"Offer something new and different for existing customers and create the next wave of entirely new customer," said Hayward in his keynote address at the two-day strategy 2000 summit on "e-reality" organised by Gartner India. As the drive to "wire" every business to the global economy continues at an ever increasing pace there has been a profound effect on the role of the IT professional as enabler of the extended enterprise, Hayward said, adding that IT and business strategy planning have become the major focus of CIOs and senior business management in the region. This has created a greater urgency on focusing business and IT agenda at the strategic planning stage, thereby reducing impediments to achieving business goals, he noted.

Hayward pointed out that Internet bandwidth is so fast that videos can be viewed on demand with as high a quality as today's broadcast TV. The Internet is easier to use than today's ATMs and its access is free or as good as.

According to him, Internet access devises are free or as good as and there are Internet appliances such as TVs, phones, cars, fridges, microwaves and task specific devices available everywhere. "There is an 80 per cent possibility that much of this will become reality within 3-5 years in urban Australia," he added.

Hayward said that Gartner sees a fast growth in technologies related to E-cash, wireless date, data mining, speech recognition, smart cards and instant-on home devices in next decade. "There will be as many as one billion Internet enabled mobile phones by 2005," he added.

Hayward said that data traffic has already superceded the voice traffic last year and added that the entire economy would be networked in the fast growing wired world.

The next generation mobile phones would have unique feature such voice recognition, fingerprint recognition, second card clot, microcharging and high network date rates. Hayward said that the in the emerging e-business market, government to customer (G2C) market would have a major potential to tap globally. The G2C model would take care of citizen self help applications (e-services) and it would deal with multiple agencies of government seamlessly. The G2C model would also deal with multiple levels of government and it can become an agent for the dissemination of information to interested parties. This would give a personalised web experience such as "megovernment.com" with an ultimate objective of making a better society.

Hayward said that in addition to G2C model, government to government (G2G) and government to enterprise (G2E) models can become more workable in the days to come.