Spending on Portal Initiatives Projected to Grow 30 Percent

Both large and small companies plan to expand their average budgets for enterprise portal initiatives by 35 percent to 40 percent in the coming year, according to a new report from the Aberdeen Group.

Drivers behind this demand include initiatives to extend business applications across the enterprise and possibly into partner systems, along with plans to improve employee collaboration.

Respondents also cited more-coherent content management as a motivation to build out portal strategies. While only 25 percent of companies surveyed said they have an enterprise-wide content management strategy in place, 80 percent of those don't plan to implement such a strategy in the next one to two years.

CRM and Related Investments

The projected increase in portal spending is likely to have an indirect impact on customer relationship management spend as well, Russ Klein, research director for Aberdeen Group's enabling technology practice, told CRM Buyer.

"Increasingly, CRM is becoming one of the core critical applications of an enterprise, and so the incentive to integrate CRM data with other business applications is growing. With a portal to enable that -- particularly in a SOA (service-oriented architecture) environment -- the implication is a broader use of CRM across the enterprise."

According to the survey, 43 percent of respondents have planned investment in performance management and CRM applications; 40 percent have planned investment in real time analytics, and 38 percent have planned investment in Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP.

Connecting the Enterprise

However, the main focus among survey respondents was portal technology. Based on their responses, spending is projected to rise across many related categories: intranet and extranet applications, business-to-business and portal-to-portal data integration, and integration of VoIP.

Other analyst firms previously have forecast similar increases -- but the major vendors were then offering pure play products, which Klein likened to buying a big empty box.

"Portal spend in of itself has gotten subsumed into other more-targeted vertical applications" up until the last year, he said. That changed, though, with Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) latest enhancements to its Sharepoint platform.

"That has really revitalized the portal market in the sense that people are starting to look at it again as a horizontal play or platform, as opposed to something you would buy in a box and install," Klein explained.

Leveraging SOA

Microsoft has been upgrading its platform, with the latest enhancements rolled out this summer, he said. "It is designed to open the application framework to collaboration. It has also addressed earlier complaints such as its proprietary architecture."

Other improvements include increased interoperability, such as better integration to back-end systems such as dashboards for business intelligence, improved search and scalability.

Other companies -- such as IBM (NYSE: IBM) with its WebSphere product, and BEA (Nasdaq: BEAS) and SAP (NYSE: SAP), to some extent -- are providing platforms with extensions that leverage SOA within the organization to enable enterprise-wide sharing of application data and VoIP capabilities, he said.

Aberdeen's research was underwritten by Anexinet, BEA, BroadVision and OptimusBT.