A Better Understanding of the Enterprise Information Portal Market

“Origin-based” Categorization

According to market studies conducted by Owendo, the principal EIP vendors fall into one of seven major categories. This wide range of players can be explained by the fact that an enterprise portal is a web application that must be capable of integrating the largest number of functionalities within a user workspace. Therefore, most software vendors figure there is a place for their solution within the EIP market.

In addition to the purists – portal vendors such Epicentric, Plumtree and Viador – other companies have worked to develop portal solutions in hopes of beefing up their catalogues and grabbing a share of this ever-expanding market.

From a technical point of view, an enterprise portal relies on a web application server and uses a database. For this reason, the major infrastructure vendors having an application server such as IBM, BEA, Oracle, Sybase and Microsoft have developed portal applications based entirely upon their technologies.

Moreover, it is impossible to create an enterprise portal that aims to facilitate information access without a search engine. As a result, search/categorization solution vendors such as Autonomy, Arisem and Verity have developed portal solutions that integrate their respective search/categorization/indexing solutions.

Vendors of content management solutions such as Documentum, Interwoven, iManage, InStranet and OpenText have also joined the portal market because document management or, quite simply, information is a vital part of any enterprise portal. These vendors cannot sit idly and watch this new trend take off; they must offer solutions capable of using their respective products.

CRM and ERP software vendors such as BroadVision, Vignette, SAP and PeopleSoft also play an important role, as portals must integrate their web applications to accommodate enterprises possessing many of these solutions. Therefore, these vendors are also obligated to offer a solution that is capable of accessing their functionalities and applications in a transparent manner.

Likewise, EAI solution vendors such as Tibco and webMethods also offer portal solutions. In fact, the whole idea behind portals is quite similar to the objective of EAI solutions: reunite and bring into relation heterogeneous applications. Portals group together disparate applications and represent the unique entry point to enterprise applications.

Finally, business intelligence vendors also play a significant role since more and more enterprises possess data warehousing tools. Moreover, by integrating statistical reports in a portal, vendors can offer adapted solutions. For this reason, Cognos, Business Objects and Brio have all come up with enterprise portals capable of integrating their tools.

Functionality-based Categorization

Each vendor aims to offer a portal with the largest number of tools. A portal must be able to integrate applications and information sources, search and index documents, enable collaboration and offer a personalizable interface. Nevertheless, despite significant efforts, vendors have a hard time escaping their pasts. As a result, several functional categories of portals have surfaced. Owendo has identified four major categories of portal solutions.

Firstly, business-oriented portals encompass all products specialized in a specific domain. In fact, this category includes vendors that have developed a portal around their flagship application. Here we find a group of data warehousing portals such as Business Objects InfoView, which is not afraid of stating its exclusive data warehousing positioning. Brio’s Brio Portal 7.0, on the other hand, leans toward a general-use portal by integrating its business intelligence solutions, as well as external information, for example. However, each solution’s core activity remains business intelligence and each solution’s main concern is producing, consulting and refreshing statistical reports. PeopleSoft, SAP, BroadVision and Vignette – products designed primarily for the creation of portals that integrate their respective applications – also fall into this category.

The second category, collaborative portals, includes collaboration, knowledge management and categorization applications. Among the vendors in this category, we find Documentum, OpenText, Lotus and Microsoft, all of which provide collaboration tools within their portal (task list, shared agenda, project management, etc.). As they have always been specialized in search and categorization, vendors such as Arisem, Autonomy, Hummingbird and Verity quite naturally offer solutions focused on these aspects. Furthermore, these vendors’ modules are frequently found in other market portals.

It is important to point out that Documentum also offers a portal solution allowing for content management in the same way as Interwoven; however, it does not offer a true portal interface. These companies implement only those components capable of integrating their content management solutions in other portals. In other words, there are no veritable content management portals, simply functionalities enabling some portals to use components from the principal document management products (workflow systems, document locking, versioning, etc.).

Although void of any outstanding functional assets, generic portals, are designed to cover most needs. For example, IBM, BEA, Oracle and Sybase provide a good-quality technical infrastructure for their portals. The portals these vendors have based upon their respective application servers are indeed complete from a technical point of view. Similarly, Bowstreet and SilverStream can be placed in this category. These solutions also propose their application servers; however, they only provide ready-to-use libraries. In this case, the portal solution is simply a framework enabling the creation of a portal by modeling, followed by development.

Finally, aggregation and integration portals aim to provide the largest amount of information by providing various modules and, of course, the ability to integrate applications and aggregate content. This category includes Epicentric, Viador, Plumtree, ATG, Mediapps and Tibco/Yahoo!. These portal solutions stand out because their origins are deeply rooted in portal creation. However, they cannot always meet all enterprise needs in a standardized manner and usually require the use of a third-party application server.

The Ever-Changing EIP Market

As we can see, most vendors have embraced the EIP market whole-heartedly. As this is a relatively new trend, for the moment, the best way to differentiate solutions is by looking at each vendor’s origins. However, these differences will fade as products develop and as the market matures. Therefore, while some vendors are trying to cover the panoply of functionalities required to meet enterprise needs, others are concentrating on very specific functionalities in order to gain ground on a market segment that will eventually be abandoned by the victors of the first round.

If you would like more information about EIPs, check out Owendo technology’s special dossier “The Lowdown on EIPs.” (http://www.owendo.com/technocorner/resources/rd.html)

Owendo technology is an analyst firm dedicated to helping enterprises solve problems brought about by new technologies. Owendo technology’s experts write reports, panoramas and articles based on technology tracking and on the experience acquired during the many consulting and benchmarking projects they have carried out for companies.  For more information about Owendo technology, contact technology@owendo.com.

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