dollar company. Forty percent of our revenue is accounted by 12 to 14 billion dollars of e-commerce a year. If you compare that with the hundred billion dollar e-commerce data from the previous charts for all of the US economy, you would draw the conclusion that Intel represents 12% to 14% of the US based e-commerce totality, and I think that is very unlikely. And since I'm very comfortable with the Intel data and not as comfortable with the US data, you can draw the conclusion that the US e-commerce data that I showed you is, if anything, significantly understated. So this is a strong and growing phenomenon. And phenomena like this, when they are this strong and growing this rapidly, have very important business rationale driving them. And the business rationales are that e-commerce is extremely favorable for both sellers and buyers. Why? It is very attractive to buyers because trading on a worldwide electronic network makes the trading process as efficient as the most efficient of all markets, which is the stock market. Just think about it: stocks today are increased and traded on a worldwide electronic market, available with information available almost instantaneously to all participants of that marketplace around the world. In a similar fashion, e-commerce makes information about products of all kinds available to customers around the world on a comparable fashion at the same time. So you will see techniques of the stock market being applied increasingly to the trading of goods and services of completely different kinds. It's attractive to buyers because it renders the market very, very efficient. It is also attractive to sellers because it provides tremendous internal efficiencies in the operation of businesses and efficiencies that we will illustrate later as we go on. The attractiveness of the e-commerce to businesses can be captured by us going back and considering what the value of businesses really is about. No matter what valuations do on a day-to-day basis, the value of businesses can be captured in the formula that the value of any enterprise can be captured by -- discounted cash flow of all future business. This future discounted cash flow means cash flow of this year, next year, and the year after this to the present value. That reality remains -- stock market fluctuations notwithstanding -- day in and day out. What does e-commerce do to this formula? The use of e-business or e-commerce contributes two ways to the value of this discounted cash flow. It provides an uplift -- an increase in an external component -- and provides an uplift to an internal component. Consequently, through the combination of the wordings of e-commerce providing these added values, the sum total of this kind of cash flow and, therefore, the value for business, increases. It's a little abstract, so let me try to illustrate that a little bit more. An ordinary conventional traditional business -- let's call those bricks business because most businesses are built out of bricks and mortar. Building is under the management of able managers constantly trying to increase the area of the rectangle which represents the discounted cash flow, the arc under the curve -- and how do we do that? We work on constantly improving the internal operational efficiency of that business, moving that boundary out to the right, and at the same time we work on improving the reach of that business by marketing our products to territories where we haven't been, to customers that we haven't reached, and increasing the external component. These two means, moving the boundary out to the right and moving the boundary up, are applicable to businesses of all kinds, traditional brick businesses as well. In the last several years, we have seen emergence of a number of businesses that have sprung into existence without bricks. They rely on the click of a computer mouse, and, therefore, we're going to call them ‘click businesses.' Click businesses have a rectangle too; they have, or aspire to have, a discounted cash flow, but it predominantly relies on the ability of an Internet business to reach customers all over the world without physically having to find and reach and drag those customers into their business. But as these businesses mature, they too will start to work on operational efficiency and start to work in the horizontal direction increasing that rectangle, increasing the discounted cash flow by moving out to the right. Let me give you some real life illustrations of that. There are, according to published reports, between 60 and 100 million square feet of warehouse space under construction that will be added to the warehouse universe in the United States driven by the re-engineering, rebuilding of warehousing by Internet companies in the next four years. Much closer to home, Amazon.com, just one of the click companies that is working on its internal efficiency laboring to move that boundary to the right, is presently constructing two warehouses totaling over 700,000 square feet of space 20 miles out of London. But the real win is going to be when we take what bricks companies are good at and what clicks companies are good at, and we combine them by turning them into what a friend of ours in the industry, the co-CEO of Schwab Corporation, calls clicks and mortar companies; companies that are a hybrid of the bricks and clicks infrastructure and, therefore, are equally good at increasing their value, increasing their discounted cash flow, by moving out to the right and moving upward to the left. Companies like that are going to be