Research Firm Predicts Enterprise Portal Shakeout

“Businesses should not expect to solve all enterprise-wide information and
application access issues with only one portal product,
and in fact most of the products we looked at are neither enterprise in
scope nor true portals,” said Allen Bonde, director, Extraprise Advisors.

Yet, with the right expectations and positioning, a number of these
solutions clearly have the potential to become key building blocks for the
next stage of e-business.”

The bearish report comes despite reports from several research and analysis
firms that feel the enterprise portal market is booming, particularly
overseas. One of these, ironically enough, happens to be Forrester, who said
intranet access overseas is growing at 40 percent annually, and the European
Union’s 12.7 million on-line users at work outnumber their counterparts with
home access by a ratio of nearly 2-to-1.

But firms on the domestic front aren’t scared either as last month saw the
launch of a major enterprise initiative from Yahoo! Inc. With its
Corporate Yahoo! strike, the giant will offer their employees content and
services from the portal giant on in-house networks.