Bridgewater Engineering Company (BECO), a privately held machine shop, makes heavy-duty machinery for factory assembly lines. It sells its presses, grinders, and milling equipment using a few inside salespeople and telephones. It buys its raw materials and supplies from a variety of steel mills and small-parts fabricators located around the world. BECO's president, Tom Dalton, has hired you as a consultant and would like your advice regarding how best to share information with the company's suppliers. Tom would like to connect his network of computers into their ordering systems so he can order supplies quickly when he needs them. Use the Web and this book's accompanying Web links to locate information about extranets and VPNs. Write a report about 200 words that describes and extranet and outlines why Tom might want to use a VPN to connect BECO's suppliers to his extranet.