inherently more competitive, at more advantage, and, therefore, more valuable than companies that only use one or the other of the means of increasing the area in that rectangle. This is a profound change for all businesses. And it is when profound changes like that in technology or in the ways of doing business sweep through the world, all companies are affected by what I like to call strategic inflection points -- a subtle point in the evolution of a business -- at which point businesses have a choice of taking aggressive action to exploit those changes and move on to higher plateaus, or not act and become increasingly marginalized as the technology is -- sweeps through the commerce and industry world and is taken advantage of by its competitors. I would like to use an example of a company that would be probably a perfect example of a bricks company that is aggressively moving to become a clicks and mortar company, and it is a remarkable -- it is remarkable only because it comes from -- it services a product, it produces and sells a product -- garden supplies -- that you would not associate with the high-tech universe at all. So let's take a look at this brief video showing the story of this company, WOLF Garten, a German company. (Video Presentation of WOLF Garten) DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Yesterday I had the opportunity of chatting with Mr. Gregor Wolf, the CEO of WOLF Garten, and he gave me an insight into what it took to implement the use of the Internet. It has not been an easy task. They have 6,000 dealers - most of them are very small companies that are not particularly technologically oriented - they are garden supply oriented, garden oriented. But what drives the dealers to venture into the world of technology, and what drives WOLF Garten to lead them into that direction, is a very important business problem. The garden supply business is just 20 weeks out of the year, because of the weather and the garden cycle. And any time there is no stock, it represents a lost sale. So there is a very important business need for instant information to be available to the dealers, and from the dealers to the supplier of the company. This turns into a real business advantage. And the Internet and Internet commerce, e-commerce, provide a very important solution to that. Mr. Wolf also told us a little bit about some of the difficulties that he had had to cope with in implementing e-commerce in his company, and that leads us to my next subject. I want to talk about what it takes to implement e-Business. And to take a complex process, at the risk of some over-simplification, I want to break it into three phases. The first phase represents building the infrastructure. The second phase represents the company adapting their business processes to take advantage of the infrastructure that was put in place in the first place; and the third phase is going beyond all that and exploiting the data and the feedback loops that have become possible through the implementation of the e-commerce infrastructure. Let's take these phases one at a time and examine them in a little bit more detail. I'm going to use Intel's internal example, Intel's own implementation of e-commerce and e-commerce infrastructure, as an illustration for Phase 1. The first thing that we have to do, which we actually started before the Internet has sprung on us and before we became aware of its potential, was re-engineering our back office processes and back office computer systems to be more modern and capable of handling the larger volumes our business growth dictated. That started in 1992 and was well on the way by 1994, 1995, when we became aware of the opportunities that the Internet provides in helping us tell our story to a customer base, i.e., in other words, help us in marketing messages. So we had two processes going simultaneously -- the re-engineering of the back office and the exportation of the Internet for marketing purposes. And in 1997, we saw the opportunity of bringing these two systems together, integrating them, and bringing them about as an e-commerce system. That was the internal task. But in a moment you start talking about e-commerce. By definition you are talking of bringing a system outside of the confines of the company; you have to involve your customers, you have to involve your dealers, and you have to involve your suppliers as well. So the task we had here was not very different than the task WOLF Garten encountered. Mr. Gregor Wolf has 6,000 dealers; we have 45,000 to 50,000 dealers worldwide. The large majority of them are small companies who may be technology adept at building computer systems, but not necessarily sophisticated in using advanced software systems. So we have to first convince them of the advantages of joining our system, help them configure the system, and bring them online. What happened, interestingly enough, is that once these customers and dealers came on to the Internet, when we went back to check up how they were doing and gather their input and feedback six months later, they were so enthusiastic that the roles got reversed where, six months earlier, we were leading the way and trying to persuade them to get started with us in the first place. Six months later, they were driving us and demanding new and advanced features in the system that they have already gotten used to and learned and wanted to go beyond with. That is what Phase 1 represents, and this is a brief description of it, a more advanced and more detailed story, along with some other cases, is provided on