Intranet Journal: Portals

'Enterprise Portal' Is New Catch Phrase,

But Definitions Vary

By James C. Luh

Now that the Net mainstream has embraced the idea of the Internet portal, a throng of business software vendors is moving to bring the idea of the portal to the intranet with products designed to consolidate business data into a single, one-stop shop accessible with a Web browser. Yet analysts said the market is still in its earliest stages of development.

The idea of the enterprise portal has clearly attracted interest. A Merrill Lynch report issued in November estimated that what it called the "enterprise information portal" market will grow to $14 billion by 2002. In the past year or so companies have raced to apply for trademarks on names and phrases like "Corporate Portal" (applied for by Open Text), "PortalWare" (Glyphica), "Enterprise Portal" (2Bridge Software), "E-Business Portal" (PeopleSoft), and "Enterprise Information Portal" (Sqribe Technologies).

Yet vendors seem to agree only on a high-level description of what an enterprise portal provides: a central, browser-accessible resource of corporate data on an intranet. Beyond that, they are promoting wildly differing ideas about what constitutes an "enterprise portal" product and what features it would provide. Depending on who's doing the talking, the ideal enterprise portal may include functions for document management, knowledge management, Web-based data analysis, or enterprise reporting. Users generally access the features through personalized browser interfaces similar to those used on portal sites such as My Yahoo.

Despite the muddle, recent trends do hint at where the market may be heading as once-distinct product categories borrow features and marketing boilerplate from one another. Recent product releases from business intelligence vendors and enterprise reporting vendors like Actuate Software show greater overlap between the two categories. Many saw further signs of convergence earlier this year when query tools maker Brio Technology acquired enterprise reporting vendor Sqribe Technologies, and last year when query tools vendor Information Advantage bought reporting vendor IQ Software.

International Data Corp. analyst Jacqueline Sweeney said the trend toward "portal" products is part of a larger movement toward Web-centered business. "This is just another step in the same direction," she said.

Teresa Wingfield, research director with Giga Information Group, took a more skeptical view, saying current products are far from the ideal of an all-in-one solution.

"The 'portal' stuff is all marketing," Wingfield said. "None of the solutions are very well integrated." Wingfield did add, however, that the vendors that offer portal-type solutions are probably a step ahead of competitors that are not, as the market does seem to be taking genuine steps toward complete solutions encompassing analysis, ad hoc query, and reporting capabilities.

Sweeney said the industry will see further mixing of analysis and reporting features as vendors partner and broaden their feature sets from within. And while much of the development of the enterprise portal market seems to center on reporting and data analysis, Sweeney predicted that the trend will also spur growth for vendors selling knowledge management products and other server products built to handle unstructured data.