Portals: The new business desktops

The executives at business media company Red Herring knew this much: they wanted their company to be "Webified," meaning the firm wanted applications and information, both internal and external, to be accessible from the desktop. The IS group knew something else: It could give users a personalized interface into those digital resources, and it would save money for the company.

It's called a portal, and it seems like everybody's installing one. Corporate portals manage end-user access to a business's network of applications and resources.

Portals can also offer security, end-user administration, collaboration, search mechanisms and data management from a single interface.

Analysts say there are more than 200 vendors offering portal products, and more enter the market every day. In just the past few months companies such as Bowstreet, SAP, IBM and Microsoft have announced portal initiatives to compete against pure-play portal software vendors such as Plumtree, DataChannel, Hummingbird and Epicentric.

But consolidation is happening, too: In the past few months, Citrix acquired Sequioa, and SAP bought TopTier.

As businesses in growing numbers launch intranets and digitize more of their functions, software vendors are realizing that the portal will be the new business desktop.

But as the portal market matures, how do you know what's best for you?

To start, there's the decision of whether to buy packaged portal software or to build the portal in-house. At Red Herring, Intranet Manager Eric White says the decision to buy was easy.

"We decided not to reinvent the wheel," he says. "It's at least 50% cheaper to buy. It depends on your scale; it could be as much as 90% to 95% cheaper."

White says Red Herring paid a little more than $100,000 for its Plumtree enterprise portal, which includes search and collaboration features, as well as single sign-on, and access to internal and external resources and applications.

"To come up with anything that was even close to it [in-house] would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars," White says.

Choosing a portal

Increasingly, consulting firms such as IDC, Delphi Group and Adventis are developing programs to help businesses decide whether a portal is the right way to go, and which portal vendor is the right one to choose.

At Red Herring, the IS group handled that task, attending seminars and conferences to educate group members about what was available. They determined a portal would be beneficial because it would do more than simply link internal and external resources as executives wanted; it also would create an easy-to-use interface that would give employees a customized "window" into all the business information they needed.

That interface would lead to better employee relationships, heightened productivity, and time and money savings, White says.

Red Herring narrowed the choices to four vendors, and received information from three: Sequoia, Viador and Plumtree. White says he decided to go with Plumtree because Sequoia "was so Microsoft-centric, we couldn't use anything but Microsoft on the back end."

Red Herring needed a portal that could integrate easily with its Oracle databases, he says. As for Viador, White says its software offered an open platform but required too much customization.

"We wanted to keep this so we could do it with under five people," White says. Because Plumtree had most of the functionality Red Herring needed out of the box, "we could literally get this thing installed, get it up and running in three days, with five people."

Building a portal in-house

For Soren Burkhart, first vice president and head of International Internet Systems for Bank One, an off-the-shelf product wasn't the answer, at least initially.

Bank One has a retail portal it built in-house, but about a year and a half ago Burkhart decided he wanted to consolidate the Internet-based applications his department develops to streamline foreign-exchange transactions. He knew it would be a complex undertaking, so he looked for a portal vendor that could help him do it quickly and maintain Bank One's competitive advantage. After looking at companies such as IBM and Plumtree, Burkhart settled on Epicentric, primarily because of its Java-based, open architecture.

"We wanted a good framework in which we could deliver our product set; we didn't want a religion," Burkhart says. "The last thing we wanted to do was have this perfect thing that was all completely built by Epicentric, and then one of our competitors buys it and gets the same thing."

It took about three months to integrate Bank One's applications into the portal and customize it to give foreign-exchange customers real-time quotes, and access to analysis and other information online. The new portal also let Bank One reduce its internal transaction processing time from two days to 5 minutes, Burkhart says.

Burkhart says the portal, which has been up for about a year, generates about $2 billion in trades per month.

Had he decided to build a portal in-house, he says, it would have taken at least 18 months - "and that's about $36 billion in trades."

Two more takes

For Steve Garten, manager of the finance and administration group at Poten & Partners, an energy brokerage and consulting company, infrastructure was important.

Poten's back end is about 80% Microsoft. Poten chose InfoImage to power its portal in large part because of its strong alliance with Microsoft, Garten says.

Separately, Bevan Ashford, one of the top law firms in England, took another route to a portal.The firm had been using an intranet for years but had never developed a single interface into its Web-based applications and resources. That meant users had to load applications and log on to different legal-resource services separately.

The law firm already was using a knowledge management tool from Hummingbird, which has its roots in serving the legal industry, so it was "a logical next step" to look to Hummingbird for portal software, says Heather Robinson, the firm's head of IS.

In the end, says Mike Robinson, Bevan Ashford's IT director, a portal simply should be good for business: "It's got to be simple, it's got to be easy, and it's got to fit into your environment." o

Contact Senior Writer Jennifer Mears

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