the website that I indicate on the screen. I urge you to call it up and study it because little tips from other people's experience may help you in your own processing implementation. Phase 2 involves -- is not an IT phenomenon. Phase 2 is a business process change, business process re-engineering, if you allow me to use that old cliche. It involves changing the way you do business to take advantage of what you have built in Phase 1. This is when the payoff starts, but Phase 2 involves very hard work because it involves change; it involves teaching the non-technological sophisticated -- or not necessarily the sophisticated - to use technology. Some of the benefits are obvious. When you automate the mundane tasks of business, like order entry processes, you bring about great deals of efficiency. Just to give you an example of a benchmark year. Before the implementation of the e-commerce infrastructure, it took us 15 minutes of work to enter a new order. After e-commerce, the 15 minutes became three minutes. That's a saving to Intel, but even more importantly, that is 12 minutes that the customer didn't have to spend hanging on the telephone talking to an Intel representative. That's the obvious one. But once you have the system, and once you put interdisciplinary themes together to take a look at the question of how you can modify your systems to take advantage of the new infrastructure, all kinds of surprising phenomena come your way. And I'll tell you one story about that. Intel provides a great deal of technical information about our products, instructions, and suggestions on how to use our products to our customers and update our product, because our products -- sometimes after you introduce them, you find problems with them, and we need to provide updates on how to work around those problems to our customers. All of this necessitates a large amount of documents that we generate electronically, print out, and physically deliver to our customers, because this is confidential information that's available only to the internal customer base. To give you a number; 142,000 confidential documents are generated by Intel each year. The means of delivery is, our field sales engineering force physically takes these documents and takes them to our customers and deposits them as the customer signs the receipt, takes the receipt back and documents, in a computerized database, of course, keys it in, that this particular customer got the latest update of the specifications. Once we had this system available for order entry, it was an electronic system that was perfectly capable and perfectly suitable of shooting out electronically-generated documents practically at the speed of light to our customer base, and because of customer database techniques, the recordkeeping came automatically with the delivery of the documents. Obviously it was a much more superior system, but the further the customer was from an Intel location, the more advantages it brought, because in some places, customers had to wait maybe a week or two weeks before the sales person came around and brought the updates, and reducing that and allowing them to have the information at the same time as the first customer was clearly very, very beneficial to them. After Phase 2, after the business processes are modified, further advantages come your way, and you realize that the system -- this is a two-way system -- and you can use the system to gather information forecasts, feedback, inputs coming from the customers to modify your order entry processes. Therefore, this information becomes an inventory control means through improved and shorter forecasting and inputs from the customers' behavior, sometimes, as to what products or what product combination the customer is interested in. Dell has been mastering using online ordering patterns to forecast materials to suppliers to themselves like ourselves. Amazon.com has been mining the database that they accumulate from the customers' buying pattern for the demand of additional or new products. So, to sum this up, the three phases of e-Business; first one, implementation of the infrastructure is an IT phenomenon. The second one is modifying the business processes to take advantage of the infrastructure as a business phenomenon. And the third, which is exploiting the data that you gathered through this infrastructure to modify your products and businesses, is both an IT and a business process. I think all this is a little bit theoretical still, and I would like to move on to use an example a little bit closer to home and describe to you the experiences that a French company, by the name of Alibabook, has had with this process with the three phases. And first let's run a little bit of a video familiarizing you with Alibabook. (Video Presentation of Alibabook) DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Jean Manuel Escalas. Tell us about the history of Alibabook. MR. ESCALAS: The Alibabook story began ten years ago when I bought, with Sylvie, my wife, a small company called CFM (in French) which is a book wholesaler. At that time we did believe that the computerization of this company would allow us to get to more efficiency. So we worked -- DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Excuse me for interrupting. What was your background? MR. ESCALAS: I am an IT engineer and my wife was involved in books, so we joined the two. