The Internet will increasingly drive businesses to become more customer-centered as competitive pressures push companies to personalize relationships with consumers, said Intel President and CEO Craig Barrett in a keynote address Monday night.
At the CA World user conference, Barrett forecast the future of doing business on the Internet. He also explained the role that Intel's IA-64 chip architecture, code-named Merced, will play in such a world.
The 64-bit chip architecture is moving along with silicon production expected to begin within a couple of weeks, Barrett said. Intel sees IA-64 as "the engine for customer-centric e-business."
Tying his message to Computer Associates, the CA World host, Barrett said that companies doing business on the Internet have to go gather as much information as they can about customers and their buying preferences in order to create a customized approach to dealing with consumers. Companies that don't do that will be trounced by the competition, while the winners will flock to the Internet with cyberspace becoming the standard storefront of the 21st century, Barrett said.
There's plenty of money to go around, it seems. Barrett noted the oft-cited prediction that by 2005, electronic commerce will be worth $1 trillion, or 10% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). This year, the figure is $100 billion, or 1% of GDP.
Intel Chairman Andy Grove, joining Barrett's keynote via video conferencing technology, said that in his experience "anytime anything moves at a 10-fold rate, fur flies."
Actually, Grove and Barrett are hoping that what flies is IA-64. Right now, not even 4% of the hardware needed to support the Internet of 2005 is deployed, Barrett said, offering a demonstration of exactly why 64-bit processing power is needed.
Visualization technologies that offer 3-D imagery, multimedia and increasingly intelligent software applications all require more computer power, Barrett said. In his demonstration here, a PC of the future-dramatically smaller than today's desktop models, required both fingerprint and voice recognition for security. The device converted voice into text and text into voice, as well as surfing the 'Net and creating some research analysis. The future PC responded to voice commands, retrieving in e-mail form messages that came in via voice. A retrieved message displayed text and a photograph of the sender.
The PC also, on command, dialed another PC for a real-time video meeting with clear audio, devoid of latency. Of course, demonstrations tend to be cleaner and clearer than the real thing, but Barrett assured the audience that the days of such computers are not far off.
Converged networks are clearly part of the future, which also will feature massive databases sized in terabytes, with ever more data, richer visualization and interactive capabilities - all geared towards giving customers their own personalized e-commerce experience, Barrett said. Besides PCs, all manners of handheld and other devices will offer connectivity, contributing to the trillion dollar 'Net economy.
Besides keeping up with the wicked new pace of doing business in cyberspace, companies will have to balance issues related to efficiency and costs with agility, speed and employee productivity, Barrett said. Those firms that manage to strike the right balance will succeed, although companies might well behave much differently online than they have in the brick-and-mortar world.
The Internet "really allows big companies to act like small companies and small companies to act like big companies," Barrett said.
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