Net business saves Cisco half a billion

NEWS Cisco claims it's saving $550m per year by doing business over the Internet. Clifford Meltzer, senior vice president and general manager for IOS systems and engineering at Cisco, said the company already does half its business over the Web, and is now looking to expand that even further. Speaking at the Gartner Group Symposium/ITxpo conference in the US, he said Cisco is looking to increase this figure to 90 per cent. Robin Duke-Woolley, principal consultant at Schema, said: "Cisco is not the only big US company doing this." He explained that General Electric is saving "near on $1bn". He added: "Cisco is growing at such a rate of knots, it could well exceed $10bn in sales for this year, so using the Internet could well be beneficial." Recent research conducted by Schema shows there are already 500,000 UK business sites using ecommerce, with the figure expected to reach eight million within five years. "The great thing about the Internet is that it gives big opportunities to small businesses, not just the big payers," Duke-Woolley said.