While 1995 was clearly the "Year of the Internet," 1996 is well on its way to becoming the "Year of the Intranet." Thousands of organizations have already found that internal intranets can help empower their
employees through more timely and less costly information flow. This empowerment bolsters the company's competitive advantage, improves employee moral and assists in getting more timely information to
customers and suppliers. 

Everyone knows that Internet growth, both in terms of users and servers, has grown exponentially over the past several years with estimates of the number of users varying from 10 million to 50 million. The truth is no one knows. However, there are reliable estimates that the number of servers is currently around 80,000.

Would you believe that the past and future growth of the Internet is just “ho-hum” as compared to what we are going to see in the growth of “Intranets”. But before defining what an Intranet is, let  just state
that it is estimated that the number of Internet and Intranet servers is about 75,000 each. By the year 2000, the annual shipments of
Internet servers will approximate 450,000, while the shipments of Intranet servers will approximate 4,500,000! The installed base by the year 2000 of Web servers is estimated to approximate 10.2 million
sites, of which 9.2 million will be Intranet sites and 1 million will be Internet sites. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it. 

Before  exploring the opportunities and issues in setting up an organizational intranet, let's explore why Internet technologies are so effective behind the corporate firewall.