“Corporate portals will provide access to everything from
infrastructure to the desktop, so portal vendors will be the Microsofts of the
future.”
BY GERRY MURRAY
Imagine if going to work meant simply logging on to your
personal portal site. Imagine not having to install anything other than your
phone system to have a robust computer network: you just plug in and log on.
Imagine if all your software and support needs were available at your
fingertips, without any capital investment, consulting, or deployment
headaches. Well, stop imagining: new corporate portal technology will make all
of this possible.
Portals have emerged as the most effective way to cope with
the information overload brought on by the Internet. Consumer portals such as
Yahoo! and Lycos help us make sense of vast quantities of content and easily
find what interests us. The latest trend in portals is the enterprise
information portal—essentially Yahoo! for the intranet. Yet portals that
focus only on content are inadequate for the corporate market. Corporate
portals must connect us not only with everything we need, but with everyone we
need, and provide all the tools we need to work together. This means that
groupware, e-mail, workflow, and desktop applications—even critical
business applications—must all be accessible through the portal. Thus,
the portal is the desktop, and your commute is just a phone call.
New World Order
This is a radical new way of computing. It’s much more
cost-effective for companies than traditional approaches, since they can
outsource the entire infrastructure as a monthly service. But if the portal
provides everything—including storage, software, networking, Intranet,
phone, fax, and video—and your Linux operating system is free, what does
that mean for companies like Microsoft? The answer is simple: portal vendors
are the Microsofts of the future.
So, who are these corporate portal vendors? At IDC
(International Data Corp., a market research firm based in Framingham, Mass.),
we recently completed a comprehensive review of this important new market.
While the race is too early to call, there are some up and comers that may
upset the balance of power among the more established names in the computer
industry.
IDC identifies four stages of evolution for corporate
portals:
_
Enterprise
information portals, which connect people with information
_
Enterprise
collaborative portals, which provide collaborative computing capabilities of
all kinds
_
Enterprise
expertise portals, which connect people with other people based on their
abilities, expertise, and interests
_
Enterprise
knowledge portals, which combine all of the above to deliver personalized
content based on what each user is actually doing.
Information Portals
Information portals organize large collections of content on
the basis of the subjects or themes they contain. Various types of companies
are approaching the market this way, providing everything from search engines
to established Web portals, as well as newer, more interesting offerings that I
classify as active portals. Active portals automatically deliver information to
each user based on what’s happening on that user’s desktop, without
requiring any manual query. They do this by matching items in the content
inventory to what the user is doing. As an example of this capability that will
be available this year, suppose I’m writing an article about the
anniversary of an oil spill in Alaska: the portal pops up a window of links to
related information; then, as I continue typing and focus my article on the
plight of fish in the area, the list becomes more targeted on that subject.
Products and companies to watch in this segment are:
• Knowledge
Server from Autonomy (San Francisco, 415-243-9955, www.autonomy.com) has one of
the best engines for content analysis and association. Autonomy’s user
interface is not as robust as other offerings, but they’re aggressively
partnering with many other companies to provide complete solutions.
• Corporate
Portal Server from Plumtree (San Francisco, 415-263-8900, www.plumtree.com)
also aggregates content from many different sources in a Yahoo style interface.
In addition, their
“gadgets” technology can launch personal productivity tools and
applications and provide up-to-the-minute reporting from internal data systems,
such as daily sales.
• Illuminar
from Verano (Mountain View, Calif., 650-237-0200, www.verano.com) has a unique
“intelligent object wrapper” technology that enables information
objects to learn about where they go—who uses them and why. Illuminar
portals can therefore help organizations reuse information very effectively.
Collaborative Portals
Collaborative portals enable teams of users to establish
their own virtual project areas or communities and decide what capabilities
they need to work together within these communities. Everything, including
security, chat, conferencing, calendaring, workflow, document management, and
forms processing, could be offered. Collaborative portals should also offer
password access to mission-critical business applications, such as enterprise
resource planning (commonly known as ERP), accounting, and manufacturing
systems, for employees authorized to use these applications.
Leading contenders in this segment include:
• Knowledge
Server from Intraspect (Los Altos, Calif., 650-943-6000, www.intraspect.com)
integrates collaboration, organization, search, and subscription capabilities
across structured and unstructured repositories. Intraspect has a key
relationship with SAS Institute, one of the largest data warehousing companies,
this partnership provides strong capabilities for accessing structured information.
• Domino from
Lotus (Cambridge, Mass., 617-577-8500, www.lotus.com) is the benchmark for
collaboration tools, and its Web integration is even stronger in Domino R5.
Extended search capabilities provide content access that rivals information
portals, but Lotus has not yet positioned Domino as a portal product.
• Site Server
from Microsoft (Redmond, Wash., 425-882-8080, www.microsoft.com) is on the
evolutionary fast track by building on the connectivity provided with Exchange
and integrating with structured BackOffice applications. Although Microsoft has
strengths that may prove overwhelming in the long term, they’re currently
trailing the market.
• LiveLink
from Open Text (Waterloo, Ont., Can., 1-800-499-6544, www.opentext.com) was
arguably the first collaborative portal product. It combines collaboration,
document management, imaging, and routing capabilities with a Yahoo!-style
presentation format that makes it a strong consideration in many
customers’ minds.
Any portal solution would be incomplete without the ability
to link people together on the basis of their skills and expertise. While this
area has received the least amount of attention, many vendors are pursuing
capabilities such as distance learning and real-time messaging to facilitate
and capture person-to-person learning. So far, however, only two companies
really allow expertise to be contributed and “networked” throughout
an organization so that everyone has access to it:
• Beehive
Server from Abuzz (Cambridge, Mass., 617-499-0074, www.abuzz.com) is a
messaging-based system that distributes questions to people by matching what
the question is about to topics that users select as their personal areas of
expertise. Over time the system relies more on the accumulated answers,
querying experts only on new subject matters.
• Organik and
Persona Servers from Orbital Software (Palo Alto, Calif., 650-565-8076,
www.orbitalsw.com) create digital “personas” for people based on
profiles as well as on the contributions they make. So when someone authors a
document on genetically engineered tomato crops, the author is automatically
registered as an expert on that topic. Thus the Orbital system keeps up with
how people’s jobs change and what they learn over time.
Convergence Toward the Knowledge Portal
These three portal categories are on convergent paths toward
the enterprise knowledge portal. Knowledge portals do everything that content,
collaborative, and expertise portals do, and more. The convergence of content
with computing capabilities will have a fundamental impact on how IT systems
are implemented, the way we spend our money on hardware, software, and
services, and the very structure of the IT industry itself. As this vision
becomes a market reality, product categories like office applications,
groupware, routing, and others will go the same way as e-mail and chat:
they’ll be free. This means that Microsoft and Lotus, among others, will
have to think about their future revenue streams as customers bask in the era
of lower total cost of ownership.
More importantly, people will be able to commute to the
portal, not to the office. Imagine going to work barefoot on your favorite
beach, among rows of other sunbathers pecking at their laptops, each working
for a different company, without limit to the collaborative and other type of
work that can be done. Imagine that taking a break means doing a little
swimming or body surfing. It sure beats working in cubeland.
Gerry Murray is the Director of Knowledge Technologies
research at IDC. This article is based on a new report from IDC entitled
“Sourcebook for Knowledge Superconductivity.” For more information,
contact Cheryl Toffel at ctoffel@idc.com.