The New Face of Portals

There is certainly no shortage of stories about portals in the media. In the last few months, hardly a day has gone by without hearing news of acquisitions and mergers. America Online bought Netscape, the GO Network was created from the marriage of Infoseek and Disney, Excite and @Home tied the knot, and Yahoo purchased Geocities and Broadcast.com.

The search engines of the past have added feature after feature in their new quest for retaining Net surfers on their sites. And, the day is not far when portals will add multimedia and entertainment to their offerings. The new paradigm is to offer compelling content, enable e-commerce and entertain.

This is only half the story. In the business world, portals are also emerging as a winning formula. The same easy concept applies. Instead of going to Yahoo, corporate employees will go to their browser-based company portal. Like Yahoo, the enterprise portal will provide access to consolidated and personalized information, enable a host of self-help services such as ordering supplies, and link a company with its suppliers and customers.

In business parlance, the enterprise portal extends the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems that corporations have been implementing in the last few years.

Merril Lynch projects that the enterprise portal market will grow from $4.4 Billion to $14 Billion by 2002. No wonder that there is frenzied activity in the sector.

There are a number of products on the market labeled Enterprise Information Portals (EIP). Their emphasis is on integrating disparate data sources, sharing information across a company and facilitating its analysis by end-users. Most EIP products are general-purpose applications with the exception of SageMaker which provides industry specific solutions, with a focus todate on the energy sector.

Vendors of EIP products come from backgrounds as diverse as document management, business intelligence and Web hosting.

From the document management angle, popular vendors include Plumtree (Plumtree Server) and Autonomy(Portal-in-a-Box). Such products typically catalog all the data sources of a company, search and categorize relevant information from the Internet, and trigger e-mail notifications to inform employees that new information relevant to their jobs is available on the server. While e-commerce capabilities are expected to be added soon, the thrust here is on providing a simplified Web front-end and an automated back-end management and indexing capability to help manage data flow.

From the business intelligence vendors come products such as MyEureka (Information Advantage), ReportMart (Sqribe Technologies), Info X-Ray(Inforay) and Viador E-Portal (Viador Inc.), all with an emphasis to bring online analytical processing capability to end-users via a Web-based interface. Some products such as The Viador E-Portal suite extends the leverage of enterprise information beyond the firewall and can link a company with its supply chain partners and customers.

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