Despite anecdotal evidence of increased involvement in e-commerce, nearly half of all hi-tech businesses still rely on traditional methods, including hard copies, floppy disks and faxes, to communicate with customers and suppliers, according to a study released yesterday by the Computing Technology Industry Association E-Commerce Standards Board.
The study focused on the use of business-to-business transaction methods within the computing and electronic components industry. More than 185 information service managers, directors and executives at U.S. and European companies were surveyed.
Companies in the United States are much more likely than European companies to use electronic data interchange and XML technologies for electronic business-to-business transactions, according to the study.
Less than half of surveyed companies use XML, a format for using documents on the Web, and less than 12 percent of transactions are transported using XML, the survey said. Only 20 percent of companies participate in trading communities such as CommerceOne, Ariba and mySAP.
The Computing Technology Industry Association, known as CompTIA, is a nonprofit trade group that provides the technology community with standards for Internet-enabled service provision, e-commerce, vendor-neutral technical certification, customer relationship management, public policy, workforce development and training.
