Can an E-Business Index Help IBM? >BY William Fellows

Computergram International, August 13, 1999 by William Fellows

While IBM Corp is doing a great job of capturing mindshare as the e-business company, we'd like to see some more meat on the bones of its strategy. The company has said that as much of 25% of its total revenue can be attributed to e-business sales, that five out of its six top strategic priorities are based on e-business, and that online sales and e-business software revenues are soaring.

Sun Microsystems Inc and Hewlett-Packard Co are doing sterling work advocating specific 'dot com' and 'e-speak' system, middleware and partnering services. We don't hear the same well- rounded product strategy or marketecture from IBM. We know net.commerce, we know websphere, we know DB2, we know there may or may not be an ASP strategy in place (depending on who talk to), we know about the megacenters but we sometimes have a job putting our finger on what IBM e-business actually is.

Sun has been quick to promote its dominance among the top ISP and dot com companies. We wonder whether a similar ranking of the leading e-business sites and their equipment suppliers would help focus IBM's e-business strategy. It could help establish some meaning for e-transactions, e-commerce and other e-activity. Who processes most electronic transactions, by volume or dollar amount, in consumer, industry or financial services sectors? And does IBM own those customers?