Everest Cement Limited (ECL) is one of the major cement manufacturing companies in India. It has five cement manufacturing plants located at Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. This location pattern has been followed to be nearer to end customers so as to save transportation cost. Its headquarters located at Chennai. Each plant has its own marketing, finance and human resource department besides manufacturing facilities. At the headquarters level, former three departments also exist to coordinate the relevant plant functions. Besides, legal and secretarial department works at the headquarters level. For marketing cement, ECL has adopted territorial structure. At each plant, there are marketing manager, marketing executives and sales representatives. Marketing manager supervises marketing executives and each marketing executives supervises a number of sales representatives working under him. Presently, the company has traditional computing system which generates lot of reports in the form of hard copies. Processing of these reports at the headquarters which have computer based information system (CBIS) tales lot of time particularly in preparing inputs suitable for CBIS and entering these inputs in the system for processing. The company has its own website which is connected through internet. Now the company wants to switch over to client/server computing linking all the plants and all the functions besides connecting each marketing executive. Each plant has its own CBIS but these systems are working on stand-alone basis. ECL is evaluating a number of options for connectivity: Internet and wide area network either owned by itself or leased from another party. Questions i. Evaluate the suitability of the above alternatives in the light of requirements of ECL. ii. Will the company get extra benefits if it opts for Intranet and Extranet? If yes, what types of benefits will accrue and what problems are involved?.