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Analysis: Choosing enterprise portal technology
Plenty of offerings but what's right for your organisation?

By Anthony Plewes

Published: Wednesday 24 March 2004

An enterprise portal (EP) can come from a wide variety of companies and cover all manner of functionality. Anthony Plewes examines what's available and what organisations should look for when choosing an EP platform.

There is a dizzying array of companies in the enterprise portal space, ranging from enterprise software stalwarts such as SAP and Siebel, through infrastructure giants such as IBM and Sun, to pureplays such as Broadvision and Plumtree. However, the core functionality largely remains the same across vendors: it is a platform that aggregates information, applications and processes and delivers them to internal and external users.

Typically a vendor's offering will include a core portal engine along with features such as application integration, collaboration, search, business intelligence and content management. Personalisation is the enterprise portal's key functionality, which involves adapting the display of information to a user's requirement, device, channel and languages.

"A portal is a thin layer in a heterogeneous environment," explains Peter Matthews, technology strategist, Office of CTO at Computer Associates. "And heterogeneous is the way of the world."

The market can be divided roughly into two parts, the infrastructure and the application side. Gartner Group labels them the application platform suite (APS) and the smart enterprise suite (SES) and companies can offer one or the other or a combination of the two. The APS products consist of the web layer, integration and applications services. The SES products have a portal layer and add a range of products on top such as content management, collaboration, e-learning and business intelligence.

The line between the infrastructure vendors and the application vendors is becoming blurred as infrastructure vendors move into the application space. This is an important trend, as standardisation in the infrastructure space could see the portal infrastructure becoming more commoditised. The key development here is a 'portlet' standard called JSR 168. Portlets are components that display information from any application on the portal.

"Standardisation will hasten the commoditisation of portal servers, like the application server and database markets before them," says Jim Murphy, an analyst with AMR Research.

The increasing proliferation of portals and standardisation of the technology should also drive the take-up of open source infrastructure.

"Standardisation is no longer a luxury," says Kevin Malone, technical strategist with IBM. "Enterprise portals might help persuade some companies to adopt Linux as an alternative."

Richard Hughes, senior director product strategy at Broadvision, agrees. "There is a great deal more acceptance of open source in the industry. Companies in the US are starting to become interested and it is already well established in Europe," he says.

Given the wide variety of functionalities offered by enterprise portal vendors, the term might be considered meaningless.

"At one point we were going to drop the word enterprise portal," says Nikos Drakos, research director at Gartner. However, enterprise portals have increased in importance and most commentators continue to be happy to use the term.

"Enterprise portal is okay as a generic definition," agrees Broadvision's Hughes. "We have adopted portal when we mean it." He adds that it makes more sense to use 'portal' as an adjective rather than a noun.

Semantics aside, portals are establishing themselves as the enterprise interface of choice. "Enterprise portals can offer access to all enterprise resources," says Gartner's Drakos. "In practice however, companies need to make a trade-off between making it work and the benefit you can derive from it. In fact in many cases you can actually cause problems doing certain applications through a portal."

Email is a good example. While browser-based access is good if you are a light user, travelling or need to access it remotely, if you are a heavy user you might not want access through a web interface.

The wide variety of available products in the enterprise portal space is also indicative of the equally wide variety of customer requirements.

"Every customer has a different pain point," explains Charlie Abrahams, MD EMEA at Plumtree. "Some want access to applications, some want to build web pages. So the best fit will be very different. That is why it is very hard to compare the specific merits of different enterprise portal companies."

The first challenge is for the customer to decide what they want.

"Some companies go all the way through the procurement process and then can't decide between the products," adds Abrahams. Companies need to be very clear about what their specific requirements are before they start on a procurement process. Abrahams also recommends that the process have board-level support.

Customer requirements have been changing over the past few years.

"The first generation of portal customers were interested in going for cost-savings," says David Haigh, senior architect with systems integrators Avanade. The business case centred around ‘If you have 20,000 employees and can save 15 minutes a day, in theory this saves $10m a year’. But it is not so simple and that kind of justification is fatally flawed."

Now companies are focusing much more on their line-of-business requirements. For example, analyst house AMR Research has identified seven essential functionalities for choosing supplier portals. These are useful for companies to integrate with their supply chain and will link-in with their existing ERP packages. These include facilities for engineer collaboration, managing the QFQ process, information sharing with the supply chain, movement tracking of materials, quality management and performance management.

Companies that use their application intensively typically choose enterprise portals from software application vendors. SAP, for example, offers an infrastructure stack with application servers and is adding content management. But Eric Austvold from AMR Research warns that SAP's approach, for example, "appears to be an SAP-only stack rather than an open architecture that can be run out of the application ecosystem."

The enthusiasm for using portals as the presentation layer has created a proliferation of portals in many organisations. This has led to many an organisation having to consolidate their portal offerings with horizontal integration portals.

"Companies need to rationalise and try and consolidate the periphery," explains Gartner's Drakos. They need to use a common infrastructure and consolidate at the user interface. To do this they need to pool resources to a meta portal."

BEA, for example, is specifically targeting this portal rationalisation opportunity. Fundamentally the popularity of enterprise portals seems to signal a return to server-based computing. "The cost of trying to integrate clients with back-end systems is becoming horrendous," says IBM's Malone. "Why should people need to do this at the client side? We have always felt that this is about server based computing."

Therefore companies should focus on their specific requirements for application deployment when choosing an enterprise portal.