The growth of business-to-business e-commerce has highlighted the importance of computer and communications technologies and trading partner trust for the development and maintenance of business relationships. Cisco Systems Incorporation, an international company, is now the second largest company in the world, behind Microsoft. Its solid financial performance is partly due to its early focus on the Internet as a channel to cut administrative costs, and boost customer service satisfaction. Cisco International provides end-to-end networking solutions which customers use to build a unified information infrastructure of their own, or to connect to someone else’s network. The end-to-end networking solutions provide a common architecture that delivers consistent network services to all users (Cisco Fact Sheet, 2000). Cisco network solutions connect people, computing devices and computer networks, allowing trading partners to access or transfer information without regard to differences in time, place or type of computer systems. By using networked applications over the Internet on its own internal networks, Cisco globally is gaining contributions of at least NZ$825 million a year in operating cost savings and revenue enhancements (Cisco Newsroom, 2001).
End-to-end routing behavior in the Internet
