By Jennifer Mears
Network World, 09/24/01

Ask Bruce Focht, data mining analyst at 401(k) financial firm J.P. Morgan American Century, what an enterprise portal is and he'll say it's the replacement for thousands of pages of greenbar paper that saves the company at least $2 million annually.

The portal, launched in the third quarter last year, gives users reports from company's legacy tracking systems on items such as 401(k) participation numbers, plan trends and asset allocation. It also serves up news feeds and other public information.

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About three years ago, Focht and his team at J.P. Morgan American Century in Kansas City, Mo., decided that putting the 401(k) reports generated for hundreds of customers on the Web would solve numerous problems, among them giving employee consultants faster and direct access to data locked in legacy systems.

Before the portal was built with Computer Associates' Jasmineii portal software, consultants had to submit a request to IT, which would process the request and send a report back on greenbar paper. The consultant would then forward the information to the company's customer. Today, the process is self-service and electronic for the consultants. Customers also can run queries on their own.

J.P. Morgan American Century settled on CA after CA acquired Sterling Software and used Sterling's Eureka portal as the basis of Jasmineii, which analyzes clickstream data and user profiles to deliver personalized data. But Focht also will say implementing it isn't easy: "A lot of people think it's going to be a plug-and-play or a cure-all to what ails them. It's not."

Configuring the firewall to work with Jasmineii's single-sign on scheme was difficult, he says, but ultimately, the portal's impact on the network has been minimal. Reports run on the server and send only the results to the client. Because users can request just the data they need when they need it and users aren't flooding the system with simultaneous requests, the servers for the production system work less hard than was projected during testing.

"[Our database administrators] were expecting this huge slowdown and it didn't materialize," Focht says.

Related links:

Other Signature Series editions

Race for Portal Pre-eminence, IDC's e-business trends newsletter, June 28, 2001:

Business Portals: Applications and Architecture, from the Delphi Group:

Building a strong portal foundation, The Burton Group:

PeopleSoft adds collaboration to service automation app InfoWorld, 06/13/01

Information security will be key Computerworld, 09/14/01

Plumtree adds single sign-on to latest portal software Network World Fusion, 09/10/01

Do-it-yourselfers rethink Web hosting Network World, 09/10/01

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