Internet technologies ARE the future of IT. The fact that you're reading this, as well as the relative boom of the NASDAQ in recent years, is a conciliatory nod toward this truth. The reasons that this is (and should be) so are many, but perhaps the most important is that the fundamental Internet technologies, (HTML, E-mail, etc.) are based on open standards that are beyond the control of any single company and are freely available to all. This openness, for example, permits anyone in the world to develop a website to the HTML standard, host it on any ISP, and have any browser in the world view it. Never mind that the site was developed on a Linux box, is hosted on a Windows NT server, and is viewed on a MacIntosh. The open standards make all of this cross-platform independence transparent to the developer, the ISP, and the end user. It is precisely this openness that has propelled the Internet into the phenomenon that it has become – a level playing field that spans the globe.

Of course, you may well ask, "That's just great for the Internet, but what's it got to do with my business?" The answer is straightforward: if Internet technologies provide an infrastructure within which widely disparate systems can share information and collaborate in real time on a global scale, then they can enable you to do the same on your own LAN. The use of Internet technologies to provide shared information and applications access on a LAN is called an Intranet.

Once an Intranet architecture is in place, many benefits are immediately realized, for example:

• Expensive and proprietary network applications can often be replaced with relativley inexpensive (if not FREE) and open Internet technologies. This can drastically reduce IT support and maintenance costs. Whereas, the number of people skilled in any particular, proprietary technology is small, the number of people skilled in its open, Internet counterpart(s) is relatively large (and growing). The result of this simple supply and demand scenario is that it usually costs far less to support open, Internet technologies.

• Internet integration of your office Intranet is a snap. All that is required is to provide a secure link from the Internet to your company's Intranet. A telecommuter or mobile sales representative would then be able to access your Intranet applications exactly as if he/she were in the office from anywhere in the world that has Internet access! No special software or training for these remote users would be needed at all.

• Geographically separated business locations could have their Intranets connected via the Internet into a single Wide Area Network (WAN) structure. Use of Secure Socket Layer (SSL) or Virtual Private Networking (VPN) technologies would protect the location-to-location connections from prying eyes. Each location would have a local connection to the Internet, so there would be no long-distance phone bills involved.