8. 3Com
3Com today is best known for its ubiquitous PalmPilot and for its eponymous San Francisco Giants baseball park. But the company, with more than 200 million customers worldwide, is making its greatest strides in business-to-business commerce….BtoB transactions make up 30 percent of total revenue, or $2 billion, and 3Com projects that 80 percent of total revenue will be derived from BtoB transactions by the end of 1999…
4. Intel
Intel’s accomplishments in ebusiness read like a fairy tale in return on investment….Fifteen days after its 1998 launch, Intel’s Web ebusiness had already booked $1 billion in orders….Unlike other rollouts that start small and initially target a specific customer or geography segment, Intel took a broad approach reaching small, medium, and large U.S. and international customers from day one….Intel made a special effort to wire previously unwired emerging market customers to give them a better chance to compete globally….Wiring the unwired enables the $26 billion chip giant to replace phone and fax with the Internet, increasing efficiency for both Intel and its customers….Says Sean Maloney, senior vice president and director of worldwide sales and marketing, “I don’t see any reason why we can’t do 100 percent of our business this way in two years.”
Today, 7 out of 10 requests for technical support from Cisco customers are handled electronically. Nearly 75 percent of customer orders are handled via the Net. Of those, more than 80 percent are booked, credit checked, scheduled for manufacturing, and sent to the factory without human interface.
And the winner is…
1. Cisco Systems
Cisco not only creates the network tools that others use to excel, but has built the most intelligently Net-savvy company going.
Cisco Systems’ CEO John Chambers may be a soft-spoken Southern gent, but he’s firm when he asserts, “The Internet is changing the way people work, live, play, and learn.” When he champions the Net, is he guilty of simplistic hyperbole? Hardly. Those familiar with how the 49-year-old runs his $10 billion plus data networking empire know he practices what he preaches. Cisco- leading maker of routers, switches, software, and other gear that keeps the Internet running is using the Net to change the way it works. Says Dataquest analyst Ellen Carney: “Cisco is a company that eats its own dog food.”
Purchasing power has shifted to the consumer. And marketing will never be the same.
A profound shift in the basis of competition is occurring. Today, competitive advantage in many businesses lies in the ability to capture unique information about customers-information that is not accessible to other vendors. For example, airlines develop frequent-flyer profiles that are not accessible to other airlines. Banks use information about balances and individual funds flow to market various financial products to their customers. Even grocers create loyalty card programs in order to build and act on proprietary profiles of their customers.
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