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Finally! After almost a decade of growing up and going through the pains of being a young and immature marketplace, portal buyers may now have figured it out. In my research for the recently updated Enterprise Portals Report – 2008, I repeatedly found that enterprise portal projects have now largely moved beyond marketplace hype to take a more realistic — and more successful — approach to portals as a special type of enterprise web platform.
It may still be early days, but enterprise portal technology customers now have a more genuine sense for what they’re getting into. They’ve learned that portal tools in themselves do not offer miraculous new websites or intranets. Instead, customers have discovered that portals represent very technically challenging integration platforms. However, I see a greater trend towards adequate staffing, shorter implementation times and greater success rates against more realistic requirements.
In this article, I’ll first review interesting areas, where portals are frequently successfully deployed and share some of my research findings in terms of the business benefits to portals. I’ll then look a bit at what’s happening on the marketplace from a more technical view and finally I’ll briefly review a couple of vendors with an increased risk profile in 2008. I believe you may be surprised at the risk profile of some of the very large vendors, which are often considered a “safe bet.”
Portals: The Business View
It may be easy to mistake portals for simply a web interface, but portals are much more. In particular portal technologies can speed up web application development in certain environments where:
Personalization matters
Personalization has been a topic that brooks much talk, but little understanding. The goal of personalization is to provide rapid access to the needed content and services. Portals can be personalized by central administrators, or user themselves, or (frequently) both. For example, all executives in sales may be presented with a sales dashboard (more later), when they first log in to the portal while information technology executives see an IT-specific dashboard. Some companies use role-based personalization to “lock down” the interface for certain groups of employees.
Dashboards are required
Executives typically require high-level aggregate information about key performance indicators (KPIs), like total revenues, number of outstanding claims. Business intelligence dashboards are often used in enterprise portals to display multiple KPIs in a single view. Portal users can then drill into the details behind each to examine ad hoc reports.
Specific groups need a simpler interface into legacy applications
Integration to existing systems in the IT landscape is a frequent task in portal projects. Portals can act as the “glue” that leverages existing technology investments and provides simple access to backend legacy applications, e.g. customer data or product information.
Portals: The More Technical View
Greater acknowledgement of portals as technology platforms has helped propel a plethora of successful open source solutions (e.g., eXo, Jetspeed, Liferay, Red Hat / JBoss, Sun, uPortal) that tend to appeal to IT shops. Open source marketplace penetration appears broader among enterprise portals than I see in other content technology spaces.
Interestingly, many of the portal vendors claim open standards and strong support for SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). Still enterprise portals from IBM, Microsoft and SAP runs only on top of their very own software. This would seem to contradict the idea of loosely couple software, and many buyers have learned that a decision for an enterprise portal might lock you into a specific application server.
Then you face a deeper issue of what services come native to the portal, as opposed to the underlying application server or a third-party module. Some portals emphasize a low footprint with few default portlets; others are large, robust and, therefore, complex, out of the box. You’ll need to make decisions such as either using the search engine that comes with the portal or instead use another third-party search engine like Google.
Risky Portal Vendors
CIOs increasingly view enterprise portals as a key element in strategies ranging from SOA to Web 2.0, so they naturally seek to minimize product and vendor risk. However, procurement managers and technology leaders who ultimately make product adoption decisions should understand that some of the biggest names in this business are undergoing substantial transformation that will lead to shifting roadmaps and product sets over the next few years
Some of the largest enterprise portal vendors are experiencing the most change right now, and, therefore, choices that appear conservative to customers might actually carry significant near-term risks. BEA and Oracle customers in particular should expect to see major shifts pending Oracle’s acquisition of BEA, as four, overlapping enterprise portal products will compete for attention under Larry Ellison.
The trend is clear among the largest vendors:
* Oracle has leapfrogged its longstanding Oracle Portal product with a quite new and lightly implemented Oracle WebCenter and now has acquired BEA – itself supporting two different portal products, after cancelling plans to merge them into a single platform. Upon concluding the take-over, Oracle will support four separate enterprise portal products that substantially overlap.
* Sun is transitioning its Portal Server to an open source license – boosting the trajectory of a traditionally low-profile offering – but also introducing a new model and set of relationships to the customer base
Conversely, SAP of late has invested only minimally in its portal solution, which has fallen behind its peers functionally, even if it remains very much a “known quantity” within the SAP customer base. Meanwhile, Microsoft SharePoint 2007 has changed very little in the past year, as customers and integrators alike continue to experiment broadly with the core platform in the absence of clear roadmap signals from Redmond.
Although product and institutional evolution is healthy, highly rapid or unduly tepid change can introduce different types of risk to enterprise technology investments. All technology purchases carry risks, but customers should understand that different vendors portend very different sets of risks, and therefore enterprises need to match their tolerance profile against the current state of any supplier
Some buyers will tolerate product or vendor turbulence if they have strong development controls in place and believe an innovative but largely untested solution, like Oracle WebCenter, will bring them a competitive advantage.
If you want to avoid an early-mover disadvantage, it is clearly important that you approach the portal project with realistic expectations. We may have come a long way in 10 years, but still the pace of change is very high and there are many outside factors you cannot control. What you can and should do is to try to keep things simple and learn as you go along. The market will continue to mature, but we still need many more successful projects!
Good Luck
"The Enterprise Portals Report – 2008" closely examines all the major enterprise portal suppliers, including BEA, Broadvision, eXo, IBM, Jetspeed, Liferay, Microsoft, Oracle, Plone, Red Hat / JBoss, SAP, Sun, uPortal, and Vignette. For more information, visit www.cmswatch.com/Reports . | 
