Basing their numbers on the positions, needs, and goals of select businesses, technological trends, current market sizes, and numerous other criteria, Zona believes that these projections are actually on the conservative side.
"Intranet deployment is at a much higher rate than we ever guessed," said Clay Ryder, Zona Research senior industry analyst. "The present use of the Intranet is extremely horizontal. It is not confined to any specific industry."

ANALYSTS CAN'T AGREE : : While some analysts feel that the Zona Research forecast accurately predicts a continued surge of corporate Intranet deployment, others are hesitant to believe that Intranet growth will go unchecked.
"There seems to be a misconception about the pervasiveness of Intranet penetration," said Ray Laracuenta, senior analyst at the Gartner Group in Stamford, CT. "We are seeing the Intranet evolve as embellishments to existing technology, rather than the outright replacement of existing systems."
One of the major obstacles facing Intranet development is the lack of corporate knowledge about what an Intranet is and what it can accomplish, which often results in costly and ineffective business solutions, said Laracuenta.
"It's starting to look like the hammer and nail situation," said Laracuenta. "If I have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The same is happening to companies [that have] an Intranet-every problem begins to look like it has an Intranet solution. Companies must realize that the Intranet may be only part of the solution."
Another dilemma facing companies is the decision between purchasing an Intranet product or waiting six months for a potentially superior solution to arrive.
For example, Prudential, a Newark, N.J.-based insurance financial services company, has developed several Intranet features that they hope to eventually extend to all 90,000-plus employees. However, infrastructure issues and limited browser deployment has curbed Intranet connection to just 6,000 employees.
"Keeping up with the rapid state of change in the technology today is a big challenge," said Mike Mandelbaum, Prudential vice president of information systems. "With companies like Microsoft and Netscape announcing new products at the rate they are, it is a very difficult environment to stay on top of."
Even analysts who concur with Zona's forecast concede that technological improvements will have to be made before Intranet functionality can meet its potential. A void of multi-disciplined programmers will have to be filled to answer fundamental technical shortcomings, said Scott Carlin, head of technology-enabled communications at Raymond James Consulting (Denver, CO).
"It's going to take good programmers who know more than just their environment to connect applications to the Web," said Carlin. "It's not about basic HTML anymore. When we develop Internet- and Intranet-aware applications that go beyond the browser, that's when things get hot."
Laracuenta sees very evident technical shortcomings in middleware - the applications that relate between the user interface and the back-end system to give the user an interactive experience.
"We're seeing the desire to move beyond the static experience," said Laracuenta. "[Companies] want to put 401K changes and work-flow collaboration on the Intranet. These are harder problems to solve because there is a lacking in robust middleware to handle some of these tasks."
Despite slight misgivings about potential Intranet problems, supporters of Zona's forecast believe that these projections are not exaggerated.
"[Zona's] numbers are very reasonable, if not a little conservative," said Carlin. "Most companies have already developed some sort of Intranet-for our clients, the number is more than 80 percent."

'EXTRANETS' ADD VALUE : : Carlin, among others, believe that much of the Intranet market growth will occur from added functionality to existing Intranets, rather than an increasing number of newcomers. One such function that is expected to generate extensive growth is the extended Intranets or "extranets"-a piece of the corporation's Intranet that is made available to customers beyond the firewall.
"The extranet is not truly inside the firewall and it is not truly outside the firewall," said Carlin. "This is where the true benefits are, [because] companies can really develop customer relations."
Companies from many industries have already deployed extranets, including banks, delivery companies, and travel agencies. One notable example is Federal Express, which exposes a piece of its Intranet to give customers the ability to track their packages.
Subarro Goodapaty, senior program analyst at FedEx, said the number of packages being tracked by customers using its Web site has reached 16,000 a day. Such a setup has translated into substantial cost savings because many of these customers would have called the company requiring to talk to a support person.
"They will get thousands of queries each week where they don't have to staff people to answer the phones," said Harry Fenik, Zona Research vice president of technology. "It's better for customers who don't have to wait in line and can get instant support. It's a classic win-win situation."
Other Intranet applications that will be in great demand over the next three years include the collaborative use and sharing of files, the integration of management and training tools and extensive human resources materials, analysts said. A recent Gartner Group survey of 500 companies also found that e-mail and video conferencing are Intranet features atop the corporate wish list.

RELATED ARTICLES : :

• Internet, Intranet markets passed $5.3 billion in 1995, PCWeek, May, 1996
• The Intranet Platform: A Universal Client?, PC Magazine, April 1996
• 'Intranets' Spread Within Firms, Inter@ctive, November, 1995