CONTEXT

Peering Into the Portal

by Doug Henschen

It all started a few years ago as personal portal sites like MyYahoo gained popularity. Soon, dedicated corporate portals emerged from companies like Plumbtree and Viador. Their "Gadgets" and "Portlets" aggregated different sources of corporate information into unified interfaces that could be customized by departments, project teams and employees.

In the next wave, portal users wanted single-sign-on access to all their applications as well as the ability to exchange data and information between applications. Companies like TopTier and DataChannel responded by using XML to map data to an integration layer and to other applications.

As portals became ever more popular, the number of vendors multiplied. ERP vendors added their own portal products (a la SAP's mySAP), as did database companies (Sybase's Enterprise Portal), document management vendors (Open Text's myLiveLink) and enterprise application integration companies (Tibco Software's ActivePortal).

More recently, the messaging providers chimed in. Late last year, Lotus introduced its K Station, and Microsoft answered this spring with its SharePoint Portal Server.

Why have all these vendors put a toe, a foot or, in some cases, their whole being into the portal market?

"We're finding that everybody's front end is a portal-type interface," says Marc Andrews, director of business development at Venetica, Charlotte, NC, a provider of integration middleware for document repositories. "What we used to call intranets and extranets are now partner portals, wholesaler/distributor portals or customer portals."

Even vendors who are decidedly not in the portal space are adapting to portal demands. Documentum, Pleasanton, CA, for one, has a "Portal Edition" designed to integrate and invoke enterprise content management services inside portals.

"The first wave of portals was about aggregating information in a single interface; you could personalize the interface, but you couldn't change the content," explains Dave DeWalt, Documentum's president and chief operating officer. "With content management services inside the portal, you can check out, edit and check back in content from within the portal."

User demand isn't the only thing driving vendor interest in portals.

"He who owns the portal owns the customer," Andrews observes. "Portals are the biggest threat Microsoft has ever seen to control of the desktop. Windows isn't the issue anymore. A Web-based portal can run in any environment, and it can deliver all the applications."

With so much at stake, you could have predicted the latest wrinkle in the portal market: consolidation. In May, application server software vendor Citrix Systems bought XML-based portal vendor Sequoia Software. One month later, SAP finalized its purchase of Top Tier and formed SAP Portals.

With demand for capabilities rising and prices under pressure from the likes of Microsoft and Lotus, you can bet that more consolidation lies ahead. As Russell Letson discovers in this month's cover story, "A Closer Look at Portals and EAI," (page 30) vendors in both these camps are doing their best to deliver the best of both technologies. The silver lining amid the chaos and competition is that users will be the beneficiaries of a maturing market.