Corporate Portals Gaining Ground With Enterprise Accounts

Many chief information officers and other IT heavyweights were understandably skeptical when Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison took the podium at last year's Mission Critical Computing Conference in Palm Desert, Calif., and made a promise: The Internet was the last technology they would ever have to master.

Yet just a few months later, a growing number of IT departments appear willing to bet on Web technology, in the form of the corporate portal, as the ultimate panacea to managing the flood of information that threatens to drown enterprise users at their desktops.

Many enterprise companies are adopting the portal model as a way to allow employees access to critical online data. They are using portals as souped-up intranets and analytical tools that enable IT departments to deliver relevant data to users at their desktops and give them the means to search it, customize it and act on it.

For example, Dollar Rent-A-Car, Tulsa, Okla., has installed a portal product from Information Advantage, Eden Prairie, Minn., not only as an intranet, but also as a way to enable rental office location managers from as far away as Hawaii to run analytical reports about customer usage and fleet management against Dollar's Oracle database in Tulsa.

"We needed a reporting tool that we could run from many locations," said Peter Osbourne, manager of Dollar's application development, who oversees the company's data warehouse. "A client/server environment isn't going to work. You can't do what we want to do over that thin pipe. That's where the Web architecture fits in for us."

As the acceptance of portal technology spreads, many enterprise solution providers find customers at all levels of organizations eager to adopt the technology to further their knowledge management, business intelligence and decision-support services.

"I think, in a lot of ways, the appeal of portals is [that] in many peoples' minds, it's the next generation of EIS [executive information service]," said Paul Puzzenghera, managing director of decision-support services at enterprise solution provider AnswerThink, Atlanta.

"So, all of the folks who were proponents of EIS in the late '80s are now viewing the portal as the next opportunity to provide very simplified interfaces, common reporting, with some degree of user control, in an environment that's very hospitable to end users."

That perception is broadening as more enterprise companies adopt portal technology. The problem, however, is that no two people seem to define the term "portal" in the same way. Some describe it simply as an enhanced intranet or a way to deliver sales figures or other business information via the Web. Some software companies are selling middleware products that integrate divergent data sources and calling them portals.

Many enterprise companies view portals as a simple way to manage data.

For example, MCC Behavioral Care, an Eden Prairie-based HMO and subsidiary of Cigna Corp. with 1,200 employees, was looking for a way to manage data such as claim information and clinical reports needed by internal departments and care managers in field offices throughout the country. One option considered by Dirk Holman, MCC's director of corporate data warehousing, was to build an intranet to manage the reports. After reviewing Information Advantage's portal product, My Eureka, he chose to go with a portal.

"Our company has thousands of reports that we generate daily," Holman said. "With a portal, I can build a channel, customize [a user's] home page and publish reports to the channel." This is far more efficient than publishing information by sending out hundreds of copies of the same E-mail, he said.

"It provides a one-stop integrated environment," Holman said. "That's what we were looking for."

Caterpillar Inc., a $21 billion enterprise company based in Peoria, Ill., employed a portal product from Plumtree Software, San Francisco, to enable engineers doing research and development on semiconductors to share their findings with colleagues worldwide.

"People don't have time anymore to spend hours looking for information," said Ann Jean-Blanc, a Caterpillar Internet consultant whose job it is to search out new technologies for the company in the area of knowledge management. Caterpillar has been struggling to efficiently employ the knowledge management concept for the past two to three years, she said.

"Caterpillar is huge,65,000 employees globally," said Jean-Blanc. "People get real frustrated because they don't even know where to start to get the information they need."

To save employees time and boost efficiency, Caterpillar uses the portal product to connect employees across its 26 business units by having them subscribe to "communities of practice," Jean-Blanc said. "Once we identify the correct way to do a process, we want to make sure that everybody throughout the organization who may be working on similar processes has access to those results," she said. "It looks extremely promising."

Some industry watchers see portals as the first real chance knowledge management and business intelligence have had to become effective tools for corporate users.

"The problem with traditional knowledge management or business intelligence tools was that they didn't do a very good job of organizing information," said Stan Lepeak, an analyst with the Meta Group Inc., Stamford, Conn. "You could find something with them, but you kind of needed to know where to look and how to ask for it."

Integrator AnswerThink currently is building a Web portal solution for a multibillion-dollar division of a major U.S. automaker. It is a forecasting, budgeting and planning system that will serve a worldwide network of dispersed corporate workers who collaborate on projects and who need simultaneous access to information and data created and stored in many different databases.

"The Web portal provides us the ability to eliminate the distribution of software, to provide common data access through a central repository," said AnswerThink's Puzzenghera.

Heavy manufacturing and financial service companies should be the first wave of portal adopters, Puzzenghera said. The next wave will be the packaged goods and retail industries, he said. They will benefit greatly from the evolution of EIS into the "connected" portal, he added.

"Our real goal is tying together the full value chain," Puzzenghera said, giving companies the "correct measures" they should be looking at to judge the profitability of their businesses.

Sales of enterprise portal products will reach $14.8 billion by 2002, according to a Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. report published late last year. Of course, that does not mean smaller software companies now offering portal products,such as Plumtree and Information Advantage,will be dancing on Microsoft Corp.'s grave anytime soon. Yet, they are certainly optimistic.

"We see the portal market as the logical extension of that move toward the Web as a universal client," said Phil Soffer, portal product manager for Plumtree.

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