Trend

The enterprise portal rises

Companies are resorting to portals as a means of showcasing the knowledge and information that’s usually locked in their enterprise software systems By Vinita Gupta.

The idea of a portal is to collect information from different sources and create a single point of access to information. It is a personalised filter into the Web. An enterprise portal differs from this to the extent that it is a filter to enterprise content that may be located in an ERP system, an intranet or on the public Internet for that matter.

Enterprises are driven by the need to provide customers, employees and vendors with a consolidated view of corporate information, processes and applications.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) the global market for enterprise portal software is pegged at around $3 billion. India would probably have a share of one to two percent of that.

According to Mohan Verma, Associate Director, PwC, the market is growing rapidly, and people use portals for conventional business transactions for which they would otherwise have used an ERP client. With single sign on (SSO) features increasingly being sought, the portal is becoming a universal front end for multiple business applications, information and transactions.

"If there are no collaboration capabilities then the investments made on portals will be of no use" - Sunil Mehra Director Sales - Fusion Middleware Oracle India

Enterprise portals allow a user to choose what reaches his desktop. These encompass extranets and other applications within a single framework. Enterprise portals are set up by organisations to cater to internal employees performing different roles.

Some common varieties of portals are corporate portals; functional portals (eHR, sales etc); initiative-specific portals (Six Sigma, NPD, and knowledge management); external portals for customers—in the telecom industry customers can access the portal for downloading schemes and extended ecosystem portals to interact with suppliers. An example of the last type is the Supplier Self-Service Portal from SAP that provides visibility to suppliers to access data such as stock levels, payment status etc. This portal offers easy interaction between an organisation and its suppliers.

The utility of portals

"If an organisation cannot provide up-to-date and high quality content to its consumers then it has lost the race" - Krishna Prasad Programming and ISMP Lead MSN India Microsoft Corporation

The enterprise portal software market has grown over the last five years, driven by mergers and acquisitions, but also through a variety of other influences namely the growth of technology, easy access to information and increasing competition. Organisations continue to come up with new ideas to provide value to customers through portals.

Portals are being created by organisations across verticals, even in government. Getting information from a government department used to take forever. With the help of portals it can be done easily. For e.g. The portal that lets you check your passport status reduces the need to personally visit the passport office.

Sunil Mehra, Director Sales - Fusion Middleware, Oracle India says, “Earlier connectivity was the stumbling block in the growth of portals but advances in technology have helped overcome these hindrances.”

"Multi channel portals are picking up as these run from a single source but can be accessed through PDAs, smartphones, PCs etc" - Akshay Aggarwal Head - Systems Engineering BEA Systems Technology

He further adds, “Business is booming with an increase in customers and suppliers and hence there is a need to have effective collaboration. Portals enable this helping drive business and increase productivity.

Akshay Aggarwal, Head – Systems Engineering, BEA Systems Technology also agrees that the technology boom has been a driving factor in the growth of portals. According to him, flexibility is required in today’s world. One would like to use the Internet for interacting instead of personally visiting a company, as it saves time, money and manpower.

He adds, “Multi channel portals are picking up as these run from a single source but can be accessed through PDAs, smartphones, PCs etc. For instance, in the case of a bank, information can be accessed through the Net or via SMS.”

According to Verma, familiar interfaces, the ease of transacting online, rising bandwidth, increased comfort vis-a-vis security, more content and the presence of trustworthy transaction gateways have all helped.

Krishna Prasad, Programming and ISP Lead, MSN India, Microsoft Corporation adds, “The key to the online medium is speed and quality of content.”

"Customers are asking for collaboration capabilities such as instant messaging or conferencing to be built as a part of the portal" - Atul Sareen Vice President, Sales Overlay, SAP India

Atul Sareen, Vice President, Sales Overlay, SAP India believes there is a need to have content strategies in place. SAP strongly profiles the users of the portals and restricts access to the modules intended for specific employee groups.

According to Mehra, for a successful enterprise portal, data that drives the business is of utmost importance.

Portals go horizontal

Assembling data to accumulate it into a database and into various media, so that it is accessible to everyone is important. This requires discussions with the concerned departmental heads scattered across the country or even the world. Meeting them in person is going to be difficult and time consuming. This problem can be solved by the use of horizontal portals that cater to everyone and not one department. Hence horizontal portals continue to be the engine that drive the enterprise portal market.

Although the IT, BPO and BFSI segments have been in the forefront of portal initiatives, telecom and other segments are also looking to implement this technology. One of the reasons for these segments to initiate their deployments has been the large employee base of organisations in these verticals.

“The perception wherein an enterprise portal was viewed as a Web site is changing. People are looking at an enterprise portal as an application that has a high value proposition to the business but a portal should be interactive,” says Aggarwal.

If all that an organisation needs is knowledge management (KM) then it should start with that instead of starting with an enterprise portal from day one. It should have the right technology that serves its purpose in the future as well, for instance if it wants to extend the KM portal into a HR portal.

Sareen feels, instead of having many initiative-specific portals like HR portals, KM portals etc there should be only one portal in which all sub-portals are subsumed and made accessible to the concerned employee groups.

He says, “Organisations keep on growing, if a company has a HR portal today, in few years it may require a KM portal hence instead of having different portals and wasting time logging in and loggging out from one portal to another, organisations can have only one enterprise portal that fulfils the needs of all other portals.”

Collaboration is the watch word

According to Mehra, enterprise portals without collaboration are meaningless.

He adds, “If there are no collaboration capabilities then the investments made on portals will be of no use.”

Sareen concurs, “We have certain customers (basically from service industries such as IT), who have asked for collaboration capabilities such as instant messaging, document sharing and chat or conferencing to be built as a part of the portal.”

Linking resources to processes

A portal’s greatest benefit comes not from creating a single view of multiple resources, but from linking these resources directly to business processes, even when those processes tap multiple resources. A portal must provide a user interface to a process, not to a single application.

Hence second generation portals are based on business processes that involve the unification of portals, for instance the Indian Railways have many Web sites but they can have a single portal that can be connected to various Web sites which will help people as they can access a portal to solve or get information instead of visiting several Web sites.

Aggarwal believes that there will be growth in self service portals.