The Burgeoning Market for Enterprise Portals, Jay Weir
Over the past two years, since Merrill Lynch coined the term, enterprise information portals (EIP) have come a long way. While some of the early promise of the portal business computing platform has yet to be realized, the growth of the market for enterprise portals has been astounding. From an emerging market value of about $1 billion in 1999, analysts estimate a potential of between $7 and $10 billion by 2005. Enthusiastic market predictions aside, actual deployment and functionality of enterprise portals are advancing at equally impressive rates.
Enterprise portals have evolved from what can be thought of as a spruced up My Yahoo! or MSN for the business user, to implementation as a means of amalgamating intranets and information sources, to the current use by many organizations as a way of Web-enabling business processes. We are also seeing portals rolled out to enable employee self-service and collaborative capabilities. But portal solutions are moving fast. The next generation of enterprise portals will move beyond the primarily inward-facing model to include business partner collaboration, customer interaction, and support for such functions as procurement support. The idea of the “Workplace Integration Portal” will see organizations realizing tremendous return on investment and significant business benefit.
EIP: Current Deployments As mentioned, enterprise portals are being rolled out currently to primarily internal users. Organizations are using portals for a variety of reasons. Some of the typical current implementations are outlined below:
Project/Role Focused: Many portals today are project or role focused—designed and deployed as either pilot projects or to solve a particular pain. For example, a portal might be deployed to help members of a project track tasks, collaborate, and access required information resources.
Departmental/Line of Business-Driven: There may be certain departments in the organization that are innovators—perhaps the marketing department wants to begin developing best practices, enhance CRM efforts, or increase collaborative efforts via a portal. Regardless, certain departments want to begin leveraging some of the benefits of portals.
Regional Focused: In large organizations especially, portals are being rolled out on a regional basis. Big companies might roll out portals to their east coast-based operations and have a completely separate portal for their west coast facilities. The portal is being used to address regional problems of information access, management and application integration.
Intranet Amalgamation: Again, as discussed earlier, many organizations see portals as a way of combining their intranets. Marketing, sales, manufacturing, finance, human resources, and other lines of business have deployed their own intranets—organizations are looking to increase knowledge sharing, so they are deploying portals as kind of a super-intranet, or, you may have heard this one, an intranet on steroids.
Inward Facing/Self-Service: The fact is that the vast majority of portals are inward facing, designed and deployed to internal audiences: self-serve applications; information sharing; amalgamation; and application integration rolled out to the company and maybe a few select business partners.
The real trend is that most portals are small-scale at the moment. This is due in part to the immaturity of the solution—organizations are testing the waters—and in part to scalability issues. That is, current portals simply can’t handle the volume of traffic required to roll them out to hundreds of thousands of customers and employees. But that is changing—fast.
Next-Generation Portals Analysts estimate that within two years, portals may be the business-computing platform. Outlined below are are some of the probable EIP deployments:
Large-scale Deployment: The evolution of portal deployments into much larger implementations that accommodate tens and hundreds of thousands of users.
Customer and Partner Facing: B2B and B2C initiatives will be added to the current inward-facing deployments. Global Focus: EIP deployments on a global and enterprise scale will replace regionally focused ones.
The “Super Portal”: One problem we’re creating for ourselves by rolling portals out today on a regional and departmental basis is that we’re using all kinds of portals. It’s not rare for a large organization to work with three or more different portal vendors, in separate regions or departments. The notion of the Federated Portal is emerging—portals that are capable of amalgamating different portals. As portals are used today to amalgamate intranets, some organizations will need a portal to amalgamate their portals...
Workplace Integration: A rapid evolution of the application integration capabilities in portals is certain. Currently, we have the ability to bolt-in applications on an interface or emulation basis. The future of integration of business systems in portal environments is much more focused. The customization of information extraction and presentation—rather than simply providing an emulation window, notifications and alerts—will emerge, along with other advanced integration functionality.
Wireless Access: As use and acceptance of WAP devices and other technologies develops, portals will need to increase their device independence. Hummingbird and some other portal vendors have certain basic wireless capabilities today, but down the road, portals will need to be accessible and useable by different devices.
Hummingbird EIP: Providing the Building Blocks for Next Generation Portals Hummingbird EIP is a fully customizable web-based workspace that provides a single point of access to all business-critical information and resources, including structured and unstructured enterprise data. Beyond providing an interface for accessing and viewing information, the Hummingbird EIP works by connecting users to content in context, enabling them to quickly process, filter and act upon information from any enterprise source.
Meeting the Requirements of Technology and Business Hummingbird EIP was designed from the beginning to satisfy the different needs of both IT professionals and line of business users.
