$1 billion mark by the turn of the century. While bigger firms, such as Andersen Consulting and KPMG, get situated, more nimble firms are jumping in and landing contracts.
"It's a whole new ball game," says Jon Brovitz, director of marketing at Epoch Networks (Irvine, CA). "Companies have invested millions of dollars in their legacy systems. Now these systems need to be scaled up, and the most efficient way to do that is through intranets. In many cases, one of the big-six accounting firms did the initial work, but small- to medium-size shops like ours are jumping in to do lots of the intranet work."
"An intranet can provide vast amounts of internal and external informa
tion that competitors don't have," adds
Sam Vinson
, owner of Intra-Link Intranets (San Diego, CA), a VAR and software-development firm. "Intranets can capture data from suppliers, business partners, customers, and salespeople and present it all in a very usable fashion."
Prior to the advent of the Web, the
integration challenges
involved with pulling all this disparate information together were too great to make such efforts worthwhile. Now integration is just a hyperlink away, and VARs and integrators are first in line to deliver the goods. Take, for example, Intra-Link's sales-automation software. The company supplies a middleware data broker to simplify the process of grabbing information from legacy data stores and generating HTML code to the Web. Its main market is small- to medium-sized financial brokerage houses that are looking to intranet technology to simplify communications between headquarters and the field.
"Account reps and brokers need to
connect with account data, determine commissions, and locate myriad documents -- often from remote locations," Vinson explains. "With a properly designed intranet, they can click on a hyperlink in a Web-browser screen to access all this and more."
Companies contract with VARs and integrators for intranet-development services because these firms have not only basic Web-development expertise but also integrated solutions to solve some of the thorniest tasks facing corporate developers. "That's the whole idea behind bringing in a VAR or reseller in the first place," explains Troy Troxler, Web-development manager at Epoch Networks. "We don't just provide the tools piecemeal; we integrate solutions to entire business problems."
Epoch offers custom software solutions for Internet security, dial-in access, fax broadcasting, chat/conferencing systems, and on-line transactions. "Having a product bundled with your services helps customers understand just what an intranet can do for them," Troxler says.
Other companies are turning to VARs and integrators to jump-start intranet projects because of their targeted market expertise. VARs can come in with a more seasoned perspective than internal IT folks have, since they've seen how a number of companies and organizations have solved similar problems.
Perspective is important in the intranet realm because it's so difficult to come by. With the Web, anyone can gather ideas by moving from one site to the next. But most of the best intranet systems are behind firewalls. Furthermore, because many of these systems are so new, the stories about their capabilities have not yet spread to the developer community.
"Many intranet systems are much more compelling than what you see when you browse the Web," says Bryan Menell, customer-management-initiative leader at BSG (Austin, TX). The systems are carefully integrated with an organization's key business processes and back-office systems, he adds.
Menell's group focuses on customer support. BSG uses the
Vantive Enterprise suite of client/server applications to help its clients leverage customer information on an enterprise-wide basis (see the sidebar "Is Anybody Watching?"). BSG uses Vantive Enterprise for two primary reasons: It's a comprehensive product line, and its open architecture simplifies systems-integration issues. Many of BSG's customers are telecommunications companies, such as MCI and Southwest Bell, but the 65-person consulting division does work for other large companies as well, including American Express and Merck.
"Integrators and VARs can bring highly targeted expertise to customers in their chosen vertical markets," Menell says. "They continually see what's on the leading edge, which helps them arrive at a workable understanding of 'best practice' within their problem domains."
Troxler concurs. "After you've seen eight or 10 companies devise an innovative approach to a particular problem, you're able to bring a very broad, very knowledgeable perspective to that problem," he sa
ys. "It's rare that customers would arrive at that same level of understanding on their own."
Building the Apps
Most VARs say the biggest issue they face when implementing intranets is security (see the sidebar "Security First"). The second-biggest concern is content management. "We often spend more time assessing needs than actually producing a site," Troxler says. "Companies might know their own business systems well yet still not have the experience to pick the right pieces and put them on-line. That's one of the things we find lacking -- the ability to organize."
Others say the number-one issue with regard to Web applications development is having a well thought-out vision of the application. "A lot of firms see the technical and financial benefits of running an application on a Web server, but few of them can visualize what that application will look like," explains Douglas Mow, manager of Web channel sales at Information Builders (New York). "It's the job of the integrator
to flesh that out."
Once the infrastructural issues are dealt with, the actual Web-site development is often fast by comparison. "Low-cost, high-speed development cycles make long debates over design a waste of time," says Forrester Research's Eric G. Brown. "The new push will be to get applications into end users' hands fast."
"There's usually no need for lengthy analysis-and-design stuff," adds BSG's Menell. "The highly structured, step-by-step approaches just aren't effective anymore. The idea is to get something up there fast. If it doesn't work, you fix it."
With regard to development tools, most corporate developers agree that writing the HTML layer is the least-important aspect of the process. "All the tools can do that pretty well," admits Powell Hamilton, Epoch's director of systems and applications. "Far more important to us are the tools for interfacing front-end Web processes with back-end database activities." Members of Hamilton's team favor the Oracle Web Server for this purp
ose because they believe Oracle has a cohesive vision for network computing. He also stresses the importance of knowing C++, Java, Perl, and CGI scripting to establish high-performance transaction-processing environments.
Staying Afloat
Another big issue that customers face is deciding how to manage their intranets after the developers are gone. Frank Martino, president of Seafood Credit (Hicksville, NY), says that this was a prerequisite for his firm's intranet project -- and one of the main reasons it hired consultants from Computer Associates (CA) (see the sidebar "Keeping Information Fresh at Seafood Credit").
CA brought its CA-Unicenter tools to the task -- an end-to-end systems-management environment now tailored to Web servers and the intranets they support. It handles security, event and storage management, resource accounting, and database monitoring. "We can focus on the business issues and outsource all the technical stuff," Martino explains.
Intra-Link's Vinson
believes that effectively linking an intranet with legacy applications and databases is the best way to simplify content management. "There are usually administrators in-house who are comfortable with existing systems," he says. "The idea is to leverage what's already there, to establish an intranet that dynamically updates the Web site based on changes to the underlying databases."
Intra-Link relies on Bluestone's
Sapphire/Web
for this purpose because of its native database connections. Sapphire/Web is a rapid application development (RAD) tool set designed for Internet/intranet development. "Many of the legacy systems being placed on-line are very proprietary," Vinson explains. "It's not always easy to integrate HTML with these systems. You need a Web-development environment that's open enough to handle this integration for you."
The Right Skills
Information Builders' Mow cautions companies who are hiring small integration outfits to look not just for as
tute Web developers, but for good project managers as well. "Project management is an essential tool, but it's something that many smaller firms don't have," he says. "Some of these intranet applications start small but can end up massive. Scope-creep is common."
What will the future hold? The vision is constantly shifting, but there's an excitement that most VARs say they've never experienced before. "Just look at something that's fast becoming routine, like ordering products over the Web," Vinson explains. "Customer orders and inventory updates can go directly into a database. Think of all the time that saves; phone calls, faxes, data entry, and file searches can now all be automated with intranet technology. It's opening up a whole new world of opportunities."
Where to Find
Bluestone, Inc.
Mount Laurel, NJ
Phone: 609-727-4600
Internet:
http://www.bluestone.com
Intranet Politics and Technologies
