Microsoft India president Rajiv Nair, underlining the importance of knowledge management and electronic communication in this Internet age, said e-commerce business through the Net will be crossing a business volume of $300 billion by 2002, according to a McKinsey study.

He said e-commerce is going to be the next big thing for the country in a couple of years and its future will be on the Net.

The economy of the Internet is growing faster than the economy of the US by a factor of 2. E-commerce will become a fundamental way of conducting trade both from business-to-business and business-to-customer. The latter has been growing over 85 per cent.

In the globally competitive environment, management of information intelligently and in time becomes vital for proving efficiency of an organisation. Nair described the digital nervous system as both a strategy and a blueprint for success in the digital economy and is Microsoft's vision for technologically savvy businesses. CBS India, which has several offices in the country and overseas, is implementing the DNS for full inter-office connectivity.

He said with implementation of DNS, CBS India is now one of the few firms which will benefit from using information technology across its entire business operations.

Talking about the country's potential for tapping e-commerce possibilities, he said it was time the country started making investments in IT infrastructure now. "This is one bus we don't want to miss" he noted and hoped that an infotech policy to deal with e-commerce will be announced within six to eight months.

CBS India executive vice-president (operations) K Subrahmaniam said the company, which has over 4,500 employees in nine locations around the world, uses Microsoft-based solutions for messaging, inventory management, desk support and database management for a range of activities through a company-wide Intranet.

He said DNS is a collaborative project and aimed at giving customers value addition and to run the business smoother. The company has already implemented the e-mail, information storage and retrieval and computing systems to enable all to work with technologies connected with these systems.

Subramanyam said the company has also set up a new e-commerce development centre in Chennai to provide services like consulting and solutions development based on Microsoft's products, platforms and technologies, for existing and potential clients in the global market.