News Analysis: Lightening the load with IT investments
Intranets can help corporates get ahead of the competition, but first they have to get beyond email
Almost every week we read the latest figures on exploding corporate uptake of the intranet. But dig deeper, and we find that the primary use of these internets is internal communications, such as email. The same is true for the much touted extranet ? the extension of the private Net to customers and partners.
But if corporations are to invest millions of pounds and gain serious competitive advantage from the intranet and the associated shift of computing approaches, they will want to do more with it than just exchange memos. If the progress of the intranet is to be sustained, serious business applications must be successfully deployed by the pioneers, or the dominance of client/server will hardly be dented.
The announcement by retail giant Safeway that it is to move all its applications to network computers linked across the intranet to servers indicates how the market may go. The supermarket chain?s programme is radical: it is to replace 800 PCs this year with NCs and migrate decision support and office applications, followed by some transaction processing.
Safeway is using its wholesale architecture rethink as an excuse to introduce new policies on IT ? notably that everyone in any kind of decision-making role, however junior, should have business intelligence tools on their desks. The firm believes the NC approach makes this practical by lowering the cost and complexity of installing sophisticated tools.
Most corporations that want to go beyond email are likely to look to decision support and office applications for their next move towards the intranet. Surveys, such as recent one from BT, indicate that they are still nervous about entrusting their critical OLTP functions to an architecture that puts such heavy demands on the network, and that relies on a browser interface that many IT traditionalists still regard as flaky.
But decision support and office apps are less business critical, and lend themselves to the NC approach ? mass deployment with low cost of ownership and training, but with tight central control from the server.
The software developers to take advantage of the trend will be those that offer companies a comfortable migration path from client/server to thin client/fat server and intranet. John Morley, European head of Brio, claims this is why his company?s business intelligence suite has been selected by Safeway for its overhaul of corporate decision making. It can operate in client/server mode for those users who already have powerful PCs, while new users are started off with the Web version on an NC. Migration between the two should then be relatively painless.
?Business intelligence is now the major driver of the Web,? he said. ?There is pressure on the IT department to deliver more functionality for less money in less time, and the Web helps them do this.?
Morley claimed that virtually all new sales of the toolset have some Web components. ?Most clients have a Web server and want a small amount of client/ server, with the majority of deployment via the Web,? he said. The advantages to corporates are low cost of training and maintenance, ease of upgrading software and the ability to support remote and mobile users.
There are still good reasons to stick with at least some client/server for decision support, though. Some functions are still not feasible with Web-based tools, such as handling of certain specialised report types and data models. Joining data sets from different databases also requires reasonable client horsepower, so that hefty PCs are necessary for power users and for systems staff creating new views of data.
There are also some performance issues when accessing relational databases via the Web server when carrying out complex tasks, admitted Morley, who believes companies should stick to a mixture of Web and client/server models for the foreseeable future.
Buyers also need to watch out for firms promising Web-enabled tools that have limited functions ? some can publish results via the Web, but actual processing, such as creating new reports, cannot be done in this way and still requires significant PC horsepower.
In other words, as with most technical advances, users must ensure the new approach suits their needs rather than following fashion. But it does seem that the Web and NCs will be important in achieving what decision support vendors have talked about for years ? getting serious tools out to a far wider section of corporates.
Netscape appears to have taken the view that business intelligence is key to the uptake of its browser technology, too. It has formed an alliance with decision support tools makers to support a core set of standards in this area. Together with Sun and Brio, Netscape will host an international series of seminars to promote data warehouse and Olap systems based on these Web standards.
?Providing business intelligence across the enterprise means bringing together the best of the client/server and Web-based worlds,? said Chris Grejtak, VP of marketing at Brio.
On the office front, Corel is pinning many of its future hopes on its early start in the NC/Java-based office applications field. It hopes to set out its stall in this area while chief rival Microsoft still hesitates, torn between the desire to remain ubiquitous and reluctance to see the higher margins and greater control that it enjoys in the Wintel market shrivel away.