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January 14, 2002

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Product Reviews Annual Retrospective 2001

Maturation, Outsourcing, and Consolidation

Reflections on important releases and product trends from 2001

Continued from Page 1

PORTALS COME OF AGE

The past year has seen some dramatic changes in the enterprise portal marketplace, not only in product capabilities but also in the size and number of portal projects that organizations are undertaking. A Forrester Research survey of portal managers in large global companies showed that portal budgets were expected to increase from a mean of $657,000 for existing projects to $2 million for planned portals.

Also, portal deployments are targeting very large user populations. Ford, for example, is delivering an internal corporate portal to more than 200,000 employees worldwide. This project was a winner at this year's DCI Portal Conference Excellence Awards, which was sponsored by Intelligent Enterprise.

Most portals developed so far act as a personalized employee front end to corporate intranets for human resource data, company and external news, education and training, and so forth. There is, however, steady growth in the use of portals for external users. This use includes not only trading partners and clients but also consumers. A good example in this last category is the California State portal, which acts as a front end to the several hundred statewide Web servers.

There have been significant developments on the product front. Entering the portal marketplace for the first time are the big infrastructure vendors, such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Oracle, BEA Systems Inc., and Tibco Software Inc. Expect consolidation of the portal market, with many of the pure-play vendors either being acquired or going out of business. Gene Phifer at Gartner Group warns that, "until the shakeouts end, risk-averse enterprises should invest tactically or stick with a larger player." Some pure-play players with significant customer market bases (like Plumtree Software Inc.) are likely to survive, however. There is also room for niche players that supply vertical industry portals or that specialize in specific portal technology areas.

Portal product functionality has improved this past year in areas such as content management, search, and legacy application integration. Improvements to watch for in 2002 include collaboration services, rules management, and mobile computing. Web services are likely to play a key role in future portal development. One promising portal industry effort here is the Web Services User Interface, driven by companies such as Epicentric Inc., Documentum Inc., and IBM.

Regardless of where the industry is heading, it must be realized that portals are an evolving technology, and portal projects require careful business and infrastructure planning. Content surveys, taxonomy development, and user training are also key success factors.

Colin White [cwhite@databaseassociates.com] is president of DataBase Associates International and conference chairperson of the DCI Corporate and E-Business Portals conference.

YEAR IN REVIEWS

Here's a glance at some of the judgments passed in 2001 by Intelligent Enterprise reviewers. For full text and an archive of every review we've ever printed, go to www.IntelligentEnterprise.com/reviews.jhtml.

SPSS Clementine 6.0, SPSS Inc. (Reviewed Aug. 31)
Ultimately, Clementine's productivity lies in its integration of the project workspace, analytical and support functions, access to operational parameters, and the ease with which all of this can be used. — Greg James

Delphi 6, Borland Software Corp. (Reviewed Sept. 18)
Following its tradition of innovation, Delphi 6 is introducing new technology and tools that succeed admirably in integrating Web services into the general application development environment. — Nelson King

Informatica PowerCenter 5.0, Informatica Corp. (Reviewed June 29)
The ability for companies to focus on deriving value from their information assets is becoming more feasible with this release of PowerCenter. This version provides additional enterprise application integration, manageability, and performance improvements that should reduce the amount of resources previously required to build and manage the data warehouse environment. — Mark Smith

SQL Server 2000, Microsoft Corp. (Reviewed Jan. 30)
All in all, SQL Server 2000's enhancement of features such as English Query, VB support, and OLAP services, as well as its inclusion of new features such as federated servers, failover technology, XML support, and true data mining, clearly makes it a significant improvement over previous versions. — Geoffrey Hollander

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PowerDesigner 8.0, Sybase Inc. (Reviewed July 23)
For all its power, PowerDesigner is reasonably simple to use. It has a good, clean interface, appears stable, and has good documentation. As an enterprise modeling tool it offers excellent value. — Rajan Chandras

Oracle9iAS Portal, Oracle Corp. (Reviewed Nov. 12)
Organizations choosing portal products today have the choice of buying high-function products from small software companies (many of which are likely to fail or be acquired), or less mature products from larger and thus more viable software vendors. The portal framework in Oracle9iAS falls into this latter category. — Colin White