Look past the dot com meltdown to see the realization of true convergence, says Monty

On June 28, BCE Inc chair and CEO John Monty addressed the Canadian e-business Leadership Forum, warning them that reports of ecom’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. The following is an edited excerpt from his speech: In speaking about e-business to this audience, I risk preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, I will risk it. I will risk it because the Internet is so big, and so charged with potential, that it would be difficult to exaggerate its importance. Businesspeople, students, professionals, scientists — hundreds of million have been profoundly touched by the Internet. As for e-business, Goldman Sachs tells us the wave has only just begun. They estimate global e-commerce will grow at a CAGR of close to 80% between 1999 and 2005. By 2005, they say, e-commerce trade will reach US$8 trillion. But, I can hear you say: hold on! Didn’t you read the headlines? The dot-com bubble has finally burst. The wave has finally crashed.Well, the simple metaphor of the wave is indeed simplistic. We need to look beyond the surge, the crest, and then the fall. Because after the fall — after the hype and inflated expectations — true convergence emerges. We’ve seen this pattern before, most recently in the early years of the auto industry. That bubble also burst for hundreds of now long-forgotten auto makers. But the strongest survived and consolidated into a handful of global giants. Similarly, e-business will be all business in the near future. Technologies may change and the Internet may evolve. We may do away with screens, keyboards and hard drives, we may go totally wireless… but e-business will remain. Internet power What gives e-business its staying power? Simply the fact that the Internet transforms everything it touches. As bandwidth, storage and computing power continue to improve, costs follow a drastic downward spiral. Where you once reached a hundred customers in your immediate area, with the Internet you can reach a thousand… ten thousand… a million. "Where a handful of suppliers once bid on a contract, you can now invite dozens to online auctions. Where your buying power was once measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, an e-market boosts it to a billion. Where cost-cutting once meant shaving fractions of a penny from each paper bill, e-billing now lops off more than 50%. The Internet’s power to reinvent how we work, inform, entertain and communicate is undisputed. In Canada and around the world, content and applications are converging on the Internet… giving birth to new industries and reshaping old ones. The future of e-business We can view the current economic slide as a brake on e-business. Or we can take the opposite view, that this is the best time to move aggressively online. As the Wall Street Journal recently noted in an issue devoted to ecommerce, while growth in the sector may be a bit slower than predicted, there’s no question ‘Net-based transactions are becoming the way of the world. This is why small and medium-size firms in particular should be accelerating their online projects. True enough, progress isn’t always smooth and cultural resistance is almost a given. True also that going online takes time and should be phased. Some begin by raising an electronic billboard on the ‘Net. They’ll progress to an informational web site, followed by a limited transactional site, before the ultimate goal of a fully web-enabled e-business. Bell.ca, Kodak, e-route, Procuron and indeed BCE’s thousands of e-business customers, are in a sense envoys from the future. They suggest that e-business isn’t just the electronic version of some things we already do. E-business is a whole new way of thinking about everything we do.

Look past the dot com meltdown to see the realization of true convergence, says Monty

News | 07/12/2001 4:00 am EDT

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