By Rachel Chalmers
The enterprise information portal – or corporate portal, if you prefer – is shaping up as 1999’s hot market, much as web application servers were all the rage in 1997. The two fads share more than heat, light and enthusiastic press coverage. Both grew out of a convergence of pre-existing technologies that never quite took off: data warehousing, data mining and business intelligence, to name a few. Since Merrill Lynch defined the enterprise information portal in a November 1998 report, research firms have been hard at work refining that definition. Most recently, Rob Tholemeier at FAC/Equities First Albany has said that he looks for a multi-tier architecture, including a web server that contains presentation logic and an application with integrity, execution and back-end connectivity services.
He notes that the Meta Group calls for what it calls a ‘wholistic’ approach, which takes into account the collaborative aspects of customer relationship management in a networked business environment. Thus, write Tholemeier, while a portal might begin as an exercise in organizing access to internal information (which is difficult enough), the long-term goal should not lose sight of the more important process of externalization. This is exactly the approach taken by Verano Inc, whose Illuminar family is designed specifically for supplier relationship management in vertical industries like oil and gas exploration, banks and financial institutions.
Tholemeier points to MicroStrategy Inc as an exemplar of business-to-consumer business intelligence (BI) through its Strategy.com web site. As a matter of fact, Sagemaker Inc is pursuing a similar line with its SageWave.com consumer service. The idea is to get employees hooked on the personalized web version of the application. When subscribers inside any given organization reach critical mass, the sales force turns up in the CIO’s office with web log data and a compelling story: here is a problem your employees face which our software is already solving. In an ideal world, software sales worth tens of thousands rapidly ensue.
For business-to-business BI, FAC/Equities fancies the chances of Brio Technology Inc, which recently acquired Sqribe Technologies Inc, and of French decision support vendor Business Objects Inc. Tholemeier also makes the intriguing suggestion that different kinds of portal software, aimed at different markets, will co- exist within organizations as portals nest creating hierarchies. On the one hand you’ll have BI portals from Brio and Business Objects. On the other, you’ll have pure publishing portals from vendors like Viador Inc and Plumtree Inc, designed to aggregate information from the vastly heterogeneous sources you’d expect to find inside your average wired enterprise. What that means is that the dozens of players in the space are not necessarily natural enemies. For the BI vendors, the introduction of independent information portals must be seen as positive, Tholemeier concludes; the more users equipped to access information, the better.
