Portal Popularity
Research firm Gartner describes portals as the ability to access and interact with information and applications, as well as the ability to conduct business tasks in a personal manner for a select audience. The technology's nascent years were primarily occupied by pure-play companies, including Corechange, Epicentric Communications, Hyperware, InfoImage and Plumtree Software.
"Almost none are profitable," says Gene Phifer, vice president and research director at Gartner. "When you have that dynamic, then you have a market that will consolidate. And consolidation started last year." For example, KnowledgeTrack and Enfish Inc. merged to form Enfish; Datachannel was acquired by Netegrity; Sagemarket was bought by Devine Systems; Sequoia Software was purchased by Citrix Systems; and Toptier Software was acquired by SAP.
Heavyweights, including BEA, Computer Associates, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, SAP and Sun Microsystems have also jumped on the bandwagon in recent years,evidence of portals' growing popularity. Some have bundled portals with their traditional application servers, like Oracle, which has integrated its portal technology in Oracle 9i Application Server.
"We are seeing lots of applications vendors portalizing their applications because of the high demand for portals as a standard user interface," Phifer says.
Resellers and integrators can take this as a sure sign of market opportunity. More important, they should note that portal technology is ubiquitous: Companies are installing portals across the desktops of all their employees. On average, each $1 million sale can translate into another $4 million in revenue for services, according to Plumtree.
"Portal technology is tailored and designed to be on every person's desktop, as opposed to [Siebel's technology, which often is in just the sales force, or PeopleSoft's is in just the human resources," says Chris Penner, director of global channel alliances at Plumtree, San Francisco. "It targets all employees within the company as well as the value chain, such as suppliers, vendors and customers. The dollars associated with that vision is great."
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