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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (15810)	1/19/2003 2:18:44 PM
From: Bill Harmond	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 57684

AOL: dialup, dialup, dialup... The Time Warner part has cyclical promise, but that's better played through Viacom, IMO.

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (15810)	1/19/2003 5:39:10 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 57684

What's in a Fantastic Enterprise Portal? Fri Jan 17, 1:39 PM ET Kimberly Hill www.CRMDaily.com To many, the term "portal" is just another enterprise software buzzword, a consequence of being thrown around so casually that it means everything and nothing. But a really great portal can be the vehicle for a powerful set of functions that are vital to companies large and small. The portal is one more way that enterprises can address that omnipresent problem: integration. "No organization in the world is going to use just one vendor for everything," said Jason Averbook, director of global product marketing at PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT - news). "Vendors have to be able to provide integration bridges." He told CRMDaily.com that PeopleSoft's enterprise portal is a big piece of the integration strategy it offers to customers. One of the crucial elements of good enterprise portal design is minimizing the number of clicks users have to perform to reach pertinent information. "Lots of organizations are counting clicks," Averbook said, "and the goal of a portal is to pull content to the surface." Thus, one manager might want to see headlines on the top portal page, and another might want the most-used functions of a particular application suite. A fantastic portal provides ways to present information efficiently. Portal usability might require changing the structure of the underlying databases by, for example, adding data fields. Green Beacon Solutions CEO Ben Holtz told CRMDaily that his company has done just that in its work as a reseller of the yet-to-be-released Microsoft CRM package. Open Standards Preferred "Onyx calls it a 'customer portal,'" Holtz said, referring to the collection of data fields Onyx (Nasdaq: ONXS - news) software offers to various users based on their need for sales, marketing or other information. But it all boils down to the fact that resellers and implementation partners often change user- or customer-facing screens when deploying software -- thereby creating portal-like screens. These tasks require that the portal software support a variety of programming tools and data-definition standards -- preferably open standards, such as XML and J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition). Building Bridges (Story continues after advertisement) Increasingly, enterprise executives are looking to portal technology to link artificially siloed business units in their organizations. Jeff Brown, supply chain management product marketing manager with Baan, a division of London-based Invensys, told CRMDaily that he sees supply chain and CRM units tending to merge, in part based on their use of common enterprise portal software. "One of the things that demonstrates this from our perspective," he said, "is this whole notion of demand chain management and rolling out portals (news - web sites) from the supplier perspective." The lines between customers, internal employees, and external suppliers and partners are beginning to blur, too, which makes it crucial that the underlying portal architecture is extremely flexible -- whichever standards it uses. Even vendors that offer relatively self-contained application suites are recognizing the need to offer bridge capability to users. Manugistics (Nasdaq: MANU - news) senior vice president Lori Mitchell-Keller told CRMDaily that although "most of the work a user would do would be within Manugistics," her company has designed "portlets" that allow customers to link out to other applications. Checking to see that the ERP (enterprise resource planning) system has posted a purchase order based on customer fulfillment information from the supply chain software would be an example. Content and Consistency One of the biggest challenges in building an effective enterprise portal is consistency. "You want to have one face to the customer," Deloitte Consulting's Darci Moore told CRMDaily, adding that this means the elements of an enterprise portal that might be used outside the enterprise must carry the same message as all other contact channels. Somewhat surprisingly, Moore said that the design portion of this task is harder than the "actual minutiae" of the technical portion. Averbook emphasized that PeopleSoft's offering ships with a great deal of content from various applications already integrated into the portal screens: human resources management and supply chain modules, for instance. On top of that, project executives can choose to add knowledge management, publishing and chat tools. Role Definitions "Role-based view" is the most common term used to describe perhaps the most-touted feature of enterprise portals. However newfangled it may sound, the concept has been around as long as mainframe applications: Screens are offered to users based on which functions they need or are authorized to use. Chordiant (Nasdaq: CHRD - news), for example, calls its portal-type interface a "universal desktop." Designed for customer service agents who must use myriad systems to obtain the information they need to complete calls, the tool presents the most likely information elements to users based on the function they perform and the level of security they have to view sensitive data. Senior vice president of marketing David Straus told CRMDaily that Chordiant used the desktop feature to link employees of a financial services firm to 17 different systems -- including legacy mainframe applications. And that is exactly what a fantastic portal does: provide users with a seamless view of a collection of disparate applications. news.yahoo.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (15810)	1/19/2003 6:14:09 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 57684

Will Silicon Valley get its mojo back? By Alorie Gilbert Staff Writer, CNET News.com January 17, 2003, 4:20 PM PT Will Silicon Valley--mired in a post-boom crisis of confidence--ever regain its status as an economic powerhouse and its place at the center of the high-tech universe? That was the central question pondered by a panel of leading technology executives, gathered in San Jose, Calif., Friday for the annual Outlook Conference of the Bay Area Council, a regional business association. "We're all wondering if this economic engine called the San Francisco Bay Area will again be a center of growth and innovation," said Yogen Dalal, managing partner at venture capital firm Mayfield. The panelists, among them Dalal; Charles Hoffman, chief executive of broadband services company Covad Communications; and Judy Estrin, chief executive of networking technology developer Packet Design, were tentatively optimistic on the matter. The general consensus was that Silicon Valley would make a comeback some day but that the next several years would be slow going. The heady days of the Internet boom, all agreed, are not about to be repeated anytime soon. The overarching advice they offered to several hundred entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business leaders in the audience? "Have patience," Estrin said. "We need to build the right foundation for future growth, not a quick fix that takes us two steps back." Some in Silicon Valley are in denial about how long it will take to come out of the downturn, noted Estrin, who sits on the boards of Sun Microsystems, Walt Disney and FedEx. She was also previously chief technology officer at Cisco Systems. "Let's all accept where we are," Estrin said. "Some forces in the Valley seem to think the next boom is coming any day." The good news To ease any hand-wringing, the panelists offered their views on promising areas for future growth. They were most hopeful about the future of broadband Internet service, wireless computing and communication, voice-over IP, advances in computer networking and data center technology, computer security, embedded computers and the Linux operating system. Yet many big challenges face the Silicon Valley economy and the technology industry in general in the coming years. The panelists agreed that the computing and communications markets are maturing and consolidating, meaning that the volatile growth of the boom may not return for a very long time. Other problems include unresolved questions around the protection of intellectual property, which are tying up advances in digital media and entertainment. Telecommunications companies are still dealing with bankruptcy, network overcapacity and regulatory uncertainties. A trend toward outsourcing technology jobs and operations to Asia is also a fundamental change reshaping the Bay Area. And last but not least is lingering fear and distrust as a result of numerous American business scandals and the dot-com crash. Estrin said anger and panic over those crises are creating "bad behaviors" that could dampen future innovation. "The relationship between venture capitalist and entrepreneur has shifted from being a team to being adversarial. We have to move back to working like teams," Estrin said. Later in the discussion, panel moderator Michael Malone, an ABC News.com author and columnist, put the panel's lone venture capitalist in the hot seat. Noting how few investments VCs made last year, Malone playfully asked Dalal what VCs in the Silicon Valley have been up to lately "besides improving their handicap and shooting hoops." In response, Dalal made a scorched-earth analogy to the devastating wildfires that have swept through Yellowstone National Park. "A lot of people looked at the burnt redwoods, wondering whether they would come crashing down or survive, instead of looking at the new flowers springing up from the ground," Dalal said. "That's where we are in the cycle." news.com.com