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Inter-disciplinary merger. (Laughter) MR. ESCALAS: This was great, because at that time in the book field there were such small companies - there were very, very few computerization. So within the job, in '97, we have built a very good back office system. So the ability to sell -- to deliver on more than 60,000 references, book references -- in less than two days. So then we thought we have to do something to go further. And what we have done is to take the opportunity of the Internet to go to the public business. So we created the brand Alibabook, and then we designed the site, and at the end of '98, we opened up the site, and it's a great success. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: The story started with you building a back office first and the Internet gave you an opportunity to take that back office and the operational capability to extend it to public customers. MR. ESCALAS: That's it. It was very important to have the back office system before, because we couldn't have delivered books, thousands of books, in two days if we had not had at that time the back office. And it took six or seven years to build this back office, and it took one year and a half to build the site. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Various times I have the impression that the Internet, e-commerce, is really about logistics and capability, that the Internet fully interfaces, and access is the other way around. Your experience is different? MR. ESCALAS: Yes, definitely, it is the way we have lived it. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: What happened then? MR. ESCALAS: Then at the beginning of this year, 1999, after spending one million dollars, advertising and systems and people, we realized that it was too few to be in the battle with the major companies, so we had to invest many more, and we had a chance, because of this project, Alibabook, because of the Internet, to make a larger company, and within a few weeks, we made a deal with FNAC, so to merge our teams and to go further, on a ratio of 1 to 10 -- perhaps 1 to 20. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: 1 to 20 in terms of growth? MR. ESCALAS: In terms of growth, investment, in terms of team, services, security -- all the problems that are created when you go on the Internet has to be scaled very, very quickly. And with FNAC, our goal now is to go quicker and to take this advantage as first mover. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Now, I understand what FNAC brought to you, but what did you bring to FNAC that it didn't have before? MR. ESCALAS: Well, the start, the team. We demonstrated that we were able to do that with Alibabook, because Alibabook, you can see it. So this -- this was very important for FNAC. It's not only to say I will do that, we can say -- DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: You have done it. MR. ESCALAS: -- we have done it. So on this basis we can go further. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Can FNAC reach more customers through electronic means? MR. ESCALAS: Of course, it's the strategy of FNAC to go on the Internet. As you know, there are 60 or more physical stores in the large towns. This aims at 30 million people, but there are 30 million who don't have any FNAC close, nearby to them. So the Internet is a new store -- I mean a visual store -- but able to address these 30 million people. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: So in terms of my rectangle, you provided the ability to reach upward and reach customers that the physical store cannot reach and probably it will never be able to reach, because economically small towns cannot support the large FNAC stores that would be needed to operate. MR. ESCALAS: Of course. And we are going to push more than one million products to these people at home on a one-to-one relationship with the customer. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: What do you mean, "one-to-one relationship"? MR. ESCALAS: We can know the customer, know his tastes. We can push the products and, considering what he needs, we can -- DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: By knowing the customers, you have the data of his buy preferences. MR. ESCALAS: Of course, and we can push the product he likes. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Have you done that or is that a plan? MR. ESCALAS: It is a plan but it will come in very soon. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Thank you very much. MR. ESCALAS: It's a pleasure. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: I congratulate you because I hope you notice that in the span of a relatively short period of time, Alibabook traversed Phase 1, Phase 2, and this last bit is the Phase 3, is taking advantage of it. But, of course, as they say about Hollywood actors who, after 25 years of working in obscurity all of a sudden become overnight successes, you have started the computer programming all of ten years ago. MR. ESCALAS: Thank you very much. DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Thank you very much. I would like to end by saying a few words about Intel's role in this process. The Internet has changed the business for WOLF Garten and Alibabook, has changed the business for FNAC, and has changed the business for Intel. Intel's mission for the previous 15 years has been to be the building block supplier for the new computing industry -- simply put, building block supplier for personal computing. The Internet has changed our environment, changed our target market, and, correspondingly, we have to change the words that we intend to be a building block supplier to the