Ecommerce is number one priority for most CIOs

Ecommerce continues to be a top strategic priority for 63 per cent of chief information officers in Fortune 300 companies.

According to Morgan Stanley Dean Witter's Technology Group, which conducted a telephone survey of its customers, this is an unprecedented debut for any new technology.

Charles Phillips, managing director of the firm's Technology Group, said: "The survey revealed that companies are both financially and organisationally committed to incorporating ecommerce into their overall business strategy."

He added that the CIOs questioned understood that to stay afloat in today's technology centric marketplace, they had to invest strategically or risk falling behind their rivals.

The survey also indicated that more than two thirds of companies plan to spend as much or more on PCs in 2000 than in 1999 and named Dell as their vendor of choice. Thirty seven per cent of respondents also said they intended to take part in a business to business Internet Trading Exchange.

More than 33 per cent claimed they had implemented a Web store front, 44 per cent said they would consider using application hosting services, while a further 46 per cent said they were in the midst of completing or had already completed the roll out of enterprise resource planning applications.

In another report, IDC predicted that 60 per cent of those using the Internet would reside outside of the US by the end of the year, while 46 per cent of online shopping would take place outside of the region by 2003.

Anna Giraldo, a senior analyst with IDC's Internet and eCommerce Strategies research programme, said: "In Western Europe, the Internet is quickly moving from a technophile phenomenon to a tool for the entire population."