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By Mike Davis, 24 March 2004 12:35

COMMENT Butler Group senior research analyst Mike Davis takes the 30,000ft view of the market - from the jargon, to the vendors, to details on implementations by some of the most interesting users, it's all here...

Three years ago, every application with a piece of HTML code was labelled by its developer, or vendor, as a portal. Business managers drove portal installations and they were predominantly deployed on a departmental basis, often without formal IT support. There was a lot of hype, the fashionable vendors quoted starting prices of £500,000 and there was a great deal of truth in the statement that a portal was an ‘intranet on steroids’.

The big shakeout had to come, both for the vendors whose products could not live up to the hype, and in organisations when the issues of management, scalability and security – or rather the lack of all three - were recognised.

This time last year it looked as though enterprise portals as discrete products were disappearing fast. Knowledge management specialist Open Text gained Corechange, and the content management vendor Vignette captured Epicentric. Netegrity and Citrix, both of whom had previously acquired products for their respective portfolios, withdrew their portal offerings.

Enterprise portals were being incorporated into product stacks along with tools such as enterprise content management (ECM), web content management (WCM), collaboration and single sign-on, creating what Butler Group labels enterprise information management suites.

Yet despite the economic downturn, interest in enterprise portals has not waned. Rather organisations, under pressure to react quickly to corporate changes and sweat their existing information assets, have looked to enterprise portals as tactical solutions. Whether to provide a unifying technology layer across disparate systems, to extend the usable life of legacy applications or to drive cost reductions through employee/customer self-service, they are here to stay.

This has been fastest maturing market for enterprise software that Butler Group has ever seen. It has been estimated that 90 per cent of Global 2000 organisations will have an enterprise portal fulfilling either a business-to-consumer or business-to-business function by the end of 2005.There are now less than 20 commercially available products that could be described as enterprise portals but these products are highly functional, standards-based and proven.

The vendors, despite two years of consolidation, are continuing to develop and market their enterprise portal products. IBM, Plumtree, SAP and Vignette all entered 2004 with very strong updates to their offerings, with Vignette claiming to have first Java Services Request (JSR)168-compliant offering.

This little technical reference is a lot more significant than it first sounds. JSR 168 compliant portals can use portlets – the small programs that present the information or application in the portal – from any other vendor’s portal. This offers the prospect of out-of-the-box interoperability between portals.

So why the renaissance? It is always worth remembering the dictionary definition of a ‘portal’ as a gateway. An enterprise portal, which is based upon internet technologies, can be considered as the only truly universal access mechanism - or gateway - to digital information, content and applications. As such it addresses many of the current business and technological challenges:

- The drive for outsourcing support operations, such as contact centres, means that organisations need to be able to put consolidated information and access to systems, potentially anywhere in the world. The enterprise portal offers controlled and secure access across dedicated links or even the internet.

- Mergers and acquisitions by organisations have increased the heterogeneous nature of data centres. An enterprise portal can be used as the bridge between applications from different operating environments. The case of the bank and the building society merger, where the ability to offer products from each of the previous organisations, at every one of the combined branches was required. An enterprise portal was used to provide access to the banks mainframes and the Building Society’s UNIX-based systems on the PCs in branches.

- Partnerships and collaborations may happen quickly and be short-term. For example, in the architectural construction and engineering environment consultants and contractors need to collaborate on fixed-term projects such as building a tower block but do not want to invest in developing new systems each time. An enterprise portal allows all participants - including the smallest of sub-contractors - to have shared access to plans and specifications.

- We are seeing a more mobile and disparate workforce. Home-based workers have the issue of secure access to corporate systems, over dial-up or broadband links. The wider availability of truly mobile devices, for example Centrino-based notebooks, 3G and smart phones, all of which are using internet technologies, have made mobile working practical and effective. But there is still the requirement for secure and defined access to the corporate systems and that is what the enterprise portal provides.

And of course there is now the ‘proof of the pudding’ in the many reported successful enterprise portal deployments:

Proctor and Gamble has documented savings of $2m through the use of collaboration tools accessed by its employees worldwide through its EP.

Prudential Financial in the US has developed a retail distribution portal www.prudential.com. This provides a consolidated view of accounts for 320,000 registered customers, irrespective of which of the line of Prudential’s business they are interacting with.

Lufthansa deployed an EP to provide facilities for employee collaboration and to reduce costs across its global organisation. It offers a self-service portal for a third of the 70,000 employees at present and will become the central collaboration tool for the future.

Hewlett Packard and Ford both state that their worldwide employee self-service portals have reduced corporate administration costs and allowed for reductions in personnel and payroll staff.

Another thing that has changed is a direct result of the economic downturn – organisations are rightly taking a much harder look at their prospective IT investments. They have realised that rather than being just tactical tools and ‘sexy’ nice-to-haves, enterprise portals are strategic IT infrastructure investments, providing agnostic frameworks for all future application deployment. This new realism places the selection and deployment of an enterprise portal as a critical business decision.

Enterprise portals are now, more than ever, important solutions for businesses of all complexions. It is very noticeable that many government departments are also selecting enterprise portals. These gateways hit many of the current critical business issues head-on and no organisation can afford to ignore the possibilities they offer.