IT's Role in Transitioning to E-Business

by Geoff Dober

There are now around 200 million online users of the Internet, with an estimated growth of 70,000 new users each day. During the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, IBM claimed that www.olympics.com, which it maintained, received more than 11 billion hits. (During the Atlanta, USA, games in 1996, the same site received only 350 million hits.) Web sites are growing by 100,000 per day, with the world's largest Web site provider (Skybiz.com) servicing more than 500,000 sites. Currently, there are more than 15 million Web sites, and it is expected that there will be more than 70 million by 2002. It's no wonder that four out of five users will never revisit the average Web site. These figures also indicate the importance that portals will attain in the future.