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Story URL: http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/portals/0,3800002620,39119496,00.htm

Leader: Are you riding the enterprise portal wave?
Extended Play from the EP - get involved...

By silicon.com

Published: Wednesday 24 March 2004

Every year vendors create a raft of new phrases - which can normally be reduced to handy acronyms - that try to do two main things. They try to describe a concept or product category and, so the vendors' thinking goes, help with the sale of said technology. That's fair enough. Vendors aren't called vendors for nothing.

But to most users of IT it is clear many of those terms don't hold much long-term sustenance. The jargon doesn't always gel.

Enterprise portals are different. In an opinion piece that forms part of the foundations of the latest special report to hit silicon.com's pages, Butler Group analyst Mike Davis refers to them as the "fastest maturing market for enterprise software" that his organisation has ever come across.

Think back to the late 1990s and it looked like the enterprise portal (sometimes referred to then as a corporate portal or now simply as a portal or EP) was seen as a quirky offshoot of high-profile consumer plays from the likes of Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Lycos and Yahoo!. How quickly their stars would rise and fall. Only Yahoo! maintains the profile it had then - and only after a difficult few years.

No, the idea of the enterprise portal matured and matured during the downturn. The idea of using a customisable, browser-based interface to link to employees, partners, suppliers and even customers caught on. Our analyses about real-world roll outs and general lessons make that clear. And the EP caught on because it means tangible business benefits.

Over the coming weeks silicon.com will look in further detail at this growing area. We'll be covering the way to choose the right provider, what the experts predict for the market over the coming five years and how the EP must work with knowledge management software as well as web services and other integration technologies.

It sounds very technical and, on a micro level, the vendor offerings are. But the big picture is one showing a way to pull together the enterprise, replacing to a large degree approaches that take in intranets, extranets and even decades old channels of communication such as EDI.

It's time to work out whether your organisation should be riding the EP wave. http://www.silicon.com/research/specialreports/portals/