Big 5 Offer E-biz Strategies

Big 5 consultants are offering new e-biz strategies for high-tech companies. New services offered by Ernst & Young, LLP [1] (E&Y) and KPMG [2] allow clients to benchmark their business decisions and IT investments in areas such as hosted applications and e-commerce.

E&Y now offers application service providers (ASP) an auditing service that judges the ASP’s ability to securely host and manage rentable, web-based applications. The service begins with objectives and ends with a judgment on the ASP’s systems and controls in relation to those objectives. E&Y plans to announce later this week a major partnership with a vendor that will develop and offer a complete line of ASP services under E&Y’s management consulting division.

Of course, this is good news for companies looking to sell their wares. An “okay” by a Big 5 firm is an open invitation to sell customers on the recommendation. It’s also a good time for the Internet to have access to these services, with the ASP market poised to explode from the current $2 billion to about $22 billion by 2003.

Not to be left off the bandwagon, KPMG has just announced its new service called Saved. The new offering is a three-week assessment of e-commerce systems along with recommended improvements. Saved is aimed at startups or traditional companies that have had problems with deploying or maintaining their e-commerce initiatives.