Custom Intranet Services

Paving the way for electronic commerce.

Electronic commerce over the Internet could reach an annual level of $150 billion by the year 2000, some analysts say. Electronic commerce is in the embryonic states in Asia, but many companies are gearing up their intranet-based services or private-access networks for businesses.

This summer, for example, Pacific Internet, a Singapore-based Internet service provider, will be in full swing with services that the company says are up to nine times cheaper than the competition. These services will inc lude personalized ISDN access, ISDN leased lines, FTP servers, and, of course, firewalls to protect customers.

On the software side, Ziran later this year should be in production with its intranet solution, called the Ziran Internet Communicator for Asia (ZICA). ZICA is an input system that will allow businesses to access Web sites in Chinese, including the traditional character set used in Taiwan, the simplified version used in China, and the slightly different flavors used in Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, says Eric Chappell, Ziran's managing director. ZICA runs on the PC and the Mac and includes a Chinese-language browser, input system, e-mail, and search engine.

Sun Microsystems is working with the Chinese University of Hong Kong on a Chinese version of Sun's HotJava browser. Other Chinese-language packages are expected to surface later this year.