Enterprise Portals

Once a niche play dominated by smaller, narrowly focused software vendors, the Portal market have been making a charge over the past few quarters to become one of the better overall performers in enterprise software. In growing nearly 12 times as fast as the general enterprise software market, portals have become a safe haven and oasis for a multitude of pure play, platform, and product vendors.

But why are portals so successful today? In an ironic twist, their standout performance in today’s market can be partially attributed to their lack of success in previous years. During the boom times of the late 90’s and into 2000-2001, enterprise customers gorged themselves on a wide variety of applications from CRM to ERP to SCM. While these applications (in some instances, anyway) created distinct operational efficiencies within their respective spheres of influence, they insured that end users now had to access an unacceptable number of disparate applications – often with separate user information and password combinations – just to do their job. Who said technology makes things easier? But this opened the door for enterprise portals, which allowed customers to present information from a number of applications and back end systems within the context of a single interface.

But while it’s all well and good to view everything in one place – and it certainly beats logging in to your CRM, ERP, and SCM applications individually - to do any real work users still had to log into the back end tool. So the first generation of portals weren’t the entire answer, but certainly a step in the right direction. Today the drivers for portals are numerous, but integration and application interaction is the name of the game. While collaborative functionality and groupware functionality like calendaring is vital to a good enterprise portal, the real promise in portals lies in being able to do actual work in them, as opposed to simply amalgamating read-only information from disparate sources.

This is the promise of enterprise portals from the RedMonk perspective, turning the portal into the de facto enterprise desktop. And by increasing the value of all of the systems integrated into it, portals promise to be an important technology for enterprises regardless of their environments or technology choices.