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The news that Hewlett Packard is trying to reinvent itself as a consultancy business by buying the consulting arm of PriceWaterhouseCoopers should come as no surprise.

As one of the biggest PC and printer manufacturers in the world, HP has plenty of funds in its war chest and consultancy is an obvious area for expansion.

Not only are HP's technology consulting services a booming area, but figures unveiled last week at the annual IDC Technology forum show consulting is currently the leading internet adopter industry, with the highest share of the expected $394 billion to be spent on web technology in the year to end 2001.

The global skills shortage makes the PwC deal an even more attractive move for HP since IDC estimates an overall shortage of 1.7 million jobs in Europe and that 90 per cent of that demand shortfall will be felt by business and industry. Only six per cent of the demand comes from technology vendors and dotcoms and four per cent from media and government.

The skills shortage is now the biggest factor holding back the development of the internet in Western Europe, with training programmes and plans to import labour, being implemented too late to solve the problem in the short term.

IDC researchers, unveiling a number of reports at their Monaco summit, looked at both the amounts of money being invested and the level of sophistication in the planned implementation of internet business processes. The study found that retail banking and the food, retail and wholesale industries were planning the most advanced use of the net.

But when it came to spending plans, it was consulting and banking that were leading the way in terms of the size of the investments they were making.

The study found that European companies take on average 25 per cent longer to evaluate and implement technology than their US competitors. There are five times as many web start-ups in the US as in Europe, and the average venture capital investment is now $10m in the US, seven times the European average.

On the consumer side, IDC found that among West Europeans, the British were least likely to trust the internet and the most likely to say it was too expensive; the French were the least likely to be interested in the internet; and the Nordics were the most likely to say that it was too difficult to use.

Across Europe, 10 per cent of retail bank accounts are already online and this will rise to 30 per cent by 2004.



Nick Rosen is a director of The Online Research Agency. email: nick@online-agency. com or tel: 0797 1543703.