Internet Services

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Corporate America Gets a New Front End (cont)

'Competitive Advantage'

"Web applications offer a competitive advantage," said Castle, who also spoke at the Zona conference. "They offer the ability to quickly provide information to clients, and let us have applications that reach outside the firewall. The speed is real-time, and that's important in our business."

For most companies, the initial deployment of Web applications is for internal use. Applications that provide information from payroll, human resource and benefits departments have sprouted up quickly, and should not be taken lightly.

Dan Mallin, electronic marketplace manager at Imation Corp., said putting the company's benefits manual online resulted in significant cost savings.

"The cost of producing, distributing and updating a paper version of the benefits manual was enormous," said Mallin, whose company is a spin-off of 3M that handles that company's former coated-media product division. Although Imation's intranet is used for far more purposes, Mallin said "we could almost cost-justify the whole project on the [manual] savings alone."

Mallin and other users are also exploring the possibility of using the proposed low-cost Network Computers to further cut costs. The NCs will use only a browser and a small OS, relying on the network for the balance of information storage and computing power.

"When I first heard about the NC, I thought it was a ho-hummer," said FedEx's Stephenson. But with Web apps increasing, Stephenson said now he thinks NCs "may have some value."

"We have 50,000 [IBM] 3270 terminals that don't work anymore," Stephenson said. "We're going to buy a lot of something, and cost will be an issue."

And even as Microsoft moves to incorporate Java inside its ActiveX architecture, the company's lack of cross-platform capabilities already has driven users to competing offerings. Recreational Equipment Inc. (better known as REI), a Seattle-area cooperative that sells outdoor sporting goods and clothing, used Netscape server software to set up its Web site, which lets customers order goods online.

Matt Hyde, REI's online store manager, said its Web page is linked directly to the company's inventory databases, which are on a wide range of platforms including Novell LANs, IBM AS/400 systems and Unix boxes.

"We want to have thousands of products available online by next year, and there was no way we could keep up by hard-authoring to each database," Hyde said. Netscape's server technology, Hyde said, was able to interface with all of the different database platforms.

"The browser as a development platform thrills me," Hyde said, especially because REI's potential customer base encompasses anyone with a Web browser and Internet access. "It's client/server computing where you have no control over the client," Hyde said. "It's much simpler to have technology that lets us have one application to deliver information to both employees and customers."

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