Working in the IT industry you’ll of course be familiar with the brands HP, Cisco, Intel and IBM. However, even if you’re not an IT professional, you probably have ‘Intel inside’ a laptop or netbook; you might also own an appliance produced by Philips or have flown for business or pleasure on a plane manufactured by Boeing.
But what does this particular group of companies have in common apart from being world leaders in the technology field? Well, alongside Siemens, AT&T, GE, Unisys and Xerox they are all vanguards of the internet; part of the elite group of the first 100 organisations to register for a domain name.
It’s been a big month for what would ordinarily be described as three letters and a punctuation mark.
On March 15th, .com celebrated its silver anniversary, marking the day 25 years ago that the first domain name was registered by Symbolics computers from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Although they are no longer in business, the domain name is still in use by a business investment firm who proudly herald its prestigious online history.
Only 9 other companies, including HP, joined Symbolics in registering a .com address in the first 12 months and by the late ‘80s the total number of registrations was in the region of just 100 dotcoms. It wouldn’t be until the introduction of Netscape’s Mosaic web browser in the mid 1990s that mainstream consumers would come to the internet and drive the prolific growth that resulted in the dotcom boom.
It is estimated that there are now more than 250m websites with 80m of these using the .com suffix. At Mala, we favour the .co.uk address label and we were one of the 57 million organisations that registered a domain name between 2000 and 2010 when we launched our company in 2000.
Even since the burst of the dotcom bubble, almost 700,000 domain names are still registered every month, and online activity continues to grow; it is estimated that over the next 3 years there will be more than 2.7 billion devices accessing the internet. As well as PCs and games consoles, the growing demand for online applications will drive mobile internet users to almost 1 billion by the end of 2013.
This continued increase in online activity brings with it additional costs and further operational challenges. IT and Telecoms budgets that are already stretched must ensure that ecommerce and customer service targets can be delivered through existing and planned network configurations alongside back office systems.
However, unpredictable variable costs that can occur from areas such as employee mobile spend can strain the budget further and potentially jeopardise future projects. Don’t forget, the forecast for 1 billion mobile devices accessing online content will include your employees using their work mobile for business and non-business related activity. Micro purchases, data downloads and web browsing all contribute towards growing mobile usage statistics and close management of this spend is essential.
The internet may have been relatively slow to take off but the developments that we are seeing on an almost daily basis prove that really, it is still in its infancy. Embracing the applications and devices that come to the market will undoubtedly improve efficiency and enhance productivity but cost control remains at the forefront of the management board.
A telecoms budget that can attribute all costs to the appropriate systems, business units and even users will not only free up existing spend from identifying incorrect billing but will also have the information required to request new budgets for future revenue generating or service enhancing projects.
If 2.7 billion devices are set to access online content in the next 36 months, how are you going to ensure some of this engagement is with your organisation?
