Publication Date: September 20, 1996

Related articles - Net Asset: Intranets Have Much To Offer Businesses and 20 Intranet Lessons Gleaned From Major Companies

Corporate America Goes Intranet Shopping

By Sue Mellen

Intranets are all the rage in corporate America these days—and with good reason. According to Patricia O'Hern, senior Internet consultant with Utopia, Inc. of Waltham, Mass., companies are turning to intranets for the immediate paybacks they offer, both in reduced equipment and maintenance costs and increased productivity. "I saw a statistic recently that said one month with the Internet/intranet is like two-and-one-half normal years. Companies learned how helpful e-mail could be. Now they’re learning the value of intranets."

Utopia, Inc. is itself a microcosmic example of the growth and proliferation of intranet technology. The two-year-old, full-service Internet consulting business is virtually bursting out of its space. O'Hern says that Utopia, which provides "one-stop shopping" for companies seeking to employ Internet tools, has found that firms are filling their shopping carts to the brim. And—as if they were shopping in a discount warehouse—they're spending money in the expectation of savings.

Cost is the real issue driving the explosive growth in intranets, O'Hern says. Training costs are negligible and the necessary infrastructure is often already in place. The communications system will operate on most existing client/server networks. "And you can use an intranet across any platform and on most desktop equipment. That saves money for a lot of companies, who may have Macs and IBMs of every description," she says.

According to a recent survey by Network World's Professional Development Group, U.S. corporations are already devoting an average of 25 percent of their IT budgets for intranets. The survey places an average corporate IT budget at about $10.3 million, with intranet spending accounting for an average of $2.6 million of that.

The survey, which was conducted at the June and July Network World technical seminar series "Intranets, Technologies, Tools and Strategies," polled more than 400 corporate and network IS managers from all across the country. It found that more than half of all employees at participating organizations have access to corporate intranets.

As William Reinstein, senior vice president for business development at Framingham, Mass.-based Network World, Inc., points out: "It only makes sense that intranets should become a major market segment for IT. This is not a jump like the one from mainframe to client/server technology. The technology is already there. It’s just a matter of implementing it to suit your corporate needs."

Utopia’s O’Hern says that the move toward intranets is part of a process that actually started with the corporate use of the Internet as an integral part of business strategy. The implementation of corporate intranets is the next stage, with the culmination a move toward collaborative networks between people both inside and outside a particular corporation and using whatever medium works best in a given situation—whether that’s intranets or the Internet.

"The whole technology space is moving very quickly into the area of groupware, which I’m using to mean systems designed for a collaborative team approach both internal and external to the company," O'Hern says. The best way to refer to the blending technology, she says, may now be "int'net."

Sue Mellen writes from Tyngsboro, Mass.

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A wide variety of Internet-related topics, including intranets, will be covered at DCI's Internet Expo. For more articles on this topic, please see Net Asset: Intranets Have Much To Offer Businesses and 20 Intranet Lessons Gleaned From Major Companies.

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