The battle for the Internet

From nerd’s plaything to business tool in just a couple of years, the Internet has managed to transform itself more rapidly than any technology that has made the leap from hobbyist to corporate markets.

Yet, for all the talk about the business uses of the Internet, it still doesn’t have the same gravitas as more traditional corporate technologies.

The Internet is exciting but still little understood and the general confusion is being exacerbated by the erupting standards wars, notably between Netscape and Microsoft. The main driver behind them is not technology or user need but commercial politics, with the anti-Microsoft contingent spotting an ideal opportunity to attack the enemy on the back of Netscape.

Critical to the uptake of Internet technologies for core enterprise applications are the management consultancies, whose advice and support will be widely called upon.

A huge opportunity then – but until now, they have seemed ambivalent about this whole area of technology. The big firms typically have advisory programmes monitoring the uptake of Internet, but nitty-gritty, hands-on systems building is less common. One of the most common corporate complaints about the Internet explosion is that there are inadequate sources of information and practical help available to aid them in making decisions about the technology.

A major step towards changing this pattern, and making Internet respectable in the blue-chips was made in October when Andersen Consulting and Cambridge Technology Partners said they would promote Sun Microsoft’s Java Web-based software environment to their clients. They are putting their money where their mouth is, establishing centres of expertise in several countries and hiring hundreds of Java specialists, still a rare and expensive breed.

One of the effects of this announcement, which will doubtless be emulated by other consultancies, is to reinforce Java’s position as the corporate face of the Web, and its almost unassailable dominance of this market.

Even Sun’s bitterest rivals in the increasingly political Internet market are having to support Java. notably Microsoft.

The appeal of such technologies, which for some large clients is starting to outweigh the uncertainty factor, is that it can largely overcome the problems of incompatible platforms and expensive legacy systems that most IT departments grapple with. The Internet camp, led by Sun, Oracle and Netscape, argue that the corporate client/server system of the future will rest on the “thin client” – a stripped down personal computer that exists primarily to download applications and data across the Internet or intranet; the browser, the main user interface; software technologies such as Java and Microsoft ActiveX that link established applications to the world of the Internet; and massive data servers holding all the Web pages and corporate databases to which the new-style applications link.

The upsides of this theory are low cost client-end computing, a new computing framework that can be implemented relatively quickly and cheaply, strong central management of systems and user access, a cheap entry into corporate networking and the global public network. The downsides are the time and effort that will be spent on the cultural change that must go with such a dramatically different approach, both in terms of the business model and end user habits; remaining doubts about the security and robustness of Internet-based solutions; the unproven nature of the technology; the ongoing and destructive standards wars between vendors; and the massive network overhead incurred by having limited local storage of data and applications.

At least the involvement of large consultancies will provide another source of advice on these alternatives for nervous potential investors.

This will be increasingly important as the suppliers pursue their own agendas and send out a barrage of mixed messages to the market. Until there are plenty of large user experiences to draw on, IT directors are taking decisions largely in the dark, and with potentially dramatic consequences for their companies – either if they leave it too late to move to the new model, or move to one that subsequently falls out of fashion.

The last two weeks of October saw the most intensive battles yet in the battle for the Internet market. If Oracle, Sun and Netscape can convince the corporate world that it must move to yet another computing model based on thin clients rather than PCs and on Internet rather than conventional client/server developments, it will have taken significant power from the Microsoft, PC-centric view, shifting the balance back to large servers.

These companies know that influential consultancies are potentially their most valuable allies in the battle.

The consultancies themselves must be careful not to get too caught up in the politics. Users are far more cynical about vendor wars than they used to be, and any hint of supposedly objective advisors being influenced by one party or another provokes anger and resentment.

One point to be borne in mind, though, is that a move to Internet and intranet-based corporate computing models also requires a radical shift in user habits and expectations, in the role of the IT department and in the enterprise business model. This is where consultants should be focusing their efforts, leaving the vendors to cut each other’s throats in the background.

Caroline Gabriel is a group editor in VNU’s IT portfolio.