Starting an E-Business From Scratch

Creating a presence on the Internet, specifically an e-business presence, does not necessarily require large outlays of cash. You can create for your client an e-business model for less than $5,000 (including hardware and software, excluding your billing time) if you are the adventurous VAR.

If you're willing to invest your time and energy into learning Unix commands, you can be on your road to an e-business Web site in just a few hours. However, you do need to know a few things before you start this journey.

Even Albert Einstein reportedly needed help on his 1040 form. So why would you go blindly into e-business, without having a field map, a guide and a plan? Consider this article series your guide, with the links and suggestions a field map for where to find the essential ingredients to brew your e-business. But most importantly, I will provide some planning tips, that may help you determine whether an e-business is right for your client, or identify the type of money required to make your e-business a reality.

The Set Up

Lets talk about a mythical client company called Kira's Pet Shop (Major Kira, my dog, can be found at www.sbanetweb.com/kira). It wants to start an Internet e-business, but it's unsure whether it will succeed in terms of a good return on investment (ROI) and it doesn't want to dump large sums of money into giving it a go. In other words, the client wants you to start a pilot project.

First, we need to do a little planning. We need to understand the client's business model and internal business policies. We need to know whether it wants the e-business system to populate its internal business system with data, or if the goal is to treat Internet orders as a paper order, from a different supplier.

For the sake of simplicity and cost, we'll use the Internet as another method for our client's customers to send orders. The Internet system will complement current methods that include telephone, fax and mail. We will initially discount the need to have orders directly move from the Internet into our internal order entry/accounting systems.

We need to decide on an operating system, hardware, e-business software, as well as what type of ISP or size pipe we will require. Lastly, we'll need some conception of the client's budget.

Operating Systems

Much has been written about Windows NT as workstation, LAN server and Internet platform. However, we also know Microsoft's software ends up costing quite a bit of money. Open source software, sometimes referred to as "free" software, has a different business model: the upfront costs are lower and the back end costs are equal to the Windows model.

In fact, many of the direct software costs in the Open Software business model is nil, with support available from a wide array of mailing lists and newsgroups. While there are definite drawbacks to this type of support model, it works quite successfully. For-pay consultants exist for all Open Source software. Because the pet store is a pilot project, we will want to use as much Open Software as is possible, to reduce our costs. We also want to look forward to full implementation, and cost is also a factor there.

The Unix operating system has been around since the 70's, ever since Bell Labs and D. M. Ritchie and K. Thompson invented the operating system. Today, there are multiple flavors of Unix with much written about LINUX, an open source version of UNIX.

However, Linux is not the only open source version, nor is it the only free version. FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, among others also offer a free UNIX platform. I have been using FreeBSD (www.freebsd.org) for several years and have found an impressive array of companies who also use this operating system (Yahoo, Blue Mountain Greeting Card, CDNow).

Hardware

FreeBSD runs on about any type of PC (Intel) based hardware. As with any operating system, speed is determined as much by clock speed of the processor as to the amount of RAM available and the speed of the hard drives. Our advice is to purchase the fastest machine with the most RAM you can afford. Also use of ultra-wide SCSI hard drives will increase performance results.

Software

One of the exceptions to using Open Source is our choice for an E-Commerce software solution. We have not found a Open Source solution (not that there aren't any) that made us feel comfortable. For our pilot project we're going to use Shopsite, by Open Market, Inc. of Burlington, Mass. (www.openmarket.com/shopsite). This E-Commerce software, is easy to install, set-up, use and create a E-Commerce site. In addition, Open Market has a variety of other products that will enable your client to move from an 'adjunctive order entry system' to a full fledged e-business solution.

Next time--installation.

Wayne Spivak is President of SBA Consulting LTD. , Bellmore, New York