For knowledge workers, Hummingbird EIP enables enterprise agility and helps achieve maximum competitive advantage. For IT departments, its ease of implementation and administration guarantees a rapid and substantial return on investment by cutting costs associated with developing customized systems and providing a solution that is faster to deploy and easier to maintain.
Knowledge Worker Benefits
- Application Integration/Centralized View;
- Information Technology Benefits;
It is increasingly important for solutions to be deployable and accessible across a variety of platforms and devices.
With a platform, application, and device-independent architecture, the Hummingbird EIP allows for maximum flexibility. Hummingbird EIP is deployable on both UNIX and Windows NT and accessible from PC, laptop, and even wireless devices.
Another element of “openness” is the ability to extend the investment in existing technologies. With its e-Clip (XML and Java plug-ins) architecture, organizations are free to bolt in data sources, mission-critical applications, and even other information systems without the need for the custom programming or tedious interfacing traditionally associated with integration tasks.
Security As with any Internet solution, security issues are paramount. Organizations need to know that their information, data sources, and mission-critical applications are safe from unauthorized access.
Hummingbird EIP is ideal for both users and IT administrators. Hummingbird has developed a technology called Common Authentication Protocol (CAP) Server that delivers the single login model to Hummingbird EIP. By entering a single password and username, users gain access to all data sources, applications, and collaborative tools they would normally have in a client/server network environment. From an administrative standpoint, user authentication is managed through existing security profiles (LDAP, NTLM, ADS, NDS, etc.), eliminating the need to create and maintain additional security accounts for users. Built-in encryption and support for standard authentication models minimize required security maintenance.
Scalability A key benefit of the enterprise information portal is that it is capable of increasing staff efficiency and effectiveness. Time savings attributable to the centralized environment of the enterprise portal are significant. However, without a scalable architecture, increased efficiency turns quickly into insufficiency.
Hummingbird EIP was built from the ground up to be a true enterprise strength solution. This allows organizations to implement with confidence, knowing that their portal server can accommodate not only thousands, but hundreds of thousands of users if need be.
Search and Categorization Rapid access to information is the basis of enterprise portals. However, because organizations, over time, have gathered so much information in so many different formats, providing this access is not an easy task. Hummingbird EIP provides a proven, unified solution that allows users to find both structured and unstructured data from all databases, repositories, and file systems, both internal and outside the organization.
Hummingbird EIP doesn’t just find and display information. Rather, it presents content in context by automatically generating business taxonomy and categorizing results into commonsense groupings—by source, relevance, topic, or concept. Users can even define custom agents that monitor sources and repositories to automatically collect relevant information and send notifications to alert the user of content additions and updates.
Application Integration It is critical for enterprise portals to access other internal and external applications. This functionality ensures that users will be able to not only retrieve and view information, but to act on it. For example, users may want to perform analysis on some sales data they received, or delve into a monthly performance report. They’ll need immediate access to business intelligence and reporting tools to do this work and may even require collaboration tools or facilities to publish and distribute their findings.
Hummingbird EIP provides users with a centralized, unified, and consistent environment for interactions with all applications. The integration services greatly simplify both enterprise deployment and interactions for the end user, thereby reducing costs and implementation time.
Personalization Personalization within enterprise portals allows users to assemble the elements they need in the way that makes most sense to them. Similar to the concept of consumer portals such as My Yahoo! and MSN, the idea is to create a personal website with all the required and desired elements. However, besides choosing from things like local news feeds, stock tickers, sports scores, horoscopes, and weather reports, users can add such components as mission-critical applications, department-specific data sources, business intelligence and reporting tools, and collaborative features.
Hummingbird EIP also incorporates a variety of unique features that allows users to create their very own web-based workspace. Users can build multi-page environments to customize the portal to their individual needs and provide for maximum productivity gain. Moreover, users can develop and choose from various themes that provide a personal or corporate look and feel, as well as the ability to apply platform-specific interfaces for desktop PCs and palm devices. This allows users to access EIP content regardless of what device they are using or where they are located.
Collaboration and Feedback
One of the great benefits of enterprise portal solutions is the unequaled collaborative capability they make possible. Imagine being able to instigate immediate action to correct a misinformed decision as a result of your own analysis and findings. Think of the cost savings of organizing an online conference to review concepts for an upcoming advertising campaign, rather than arranging for ten attendees to fly to the main office for the day. By enabling this type of on-the-fly collaboration, enterprise portals present tremendous opportunities for increasing bottom-line benefits.
Hummingbird EIP provides a comprehensive feedback loop that allows users to rank pages, features, and functions, and make recommendations. Additionally, the Hummingbird EIP facilitates real-time messaging by providing users with the ability to send messages to other online users.