Split between IT users and suppliers

Date: 04/04/1996

By Tim Jones

AS the European Commission maintains its commitment to the information society as one of the building blocks of Europe's future prosperity, a new survey has identified a growing rift between what users want to buy and what suppliers want to sell them.

The study by the European Electronic Messaging Association (EEMA) found that the big suppliers of information technologies (ITs) are keener to sell what they consider to be the products of the future than their customers are to buy them.

“The survey does show a difference between users' and suppliers' opinion,” says Vee Baker, European Product Marketing Manager for Lotus, who worked on the survey. “Are suppliers pushing technology on to users or do the users really want it? Who is leading whom in this merry dance?”

The survey was conducted among 58 user organisations, consultants and suppliers between December and February. Just less than half the respondents were end-user companies, while 17 were suppliers. The firms were drawn from right across Europe and 40&percent; had more than a thousand employees.

The survey's aim was to find out which messaging technologies are considered essential to European business now and over the coming year, and whether suppliers are really meeting users' demands.

EEMA also wanted to discern how Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) fits in with the Internet in ensuring the creation of an efficient 'electronic commerce' market-place.

EDI transmissions are sent between the computers of different companies, conform to a standard data format and are essentially used for business transactions. The Internet, on the other hand, is an international computer network which is permanently linked through high-speed connections.

At the moment, the most popular ITs among customers are Internet and fax messaging, with 80&percent; of user firms using these methods. Following hard on its heels are electronic mail (e-mail) systems such as Lotus cc:Mail and Microsoft Mail, provided as a Local Area Network (LAN) service - within a defined building or company. These are used by 68&percent; of firms.

Lagging far behind, with only a 12&percent; take-up, is the new X.500 - the latest internationally recognised telecoms standard governing the attachment of users' terminals to the telecoms network to allow them to talk to each other.

The service is usually run by national telecoms operators, but some suppliers, including AT&T, Sprint and MCI, also provide this or its predecessor X.400.

Opinions are divided on which of these will be most in demand in the immediate future. In the area of electronic commerce, the respondents were agreed: the future of home shopping and banking lies on the Internet. The Internet topped the list as the future home of electronic commerce, with EDI trailing in a distant second, followed by X.400 - the current standard - in last place.

But when it comes to business-to-business communications, most users believe that EDI will be the growing technology of the coming year, while suppliers remain loyal to the Internet.

Users are, however, deeply concerned at what they see as the lack of connection between EDI and value-added data service providers in Europe - services which link them up to communications systems and help them with commercial transactions.

While only a small number of suppliers believe this is a problem, three-quarters of users questioned said it was. For this reason, EEMA will provide a forum for a debate between users and suppliers at its ninth annual conference on 10-13 June.

The EEMA was formed in 1987 to provide an independent forum for the creation of a market platform for all participants in electronic messaging, from users and hardware and software vendors to governments.

In February, European representatives met to promote the use of EDI especially for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They agreed to create a European forum for electronic commerce which would bring together representatives of all parts of the industry to promote EDI.

At an EEMA conference last week, they decided to campaign for the '88 Challenge', aimed at bringing all European end-users up to the latest (1988) standards approved and policed by the International Telecommunications Union.

“The next stage is to ensure that everyone can send binary files like spreadsheets and Word documents,” says Roger Dean, the executive-director of EEMA. “The challenge is to raise everyone up to the new standards.”

Baker says that, in general, Europe is often slower to adopt technologies. But she adds: “When Europeans finally do it, their use of the technologies can often be more sophisticated.”

The European Parliament's intergroup for SMEs complained last week that the Commission, while pushing for an information society and help for SMEs, had failed to specify ways of linking these firms to the new technologies in its recent 1997-2000 SMEs programme.