The Power of Intranets
			by Bill Petro

In the last 18 months, I have traveled over 300,000 miles speaking on a
variety of subjects, the most frequently requested being the Internet
and Java. What I'm most keen about speaking on is the Intranet, for
a simple and compelling reason: it's where the money is being spent.
Zona Research estimates that this year companies will spend more on
Intranet deployment than what they spend on the Internet. This trend
will increase so that Intranet spending is expected to be twice that for
Internet spending beginning in 1997. Two-thirds of large US companies are
already building intranets* and last year spent US$2.3B on collaborative
products, twice the amount spent the previous year.

The numbers are just as impressive when expressed as the difference
between a company's internal versus external Web servers. It is not
uncommon to see five to fifty times as many internal Web servers as
external. Oracle has about 12 external Internet servers and over 600
internal intranet servers. IBM has about 20 Internet servers and over
1,000 intranet servers. Sun has close to 100 external sites, including
the SunSITES, but over 3,000 internal Web servers, or about one for every
10 employees. At last count, we had over 300,000 pages of Web content.

Definition and Comparisons:

By "Intranet," I am referring to that part of the Network which is
inside an organization's firewall. (And by firewall, I'm referring the
mechanism/software that protects a site's data assets from outside
invasion by monitoring and filtering traffic across the Internet
connection.) It is the private, rather than the public part of the "Net",
and is sometimes referred to as the "Enterprise." But it is more than just
this year's name for the Enterprise, and involves technologies, processes,
and usages that evolve over time, which we will explore in future columns.

The Intranet and Internet are similar in that both take advantage of
standards that are open and universally available. For example, TCP/IP
is increasingly being seen as the "lingua franca" of internetworking
protocols.  HTTP is emerging as the browsing protocol and HTML as the
documentation format. Popular browsers are the "viewers" into the internal
and external Web, browsers like Mosaic, Navigator, Explorer or HotJava.
And both the intranet and Internet are accepting Java as the technology
for dynamic and interactive Web pages. Forrester Research reports that
of the Global 1000 firms they surveyed, more than a third expect Java
to play a strategic role in their companies within the next year.

There is another important parallel as well. Companies want to use
the intranet and Internet for both information and transactions.
In the Internet information is expressed through a Web presence. In the
intranet this is done through collaborative communication. The intranet
sees transactions provided through applications and services. Businesses
expect an internetworked marketplace for transactions on the Internet.

Opportunities:

Businesses are looking for ways of integrating their internal business
processes. This is one of IT's greatest challenges and a business's
biggest opportunity. If a company can reduce their cost of administration
they can reduce their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). This directly impacts
their ROI (Return On Investment) and makes them more competitive. If these
seem to be too many TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) a couple of years ago,
this was called "re-engineering."

Intranet values:

An introductory business class will tell you that to be successful a
business wants to decrease costs, enhance productivity and improve both
employee and customer satisfaction... to increase revenues. I'll give
just a few examples of how Sun has used its internal Intranet to address
these values.

    - Decreased costs:

Sun distributes a quarterly employee magazine. By putting it on-line
in our internal SunWeb, rather than printing it on paper and trying to
keep the mailing list up to date, we've saved approximately two-thirds
of the production and distribution costs. Additionally, we can have more
timely articles.

Our corporate on-line human resources reference used to be on a
proprietary commercial search and retrieval document platform. By moving
it to our SunWeb and using standard intranet formats we've saved about
US$1.2M per year.

The Sun price book is about 400 pages long and is distributed to several
thousand field people monthly. As any timely document, it is out of date
as soon as it is printed. Now it is published on the internal SunWeb
and is easily updated and corrected, has hypertext links to relevant
configuration information and other products. And it saves about 60%
in printing costs.

All told, Sun has realized documentation distribution and workflow
savings of US$25M per year.

    - Improved communication:

When I was a product marketing manager, field and other internal
staff would contact me by phone or email for strategic information on
the products I managed. If I was traveling or otherwise unavailable,
critical time could be lost. With the advent of the SunWeb I was able to
make all my information available on-line, long before it was to appear
in printed form: product specs, sheets, customer presentations, FAQs,
whitepapers, and pricing pages.

    - Enhanced productivity:

Sun's "Try & Buy" program, which allows customers to try out software
and then unlock the licensing protection, has cut its order time from
two weeks to just minutes. Our internal IT organization uses the internal
Web connected to a database to track assets and distribute reports.

    - Customer satisfaction:

SunSoft uses a new on-line literature fulfillment process that
significantly speeds orders and allows customers to more accurately
request what they need. SunExpress, Sun's aftermarket group, can accept
orders via phone, fax, or the Web.

Next time we'll look at how other companies are reducing costs and
increasing profits.

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* Forrester Research