Evolution of Enterprise Portals
By Clinton Wilder, Beth Davis & Gregory Dalton
Special from Information Week
While huge Internet portal sites such as Netscape and Yahoo
battle for consumer traffic, a growing number of businesses are
adapting the portal's gateway-to-the-world model as an efficient
way for employees to access critical information online. The
concept is so powerful that software vendors are rushing to
deliver portal platforms, or at least slap that label on all manners
of products and services. That means lots of options-but also
plenty of confusion.
In their most ambitious embodiment, enterprise portals represent
the latest step in the evolution of intranets from sites that offer
mostly static job support and human resources data, into the
starting point for managers and knowledge workers to access
real-time and historical information from internal applications,
legacy databases and the Internet-all from their browsers.
As enterprise portal gain momentum, they lend credence to
predictions the browser will replace Windows as the standard
desktop interface to access data from any IT source, not just the
Web. "This will be the next big user interface," said Dave Folger,
analyst at the Meta Group Inc., Stamford, Conn.
What differentiates portals from their simpler relatives, said
users, is their ability to incorporate data from multiple sources in
multiple formats and organize it into a single, easy to use menu.
"How you differentiate it from a Web site is really a method of
categorization," said Parrish Arturi, vice president of channel
development at First Union Corp., Charlotte, N.C., which is
integrating access to a number of disparate intranets into a
single, browser-based menu. "The first step is aggregating your
basic sources of information, then adding navigation and
structure and more information."
Compiling data from multiple sources is not a new concept.
Many technology tools-data mining, data warehousing,
knowledge management, business intelligence-even the
much-hyped but little-used executive information systems of the
1980s-do just that. What is new with portals is that ubiquity and
ease of use of the Web-browser interface, and the availability of
innumerable new data sources on the public Internet, many of
them in real-time.
"The question is, is an enterprise portal a product or a concept?"
said Jim Balderston, analyst at Zona Research Inc., Redwood
City, Calif. Balderston compared the portal phenomenon to the
frenzy over push technology three years ago. "If (enterprise
portals) are a concept, then people are chasing something that's
ephemeral and very hard to get their hands on," he said. "But if
there's a way for companies to manage the fire hose of
information that's coming at their desktops, then that's a
reasonable thing to do.
That is what Robert Scheer, manager of emerging technology at
W. W. Grainger Corp., wants his portal project to accomplish.
"The overall concept is great," said Scheer. W.W. Grainger, a
multibillion dollar distributor of industrial and office supplies in
Lincolnshire, Ill., is building a portal system that catalogs its
intranet content, as well as searches and categorizes relevant
information from the Internet on its market and competitive
positions.
One key benefit of a portal system is the potential to give users
organized access to a variety of information. "Our primary
objective is to make as much information available to as many
users across our organization as we can," said Ron Berry,
director of IS at Emery Worldwide Redwood City. Emery is
building an enterprise portal using ReportMart software from
Sqribe Technologies Corp. to give several thousand employees
access to logistical data, financial reports, customer information
and internal information.
For companies planning to go the "buy" route, most enterprise
portal products coming on the market are from small vendors
such as Plumtree Software Inc., Portera Systems Inc., and
Sqribe. Also, there is a wide variety of products tat bill
themselves as portal technologies, most of which provide some
form of data access and integration.
Tom Stein and Rick Whiting contributed to this story.
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