Internet economy, which is a lot more diverse and a lot bigger than personal computing itself. Now, I realize these are fairly simple words and fairly obvious words, so I would like to give this, maybe, a visual illustration of what this means by doing the following: I want to go back to 1993, which was the year when we introduced the Pentium® Processor. Six years ago, we painted a picture of our previous mission, our old mission, in the form of a 30-second television commercial. So let's first play the television commercial. This is Intel's mission in the form of a commercial six years ago. (Video Presentation of Commercial) DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: Now, what I would like to do is paint you a corresponding picture of what it means to be an Internet -- sorry, a building block supplier to the Internet, but here I have a little more difficult job because I have to paint the picture of the Internet, and some of you may be able to do that with your eyes closed, but for some others it may be a difficult task. So I want to take you on a bit of a tour of what happens in the Internet when you look at that keyboard, similar to the keyboard we had before, and look up a web page. Let's say you want to download some music from the Internet, MP3 music, legal of course, and ask what happens after you hit the return key. What is going to happen is your request is going to be broken up into a bunch of packets of information. Those packets of information will process through the computer, out into the telephone network, to a local place called the Internet service provider. It will do some stuff in the Internet service provider, leave there on the Internet backbone, go to the MP3 web site, find my music for me, or if I went to the Alibabook web site, it would find my book order from your book status for me, whatever it is, and bring that information back. It's as simple as that, but it's a little bit more complicated. Let's take a look at what happens during the transaction, and let's start by starting with a request. We hit the return key, our information gets processed, broken into packets of information by the microprocessor, pulled out of memory, and, through the inside of the personal computer, leaves the house, goes through the telephone network to a local building somewhere in the vicinity that is called our Internet service provider. Look inside, what happens inside the Internet service provider. We peel away the wall to take a look inside, and what do we see inside? Low and behold -- a number of computers, different computers, larger computers, but computers nonetheless. They are web servers that interpret my request. Those green bits that are going around is my request going around. They have to be addressed to the same place. The postal code equivalent of the Internet, which is the domain name, has to be attached to them packet by packet. And then a computer has to figure out -- called the traffic management server -- has to figure out the best and most economical way to send it on the Internet, and a router has to send it on its way to the web site where I'm going to. But after the router, before I get to the web site, my packets leave and go toward an access point to the broadband backbone of the Internet, and very, very rapidly, in a high capacity, in groups of packets, they take off and head towards the site where all the MP3 music is located, which is at the data center. When you get into the data center, there again is a bunch of computers, web servers, application servers. These are servers filled with microprocessors and filled with memory that take our green request packets, find my song and, look, the blue packets are my song, and they dispatch the song through the same kind of traffic management -- through servers and routers -- back to our home where I'm eagerly awaiting the music. After they leave the web server location, the blue bits are racing through the Internet backbone back toward the ISP, the Internet service provider, then step down to the telephone wire and into the house. And, "voila," I have my music, all of this taking 480 milliseconds -- less than half a second. Now, I cannot really describe this to you because 480 milliseconds is how long it takes you to blink your eye. What I would like to do is run this in real-time but we couldn't see it. So I'll do a compromise. I'll run you through without saying anything about it at 80 times slower speed than real-time, run through the same process. (DVD Simulation) DR. ANDREW S. GROVE: This is what happens every time you hit the return key. I hope I didn't scare you from doing it again. Back to, again, what our role is. Our role is to be the building block supplier to the Internet economy, and that gives us an opportunity to go after every location where our bit stream, our packet stream, is processed, broken up, managed, and this gives us three categories of places where we can use our microprocessor silicon technology. First, of course, personal computers remain the predominant access device of the Internet, just the same way as in this illustration. The process starts from the access device; microprocessors are needed for that. That is the basic business where -- that makes up most of our revenues today. But because most of the computation now takes place in this network universe, there's an opportunity for data processing and information processing in every single one of those server-like functions at the Internet service provider and at the website. Lots of servers are needed for this, different servers, but