Net Shopping Will Dominate Market In 10 Years

Vishwesh Padmanabhan is the vice-president (software and solutions developer marketing) at IBM India. He is responsible for marketing and distribution of IBM Software products, development of independent software vendors and management of IBM solutions partnership centre, which facilitates application development using IBM technologies. He spoke to Bipin about his views on the Net market space and how IBM is poised to play a role there. Excerpts:

Q. How is IBM playing a role in India's e-market place?

A. We believe that software is the soul of e-business. We have the powerful tools that will enable business solutions. Our business is to help companies leverage information to gain competitive advantage.

 

Our aim is to allow companies sustain competitive advantage and help them develop new sources of sales, increase customer loyalty, reduce cost of operations and improve operating efficiency. It takes powerful software to transform your business into an e-business.

Q. How important are Web customers for today's economy?

A. Researches and studies show that an average 60 per cent of all Web customers are new to the business and online shopping revenues will eclipse paper-based catalogue sale within the next 10 years. It is also observed that Web sales will surpass $108 billion in 2003 and revenues will experience growth at a 69 per cent compounded annual growth over the next five years. All this shows that the Net offers unparalleled opportunities to companies.

Q. What are the requirements of the Internet business? How will a company migrate to e-business?

A. There are about eight requirements. The migration from static to interactive Web pages for the companies. This is the state when companies move to dynamic Web pages. In the second stage, the companies should provide access to product database and in the third, the companies and there websites will provide real-time link to the inventory.

Then, the companies will add order processing and customer database which will be migrated at the fifth stage, when it would provide link to suppliers to maintain online inventory support.

After that, it will add customer support in the form of integrated e-mail and workflow system and at the seventh stage it will implement business intelligent solutions for one to one marketing. In the final stage, the company will deploy scaleable systems to accommodate growth.