Portal software services are growing up fast

Perficient, a consulting firm in Austin, Texas, has seen great returns since it implemented its WebSphere portal about a year ago, taking advantage of collaboration capabilities to reduce travel expenses and streamline projects. Going forward, though, the company expects more than collaboration and access to content and applications from its portal.

"The portal is becoming a key part of the corporate infrastructure," says Andy Sweet, CTO at Perficient. "It's a mission-critical application."

That's an increasingly common refrain among corporate customers as they realize a portal can be more than a simple window into applications and content. With more work being done online, and especially with the advent of Web services, the portal is poised to be the new desktop where business is done.

"Portals started out as content aggregation, then became about application aggregation, now it's focusing on application and content integration," says Laura Ramos, director of enterprise portals and enterprise research at Giga Information Group. "It's no longer sufficient to have these portlet windows in the interface; the portal has to know what to do with them. So things like application integration, workflow, application development, content management, collaboration - all these things are becoming more and more important."

The idea is to have a workspace that can change according to a user's role and task, offering relevant content, applications and collaboration opportunities as a business process is accomplished, analysts say.

That notion is causing some big shifts within the portal market as vendors jockey to provide more advanced features. Consolidation has been happening in the nascent industry for some time, but the portal market is starting 2003 with a decidedly different feel from previous years: Stand-alone portal vendors are few and far between, and larger infrastructure players such as IBM, Sun and BEA Systems are refining their portal offerings. Enterprise customers will find fewer portal vendors from which to choose this year and a rapidly maturing set of services from those vendors that remain.

In the last few months of last year, Netegrity, which jumped into the market only months before by acquiring DataChannel, opted to forgo its portal efforts. Then Vignette acquired Epicentric, one of the few remaining pure-play portal vendors.

"It's all in line with where the industry is headed, which is toward fewer and fewer vendors and toward more vendors that are going to be packaging collections of related technologies into suites," says Gene Phifer, vice president and research director at Gartner. "A traditional portal product will not have a very happy future."

Vignette's acquisition of Epicentric illustrates the trend toward one-stop products that combine collaboration, content management, knowledge management, business process management and other features, all delivered through a portal, an approach that Gartner defines as smart enterprise suites. Plumtree late last year released its content management server to help round out its offerings and plans to release a business process engine, code-named Fusion, this year.