Irving Wladawsky-Berger, general manager of IBM's Internet Division, defines the difference between "e-commerce" and "e-business": "E-commerce is all about buying and selling (on the Internet) and all the processes that support buying and selling, such as advertising, marketing, customer support, credit-card activities and the like. E-business, in addition to encompassing e-commerce, includes lots of applications to help business run more efficiently. It also includes more internal applications for linking employees together and helping employees work more productively.

E-business also involves publishing and accessing information. So e-commerce and e-business are two halves of the same coin. E-business is the grand strategy, and e-commerce is an extremely important subset of e-business."

(Investor's Business Daily 4 Nov.)