Virtuality as a Strategic Approach for Small and Medium Sized IT Companies to Stay Competitive in a Global Market

Change has been a feature of the IT industry right from the outset. This change comes primarily from advances in technology and these are continuing today. Many “core technologies” are still undergoing a transformation which makes clear positioning of companies in the marketplace difficult. One of the most dramatic changes in recent years has, without doubt, been the global availability of public networks. The Internet can be regarded as the precursor of such networks. Research material on the impact of this technology on business organization and strategy contains a large number of exploratory works (see Cronin 1996; Angell and Heslop 1995; Barnatt 1995). Conceptual works are still rare and their praxeological content is often unclear (see Quelch and Klein 1996; Bradesko 1995).