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Analysis: Enterprise portals - integration made easy?
Or is that too much to ask?

By Anthony Plewes

Published: Tuesday 06 April 2004

Enterprise portals have been around since the end of the 1990s but their earliest incarnations were little more than souped-up intranets. They rose to prominence as a simple way to integrate back office applications. Anthony Plewes looks at the future of integration technology in enterprise portals.

There is a pressing requirement to simplify the complex web of applications that is faced by all modern enterprises and integration can cost companies a fortune in time and money. Enterprise portals offer companies the ability to integrate applications simply and quickly at the server level.

"The cost of trying to integrate clients with back-end systems is becoming horrendous," says Kevin Malone, technical strategist at IBM. "Why do people want to do this at the client side? We have always felt that this is about server based computing."

And because all the application logic is stored on the server, the enterprise portal could be considered the desktop of the future. For example, you could plug your credit card into a hotel TV and be presented with your company desktop.

Portals currently use portlets to integrate enterprise applications into the user interface. They are Java-based components that plug subsets of the functionality of enterprise applications into the user interface. At the end of last year, the standardisation of portlets took a step forward with the specification of the JSR168 standard. This advance means that any application software developer only need develop one portlet which will work with any portal rather than having to write proprietary APIs or connectors.

In the long-term, standardisation is expected to change the market dynamics. Portal vendors will no longer be differentiated by the number of portlets they can offer to their customers through the partnerships they have with the enterprise application vendors.

"Portlet standards will come to play a significant role in portal implementations starting in 2005 and early experimenters will be testing ideas in 2004," explains Hadley Reynolds, VP and research director with analysts Delphi Group. "Standard portlet implementations will not replace the proprietary or vendor API-based versions for complex portlets because the standard will always be behind the upper level functionality that the vendors will provide on their own platform."

However, portlets do not suit every integration job.

"Traditional portals have used portlets, which means they can be up and running overnight," says Marco Saarinen, senior product marketing director at BEA. "The challenge here is that they are low-level and if you use them heavily, it can create a brittle chain."

For example when integrating line-of-business applications, if a company makes changes to the back-end system they could end up breaking the chain.

Of course enterprise portal technology is not the only approach for easy application integration. Enterprise application integration (EAI) tools have typically offered robust integration - at the price of complexity - but web services, an approach all about connecting different software using various standards, most importantly XML, have emerged as an easy-to-use alternative.

These approaches are not mutually exclusive and web services will start to play an increasingly important part in portal implementation. "Web services will be the primary implementation platform for portal applications going forward," predicts Reynolds from Delphi Group.

"There is a transition under way that will take three to five years to complete," he adds. "The main contribution of web services will be to reduce the cost and improve the flexibility of supporting proprietary integration points across underlying application and information sources."

Currently enterprise portals are consumers of web services. In the future they will move to create Web services for other applications.

"The interest in portals and investment would have happened without web services," says Gartner Group research director Nikos Drakos. "In one place it has had a big impact: the Web services support in enterprise portals has made users feel like they are not locked into any vendor’s product."

However, he warns that not all vendors support web services in the same way. "It is important to know how much a vendor makes use of web services and how much they use their internal API."

But portals are not just about integration. As they became more entrenched in enterprises, the vendors have been adding a range of functionality to their enterprise portal products. This trend looks set to continue, with typical functionality such as collaboration, document management, knowledge management and business intelligence being incorporated into the products.

However, Drakos warns that companies ought to remember that not all vendors are best suited to offer all functionality. "Look out for application viability," he says. "Not just small vendors but some big vendors where not all parts of their product are as fully developed."

Portals can go even further than richer functionality and integration. They will give companies the ability to construct what have been dubbed 'composite applications'.

"Companies will build new web applications from legacy enterprise applications," explains Charlie Abrahams, MD EMEA of Plumtree. " For example, Centrica built an application for finance based on output from Oracle. It is no longer just a portal, it is a framework for building new applications."

Delphi Group's Reynolds says that the move towards composite applications will accelerate as the portal infrastructure moves into web services as the primary operating environment.

BEA's Saarinen says: "One of the key trends in the market is to simplify application infrastructure and minimise the number of moving parts. Companies are looking at more unified integration platforms. This is where portals come in. The role of portals has moved beyond content to include business process and custom applications."

Vendors are even making the design of these process portals accessible to the business user. Broadvision, for example, has launched a tool to allow line-of-business users to graphically model the process flow.

The new generation of portals will be far removed from static intranets with some application functionality and will be able to support dynamic business processes. These 'process portals' will have all the qualities of a standard portal, such as search and content aggregation, but will be focused on enabling specific business processes.