The new partners, Autonomy , EDS, Ernst & Young, Factiva, InfoSpace, iSyndicate, Net Perceptions , SiteScape, Verity and WebEx, will provide content and applications for enterprise portals built on the Oracle Enterprise Portal framework.

Partners who join the Oracle Portal Partner Initiative will receive technology, training and support -- all based on Oracle's Enterprise Portal.

One faction of the plan includes the FastForward Enterprise Portal solution, an application built on Oracle's database, Oracle8i, and Oracle WebDB, Oracle's portal building tool. The initiative marks the first fixed-time, one-price solution available in the market for portal development.

Oracle's goal is to offer a one-stop portal experience so corporate users do not have to spend extra time opening and closing numerous files and applications. Increasing in popularity, enterprise portals also allow for rapid communication among employees.

"With the Oracle FastForward Enterprise Portal solution, Oracle helps a wide-range of companies solve three key problems -- consolidating disparate information located on different web sites, easing the complexity for IT management -- quickly while reducing large e-mail attachments," said Sandy Sanderson, executive vice president, Oracle.

"With an infrastructure based on Oracle8i, customers can start small and grow large quickly, just as their centralized IT framework grows to support hundreds of thousands of users per day in record time."

The FastForward Enterprise Portal solution is the fourteenth in a series of programs introduced over the past two years, the latest being Oracle FastForward OnLine Financials. Both the FastForward Enterprise Portal and FastForward OnLine Financials are designed to be five-day programs geared to reduce implementation time by 90 percent over previous programs.

Oracle has joined a number of technology providers in the Web portal market, including IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and the Sun-Netscape Alliance. Corporate Web portals typically give employees easy access to e-mail, stock quotes and news, such as weather reports or company news.

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Oracle FastForward Enterprise Portal solution is immediately available in the US at a base price of $30,000 for 20 named users. A spectrum of pricing packages is available for named users as well as power units.