Technology

There are numerous technologies developed to a commendable level in the last few years.
Almost all the businesses experienced a different change in various operations. The advent of internet in the area in the business sector resulted into some marvelous achievements by facilitating transactions, ordering and selling processes. It became possible from the electronic business or of E-Business. E-Business allows transactions over electronic medium or internet. Internet was initially, evolved as a mode of sharing, nobody had thought of selling and purchasing goods or commodities over the internet. The commercial viability of the internet gradually developed with time. These days, it has become quiet common to pay, sell, buy or order through internet. One of the common e-commerce website is e-bay.

Electronic business methods enable companies to link their internal and external data processing systems more efficiently and flexibly, to work more closely with suppliers and partners, and to better satisfy the needs and expectations of their customers. (Varlan, 2010)

Types of E-Businesses
E-Business can be classified on the basis of provider and consumers. It can be between two parties in the following ways.

Business-to-business (B2B)
This exists between two business entities. The concept is the same as the traditional business mode. The only thing is that the transactions and ordering process becomes easier and faster in this model.

Business-to-consumer (B2C)
This is a form of retail electronic business or e-tailing. Wal-Mart, E-bay, Amazon.com are some of the leading examples where the individual customer can browse products from the product categories, check the specifications, select the product and place the order by paying it.

Business-to-employee (B2E)
Businesses can use this platform for their intra-business activities, offering products and services to their employees. Businesses utilize this platform for employee discounts, supply requests, announcements, reporting and others.

Recent Developments of Technology
In the recent past, there have been various developments in the area of e-business and related technologies. The companies developing Enterprise Resource Planning packages like Oracle, SAP and others have realized the role and benefits of e-commerce in the present business. They have developed particular packages to deal with the needs of the organizations. There have been various developments in the Middleware in order to facilitate the backend operations to the front end. Developments in the recent past took place in the areas of legacy, client server and internet based computing, access gateway, network interface, communication interfaces, security of transactions, information and data, integration with CTI (Computer telephony)  mainly. Companies have focused in developing better programming languages and easy and secured application execution services. Development and upgrades in COBRA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) helped in streaming business and application logics. There are various types of middleware developed in the recent past like database middleware, message middleware, transaction middleware and many others.

Merits and Demerits of E-Business-
E-commerce like any other business solutions has its own merits and demerits. Some of the most common merits are as follows

E-commerce provides easy and fast services at door step. It has potential of reducing time, money, efforts and others resources used for the commercial processes. Advertising and promotions through electronic means is easy and cheaper and it also saves the market space and you deal with customers at home convince.

Cost of entry is very low. The initial capital or investment requirements are low. The human resource requirements are less as compared to the traditional processes. It can be easily maintained by updating the site time-to-time.

Regulations and restrictions such as geographic limits are very limited. Business can take place 247 and around the globe.

The recent development have helped in improving this platform in terms of scalability, LDAP support, improved architecture, performance, security and fault tolerance.

However, the demerits of the e-commerce are also very important to understand. These are as follows
The threat for the breakage of cyber security and cyber crime leads to the chances of financial losses (Calkins et al, 2000).

Few websites are fraudulent and as soon as you enter your login credentials they captures everything you type and send them to a email address given in the software this application is called as key logger which gets installed as soon as you open such websites without your permission (Dawson, 2003).
Due to credit card frauds and scams customers are reluctant to buy or to do business over the internet and to prove the validity customer might need to purchase a certificate from verisign or godaddy which may cost yearly to business owner (Chaudhury and Kuilboer, 2002).

Businesses need to spend some money in updating their web server with the updated definitions of antivirus and need to buy a dyn-dns or a static ip address to host their website.

Complexity of the website may lead to loss of sales or business. The complexity can come from the content published on the website, intractability of web pages and alternates available to the customer.
Any up gradation involves lots of money. The ERP software is not only expensive at initial levels but also the maintenance and service charges are high.

Recommendations
E-Businessuses expert E-architects to develop a comprehensive online strategy to accomplish business goals for branding, functionality, audience and traffic through a well designed website.

Trust and Faith of Customer
The process of acquiring customer trust is a tedious process. The reason to this is that trust cannot blossom simply as a result of an expensive marketing campaign or a spiffed-up image. It is all about repetition (Millard, 2003)

Amazon and eBay has customer trusts and that has helped these websites to develop a large customer base.

Staying Steady
The organization needs to be trustworthy as well as reliable for the customers to make e-transactions. Customer values companies which are reliable in their offerings, transactions, service, delivery and accessibility of the websites. These factors help in customer retention.

Proactive Response
There are some companies like Orbitz which are proactive in their services. They notify their travelers when flights are delayed through cell phone and e-mails. Companies like Dell ensure that their customers get the right products, timely and good services. Trusted sites need to maintain their reputations. This is a continuous process in which leading companies are involved. This is probably the best reason for these companies to maintaining their image at top of the mind of their target customers.

Conclusion
The entire outlook of the business world can change if e-business is used appropriately and efficiently. The primary and secondary benefits of the e-businesses are worthy enough to consider this platform for the business processes. In the recent past, more focus has been given to developing architecture, better security of the transactions and integration of different business modules.