eBusiness as a pillar of the new economy

The eBusiness market in Italy is growing up very fast, after the crisis due to the bubble of “net economy” and “blue chips” the potential of on line transactions and business opportunities emerged clearly. The development of electronic commerce seems to be less affected by the uncertainness period that afflicted all the other sectors of ICT in 2004. In 2004 both B2B and B2C segments grown up more than what was expected reaching a 60% figure both in B2B and B2C. The quota of eBusiness transactions on the global Italian market is growing up from 3.2% in 2003 to 6.1% in 20041. The amount of companies directly connected on line with their suppliers or customers is directly related to the number of employees ranging between 9.3% for less than 10 employees up to 22.3% for more than 250 employees, the average value in 2004 was 9.6%. It seems there is a threshold at 50 employees in order to enter the eBusiness area, small companies seems to be cut out from eBusiness. eBusiness is sometimes an unique opportunity to reach the international market or even to reach the domestic market in a significant dimension. Almost the same situation applies to eProcurement: average value of 6% in 2004 with a miximum of 34% for companies with more than 250 employees. One of the mayor constraint limiting the development of the automation of the supply chain is no doubt due to the consolidated workflow and the complexity of both internal and external processes related to the management of the supply chain, all these reasons slow down the implementation of on line transactions involving suppliers. One third of the companies with more than 250 employees already tested on line solutions and decided to improve their investments in on line services adopting e- Procurement solutions. 1 Federcomin / DIT - Osservatorio della Società dell’Informazione - Giugno 2005 Dati IDC More relevant, in this scenario, the number of companies selling goods and services thanks to on line Commerce, it was 20% in 2004 and it is increasing every day. The success of eCommerce solutions is partially due to the availability of low cost eCommerce platforms, easy to manage and maintain, as well as online portals (eMall) diffusion enabling more than one company to share the application.