Enterprises Portals

BY JANUS BOYE

Enterprise PORTAL MARKET OVERVIEW

2008

F

or the portal marketplace, 2007 was a remarkable year. Much happened with the large infrastructure vendors, including massive, virus-like adoption of Microsoft (microsoft.com) SharePoint and product innovation from IBM (ibm.com), with hyped integration with Google Gadgets. Oracle (oracle.com) continued to push two enterpriseportals (Oracle Portal and Oracle WebCenter) and also started 2008 by acquiring competing vendor BEA. Because BEA already had two enterprise portals (WebLogic and AquaLogic), buyers now have four options from Oracle. Of the largest vendors, only SAP (sap.com) seems quiet on the portal front and appears to be falling behind. Not just the large vendors were busy in 2007. One-time high-flying BroadVision(broadvision.com) continued to change its focus toward e-commerce, while Sun (sun.com) changed its licensing entirely to open source. Among the traditional open source projects, many spent the year improving usability and carefully nurturing their communities.

Market trends
One difference between the portal market and related marketplaces, such as enterprise content management (ECM) and Webcontent management (WCM), is that several standards have been in place in the portal market for a while. Consider the portlet standard (JSR 168), which enables portlets to work across products. A new version of the standard is due in 2008, with more focus on

interactivity between portlets, to make portlets a more integrated machine, rather than disconnected services. Another standard worthmentioning is HTML—the essential hypertext standard that we use every day, which is finally being upgraded. While HTML 5 is not expected until 2010, progress could help keep vendors like Adobe from locking the Web 2.0 phenomenon inside proprietary standards. On the nearer horizon is Internet Explorer 8, which is expected in public beta during Q2 2008. Web 2.0—or Enterprise 2.0—is still a significantdriver for enterprise projects. While some of the hype might be gone, enterprises are increasingly experimenting with social software and portal-like platforms such as Facebook (facebook.com). The vendors are all busy adding a fresh brush of Web 2.0 to their portal products, including wiki functionality, blogging modules and Google Gadgets integration. It will be interesting to track successfuladoptions in 2008, but as the 2.0 functionality inside the portals remains brand new, it might make sense in the meantime for the rational buyer to consider a best-of-breed strategy. Finally, the increasing overlap between the related marketplaces, in particular Web content management, is worth mentioning. Portal vendors have been busy adding content management system (CMS) functionality, and while itis still very basic in some products, it might meet the needs of some projects. Certainly portal vendors are hoping to get a larger share of the budgets, while CMS vendors have been less busy expanding the scope of their

8

KMWorld

May 2008

www.kmworld.com

Experienced help?
Beyond finding the right enterprise portal, a problem in the enterprise portal market is unlikely to beresolved in the foreseeable future—one that most technology buyers discover only too late. The bottled-up demand for portal technologies is stymied by a lack of appropriate skills to enable the tools to effect the important changes needed in many organizations. Finding a skilled and affordable SAP (sap.com) NetWeaver consultant can be difficult, for example, and your chances of locating a goodportal-aware business analyst can be nearly impossible. As the reach and impact of portals grow, so too do the rotten projects—those that promise the world and fall staggeringly short of goals. Vendors should be less proprietary about their products, encouraging both buyers and third-party consultants alike to want to embrace and learn in detail. If your organization relies on external help, calculate...