Be prepared to build the business progressively, and ensure you have robust technology and business

There are many opportunities available for existing businesses and new businesses. Some of these are new activities selling existing products, others are new businesses selling newly packaged services.

Whilst investment is necessary, a worthwhile business opportunity can be expected to generate revenue.

It can be easy

Get good advice. It doesn't have to be hard.

Multibase has more than theoretical experience in online business. Its technology lies behind some of Australia's most significant sites in their industries, as well as traditional business software developed over more than 20 years.

This helps us to understand the needs of your business and your industry, and to develop a strategy in partnership with you. This can build the wealth of your existing knowledge, business processes, systems and technology into your eBusiness solution. We stage carefully the development and delivery of your new eBusiness tools, consistent with your budget and with your organisation’s ability to master the change. We will then support the new system and its integration into robust, economical, sustainable daily operations. If it is appropriate, we will help you move from an extremely dependent situation where we provide all hardware, software and services, towards progressively greater independence.

The importance of strategy

If you wait to get it too perfect, you can miss the opportunities of the internet - but if you don’t think it through you waste the opportunity.

Partly because the Internet is a relatively new business environment, it can be tempting to put a tentative toe in the water without much thought. If it doesn't work, you can write off the experience and go back to business in the traditional way. But you'd be missing an opportunity being taken successfully by organisations around the world.

If yours is a small organisation, you are missing the opportunity to appear as big as anyone on the Web, and do business around the world. As a large business, you risk being overtaken by small competitors nimble enough to move quickly and strategically. In any case, the Internet offers the opportunity for better, faster business processes.

The key is to analyse your needs and plan to meet those needs. For every job, we use a combination of our experience and our own needs analysis tools to help you to maximise the effectiveness of your internet strategy

Your Internet goals

Apply your existing expertise to your online business - and be open to new possibilities.

Why are you considering a web presence? What do you hope to gain? Such fundamental questions need to be answered when starting to do business on the web. You maximise your chance of success if your e-goals are integrated with your wider business goals - and apply your existing business experience to this new sales and marketing channel.

Your successful web site could achieve the following:

• Help establish the identity of your organisation
• Promote your products, services, goals, and policies
• Enhance contact between members of your organisation, and with existing and potential customers and suppliers
• Improve sales and distribution of your products and services
• Expand your business by increasing its reach and accessibility

Build a sustainable growth process

It may be better to start smaller, with a big vision, than start big and be forced off the stage because you couldn’t sustain the pace of updates and management.

Some sites and web applications are built on "what seems like a good idea at the time". This can be a short-term shortcut, and it’s a valid strategy to go live quickly. Some sites are still driven by the desire of the web developer to win artistic accolades.

But given the increasing maturity of the web, Multibase wants to develop a truly excellent eBusiness which is "grown" from the context of your own organisation rather than imposed by technical fashions or the needs of the web developer.

Like any other effective business activity, your eBusiness needs a process that will develop a sustainable structure rather than both content and technology which have continually to be recreated with considerable ongoing expenditure. The result needs to be directed toward achieving what's appropriate to your needs and your budget.

Open standards mean new opportunities

Build on your existing business assets and systems, by taking advantage of the open systems possibilities provided by the Internet.

The open-standards approach of the Internet provides new opportunities both to reduce costs and increasingly, to earn revenue for your business. There are many ways that even modest sizes businesses can benefit from the new standard for international communications.

By employing the open standards applying to the Internet, applications and services like email, groupware, security, directory, information sharing, database access, and management can be made available cross-platform and cross-database, flexibly, with vendor independence, as the innovation and products are created by an entire industry, not just a single vendor.

With business-to-business ecommerce growing all the time, there are significant possibilities for systems which provide access to existing assets such as legacy system database, warehouse systems, and information sources. Such systems can also deliver information, receive payment, and update records - by building “glue” to bring them together rather than throwing your existing assets away and starting again.

Integrating Internet technology into your organisation

The Internet is not just about buying and selling. It can improve communication within your organisation as well as with your customers.

The communications possibilities within organisations facilitated by Internet technology are as exciting as those between an organisation and the world.

Intranet is a term which describes the use by an organisation of standard Internet technologies to deploy a rich, full-function, ubiquitous environment for information sharing, communication and applications, built on top of open networking technologies and an open network-based application platform.

Physically this means that there is a TCP/IP network inside an organisation that links its people and information in a way that makes people more productive, information more accessible, and navigation through all the resources.