E-Business
By Sebastian Rupley
Companies are deploying a phalanx of Internet technologies in their quest for a competitive edge.
Want to see e-business explode? Want to see it again? When you're looking at the future of commerce on the Web, the first observation to make is how fast we're all travelling down that road. In only five years, bleary-eyed technologists working side by side with hypercompetitive entrepreneurs have forever changed how business works. The famous Harvard Business School recently overhauled its entire curriculum in one fell swoop to ensure that its MBAs emerge with the technology skills now needed to compete online. The pace of new e-business technology development is driving these changes. A glimpse at which new technologies will soon bring more sweeping change to e-business shows that the pace continues to accelerate.
Orbiting Around XML
A blistering array of new Web commerce technologies are centred around XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a markup language for tagging and describing content (which goes beyond HTML's duties displaying content; XML actually describes the content). One benefit of XML is that it can help the Web function like an intelligent library card catalogue. It can improve Web searching and programs such as intelligent assistants, or bots, which could scour the Web or a series of partnered business sites for the best prices on products.
XML can help business Web sites intelligently exchange information in several ways. ibm, Microsoft, Sun, and B2B (business-to-business) software providers such as Ariba are among many companies building XML layers into their key e-business products. According to GartnerGroup, XML layers will process 70 percent of online business transactions by the year 2001.
XML, along with the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), has potentially huge implications for extending the world of e-business to wireless devices of all kinds. Many companies are working on strategies for storing e-business data as XML and writing XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) scripts to format data for wireless devices. Several companies are also working on ways to use voice as an interface for retrieving and working with such data. Motorola has a speech recognition language called VoxML that allows a person with a Web-enabled mobile phone to query a Web site verbally and receive a text-to-speech response. Text-to-speech technology from BeVocal and Quack.com already allows commerce sites to offer limited voice querying.
Such voice-driven access to e-business sites could encourage consumers to use roaming voice applications, such as searching a shopping site while sitting in traffic. It could also help an employee access customer information stored in a CRM (customer relationship management) system by speaking a query into a phone. Big CRM players such as Siebel Systems already have initiatives in place for extending customer data access to hand-held devices and cell phones.
