Enterprise Portal Players with Complete Solutions have big, complete, very scalable products.  They can do (or be made to do) nearly anything.  They’re particularly good at being customized for appearance, for integration with existing legacy applications and new business applications, and for supporting complex interactions among large numbers of users with varying roles and permissions.  IBM is the best example, but BEA and Sun’s iPlanet also play here and Microsoft is preparing an Enterprise version of its Sharepoint offering (which is currently more of a specialty offering).

 

Specialty Portal Vendors often provide a portal with a particular purpose in mind – perhaps Knowledge Management or Collaboration or Distance Learning.  Over time, some specialty portal vendors have extended their offerings, either by adding to their intellectual property or via partnerships with others.  They’re usually great at what they specialize in, but not necessarily experts in building large-scale, general purpose portals.  We’d position Open Text and Hummingbird here.

 

A sub-segment of these Specialty Portal Vendors (or perhaps a segment of its own) is Portal Vendors who specialty is easy to create/easy to use portals.  Full-blown portals (even if you’re only using a part of them) can require quite a lot of time and manpower, typically three months or longer, to get up and ready to use.  Portals in this category are not intended for very large enterprises, but rather for medium-sized companies or departments or locations within larger companies.  Fast implementation – as little as a few days to a week – is their primary calling card.  The newest addition to this group is the just-announced Citrix Nfuse Elite.

 

Application vendors have, in many cases, created a portal wrapper for their application (SAP and Peoplesoft would be good examples.)  They may offer some of the other features of portals, but they’re rarely full-blown Enterprise Portals (see above).  These are fine interfaces for those products; the only problem is that it’s unlikely to serve all of the computing needs of an individual and less likely to serve all of the needs of an entire organization.  We’d expect this notion to evolve so that the portal-enabled versions of applications will ultimately be part of a larger and more complete organizational portal.

 

Dozens of vendors provide tools and content for Portals.  These are too numerous to mention by name but include everything from integration tools for accessing applications through the portal to search engines, collaboration, and messaging.  Content vendors provide everything from general news, weather, and business information to industry specific real-time information.