Zona contends that organizations are better able to quantify the benefits associated with the use of Intranet technologies for internal communications and applications. IDC, an Arlington, Virginia-based Internet research organization, estimates that in five years the demand for enterprise applications of Web technology will be five times greater than the demand for external applications. Using Web browsers such as the popular Netscape Navigator, a single front end provides access to all internal and external resources. Therefore, users don't need to learn multiple software interfaces, all with a different look and feel, and quickly become proficient with Web pages or Web applications. In other words, we're bringing applications together using the browser as a single point of integration.
Web applications are significantly less expensive in either internal or external flavors.
The software and hardware required to get Web servers and clients up and running are cheap, Web applications driven from a single browser require less training, and deployment costs are reduced due to the single interface, protocol, and middleware architecture. An Intranet brings architectural simplicity back to the enterprise. When a new corporate application is available, the corporate user simply links to the appropriate Web server and runs the new application, either by downloading and executing a Java applet or by receiving an HTML stream from the server or server-based application layers. An Intranet is portable as well. Therefore, Intranet applications run on Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows NT, most Unix flavors, and Macintosh.