Survey Finds 9 of 10 O.C. Firms Have Access to Internet

Nearly 9 out of 10 Orange County businesses are now hooked into the Internet, according to a poll released Thursday.

A survey by UC Irvine’s Graduate School of Management found that 89% of Orange County companies with 10 or more employees now have access to the Internet, up from 63% a year ago.

The Orange County results “are astounding,” said Kenneth Kraemer, director of UCI’s Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations. But Orange County companies’ relatively high use of the Internet makes sense in light of the region’s concentration of technology and globally oriented businesses, Kraemer said.

Local colleges and universities also contribute to the pervasive use of the Internet, he said. What’s more, corporations such as Walt Disney Co., while not producers of high-tech products, are advanced in the use of technology.

Although no comparable national study was conducted at the same time, the International Data Group, which studies technology use, said 47% of companies nationwide used the Internet in a survey it released in August.

A total of 59% of the 222 local companies surveyed said they have a home page or site on the World Wide Web, up from 33% last year.

Nearly one-third of the respondents said they actively do business over the Internet, such as by advertising products and services, collecting sales leads, taking customer orders or purchasing materials and supplies. That compares with 24% a year ago.

The proportion of company employees with Internet access rose to 30% from 23% last year, the study found.

Jerry Goetsch, director of corporate planning at Toshiba America Electronic Components Inc. in Irvine, said the growing use of the Internet dovetails with businesses’ increasing use of computer networks for internal communications.

“Once that infrastructure has been put in place for communications internally, it’s only a matter of turning on a pipeline to the outside business world through an Internet service provider,” he said.

However, Goetsch cautioned that most companies, including Toshiba, are still at a very early stage of actually conducting commerce over the Internet.

Toshiba’s Web site, for instance, is primarily used to disseminate information about the electronics company and its products. The site currently receives about 1 million “hits”--or visits--per day.

It’s a big leap to go from there to responding to customer service queries, product orders and other requests over the Internet, he said. Toshiba plans to begin offering such services in the next couple of years, but will go slowly in the implementation, he said.

“If you throw a Web site up with the ability to communicate, there’s an immediate expectation that ‘I can send e-mail and I’ll get one back,’ ” he said.

“You can get overcome by the efficiency of the communications tool. We are rolling it out in a controlled fashion.”

Merit Property Management Inc. in Mission Viejo, one of the respondents to the survey, launched its Web site last month. But spokeswoman Lesly Martin said the community association management firm is also taking a measured approach.

The site is currently used to provide information about the company to customers and others, Martin said. Merit plans eventually to make the site interactive by allowing payments to be made electronically, e-mailing documents to customers or accepting bids from vendors through the Internet.

But that level of sophistication will take some time, she said. “It’s just in its infancy stages.”