While goat-and-cotton kind of deals are struck even today, its done differently. Instead of meeting regularly at the market, my computer tells yours that a thousand goats were shipped to your farms on Monday. And my computer is told that five thousand bales of cotton will be delivered to my warehouse on Thursday.

While no money changed hands, information travelled through a private network, using electronic interchange (EDI). This is known as electronic commerce or e-commerce. E-commerce has been around for over thirty years and companies have been using it with good results.

The Internet has just made it easier and a lot more affordable for a very simple reason. In the past, if two companies had to be linked together, both of them had to spend a lot of money to hammer their systems into a common shape.

The Internet does away with this problem because it is built on a common, globally accepted protocol.

Therefore, companies can leverage their external linkages and achieve tremendous efficiency.

There is also an opportunity for companies to fine-tune their internal operations. In the past, corporates couldn’t incorporate technology like enterprise resource planning (ERP) packages because it was awfully expensive.

The Internet, however, has driven down these costs by allowing companies the freedom to rent these packages from the web. Moreover, there are smaller companies offering customised solutions at a fraction of earlier costs.

For Indian companies, it offers a great opportunity. With the burden of costs done away, the Internet allows companies to incorporate the best business practices available today.

Unfortunately, the investments that need to go into making all of this possible, does not attract top-of-the-mind attention.