they all use microprocessors, and we have an opportunity to supply a large number of those. These are much more powerful, because every time you add one more client to the Internet, the load on those servers increases much the same way as Mr. Escalas described. Scaling the Internet is one of the constant challenges of the day to day function of anybody who supplies services on the Internet. And lastly, as you have seen, those packets are handed off from one computer to the other many, many times in the simple roundtrip that happens. And in that, a lot of network-related computations take place, network processors, communications processors, provide another opportunity for our silicon technology. And, in fact, in the last couple of years, we have acquired something like seven companies to enhance our own internal capability to facilitate. As Internet use and e-commerce encompasses smaller companies, it is going to be increasingly difficult economically for each of those small companies to build big data centers like we illustrated in this animation. So, correspondingly, I think there's going to be a large opportunity for small and medium-sized companies to buy these capabilities as a service function, if you wish, a bit at a time, if you excuse the play on the word. So we intend to participate in that by providing data services. This is an illustration of what some of the inside of the web server that you saw in the animation looks like. We intend to run these, run the customer's program for them, and not only run them physically, but provide management capability, control centers, that can allow a mission-critical application such as e-commerce, because e-commerce is mission critical. A web page can break down and your business continues. E-commerce breaks down, you cannot take orders or ship shipments. So management services are going to be increasingly important, and we intend to operate in providing that capability. But the hard part for business remains microprocessors, and microprocessor developments have also been directed to a service that are serving the increased demand on servers, serving structures, and a product of ours, which is a 64-bit microprocessor, is about to be unveiled. We've demonstrated technically at a development conference a few weeks ago -- we intend to introduce it into the market at the middle of next -- this IA64 micro bit process looks like this. It's the most complex microprocessor we've ever built. And it is particularly suited for the Phase 3 type of activities that are necessary on the Internet. The fact that its 64 bits allows large databases to be handled right out of the computer's memory very, very rapidly to provide that one-on-one marketing that Mr. Escalas described, and provide the security that e-commerce transactions requires by providing acceleration to security application and also to allow us to get information out of the immense amount of data that we collect about customers by visualizing patterns. We are in the very early stages of Internet development and deployment, anywhere in the world. To illustrate that, consider this: on this chart I show the census of servers in -- deployed in 1999 -- and take that census and do a few computations. What happens to that number between now and 2005 if we extend it with the large number of people that get on the Internet., extend it again by the more diverse functions that these people will do and the more diverse tasks -- the more diverse software that they will use -- and lastly allow for the fact that in order to provide the security and mission critical capability, we have to build in some extra capacity to protect ourselves from down times? When you look at the comparison between what relation we have today, deployed today, and the population that we are likely to have five years from now, you rapidly come to the conclusion that 96% of the total, 2005 server capacity, are still to be deployed. So there's a lot of business opportunity for us, and a lot of work to deploy all of these things and to scale all these servers another tenfold like Mr. Escalas has done in Alibabook, and another tenfold after that, and another tenfold after that. And that is going to be how the Internet economy is going to be deployed around us. I would like to sum up by just providing you with one more comment. I segmented the deployment of e-Business into the three phases: Phase 1, deployment of infrastructure; Phase 2 modification of business processes to take advantage of it; and Phase 3, taking competitive benefits out of it. Phase 1 is what most companies buy. Somebody does it for most companies. In our company, we did it ourselves because we are a computer company. But most companies hire consultants, computer companies, to do that for them. Money can buy Phase 1. Phase 2 cannot be delegated to another company. Phase 2 is what the host company, the company that is deploying e-commerce, must do themselves. Only they can figure out what is the right business process for them to take advantage of the Internet, and only they have the vision, the power, and the will and the persistence to do it. Phase 1 may be expensive. Phase 2 is, in my opinion, the most difficult task, and will require a belief and persistence in the powers of the Internet which, on the other hand, if you don't have, you are very likely to miss the strategic inflection point that the Internet provides. Thank you very much for your attention. * Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others. |
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