News & Events

Published in CA Magazine
[December 2003]

...Coming from a rather different direction, the CEO of iBooking, is a great believer in the ASP model, and thinks 2004 will see SME's making more energetic use of the ASP approach, particularly for e-business. “Many smaller to medium-range companies initially went to web developers for e-commerce sites and wound up with sites that were too elaborate for them, and too costly to maintain. Absolutely the easiest way for a smaller business to operate online is to buy all the functionality that they need over the internet, all driven through the free web-browser that they already have on their PC”, he says.

Internet advertising, he points out, has moved strongly in favour of smaller companies. Instead of having to pay out huge sums for banner ads on popular websites, small companies can now use a pay-per-click approach. Under this method, the owner of the banner advertising site only gets paid if a customer on their site clicks on the SME's banner ad, for example, and jumps to the SME's site. This is an extension of the “affiliate” relationship, where companies collaborate to drive customers to their affiliate's website.

Cent expects to see a great deal of integration and collaboration through 2004 between the web and mobile phones. “If you can integrate your web application with SMS messaging to mobile phones, you have a very powerful tool. We expect to see strong corporate uptake for this approach through the coming year.” he says.

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