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IN a message which should provide some comfort to shop owners, the director of the Internet Commerce Group at Sun Microsystems said commerce on the Net was not about to replace the shopping arcade.

   Michelle Arden said although much of the commercialisation of the Internet had taken place this year, most of the development had been 'interior to businesses'.

  Ms Arden was speaking on commerce and security on the Internet at the Internet conference, Executives in Cyberspace, held in Hong Kong last week.

   'We really see business investment as the key. A lot of people are looking to the end user, but it's not plug-and-play enough, it's not solution-oriented enough. Let's face it, would you pay a lot more money to buy sweaters over the Internet?' she said.

   The seemingly boundless possibilities opened up by the Internet have been hyped to such an extent that many people are confused about how the Net is going to be used commercially.

   Even if sweaters are out, the Internet still exerts a great appeal for those interested in doing business on it.

  Sun Microsystems is itself in an excellent position to take advantage of the Net, being an expert in networking and Internet-related fields and providing much of the technology for the underlying backbone of the Internet itself.

   Sun is hoping that HotJava - its technology to enable multimedia on the World-Wide Web - will help encourage interactive commerce on the Net.

   Ms Arden said: 'People ask me, 'How does Sun make money out of Java?' Sun makes money out of Java because people come to Sun for Internet solutions. We can tell them about the rest of our Internet products, including servers.'    She sees companies such as Microsoft as potential competition, but warns that trying to find a cheap solution may not be the right answer.

   'People are looking for cost of ownership. That's the thing in the IT [information technology] world. People are asking themselves, 'What is it really going to cost?' for the applications, the networking and the maintenance?' Ms Arden said.

  However, Sun is aware of the costs.

   'Sun is aggressive about keeping the cost of ownership low. That's one of the reasons we have been competitive in the enterprise server market,' Ms Arden said.

   'We have a phenomenal expertise in networking which is the core competency of the decade. People are looking for reliable and fast networking solutions and I think we have demonstrated that we can do that,' Ms Arden said.

   HotJava was on show at the networking conference and impressed those who saw it.

  Five years in the making, 'Java was initially developed as a language for embedded devices. We were thinking set-top boxes; we were thinking embedded building control systems,' Ms Arden said.

  'We were thinking of all sorts of devices where you didn't know what was on the other end. With no idea what the platform was - it had to be platform-independent.

  'We wanted a high degree of customisation; we wanted robustness.

  'Quite frankly we found a lot of these advantages played right into the Internet.'   Turning to security on the Internet, Ms Arden said it was an issue that concerned many people.

  She spoke about the potential problems.

   A typical bank robbery, she said, would net the robbers about US$9,000 (HK$69,570); white-collar crimes such as embezzlement could net about $25,000; electronic crime, however, was easily the most lucrative at $650,000.

  She said an interesting aspect of computer crime was that most of it came from within an organisation. The Hollywood image of teenage hackers sneaking in over the telephone lines at night might be dramatic but it was quite far from the truth.

  Nevertheless, there had been a 77 per cent increase in computer crime from 1994 to 1995, she said. In the US there were 200 computer 'security incidents' every month.

  Ms Arden said it was important that the end users of a business knew what security was right for them.

   Ms Arden noted the recent spate of breaks of Netscape's software was an example of how the Internet worked at its best. Netscape had tried to do things by themselves but after the 'attacks' they opened up the discussion and made good progress in plugging the holes. This showed the sophistication of the group.

  Sun had very sophisticated security and authentication systems, she said. There would, however, always be tradeoffs.

   If you wanted a system to be as secure as possible, it was likely that it would be more difficult to use. It might also cost a great deal more money to implement.

   When thinking of the system that met your needs, these factors also had to be considered, she said.



Internet commerce is secure, says Sun