Yahoo! Inc. made a major push within the enterprise arena Tuesday by
signing on 11 new customers and rolling out an upgrade of its portal
building software.
Terms of the deals were not disclosed.
New customers for the Corporate Yahoo! initiative include: McDonald’s Corp.,
Bayer AG, Janus Capital Corp., Seagate Technology, Merck Sharp & Dohme,
Reuters, Corio, Hall Kinion & Associates, Health Net Inc., Government
Securities Clearing Corp. and JLT Services.
Collectively, Yahoo! has increased its enterprise customer base to 18,
consisting of more than 800,000 individual users among the companies. But
perhaps
the biggest score is in picking up fast-food behemoth McDonald’s as a
client.
McDonald’s is deploying an enterprise-wide portal to enhance internal
communications and collaboration among its corporate employees and
franchisees, marking the first time the fast-food chain has made such a
major Web push.
Corporate Yahoo!, like most enterprise-targeted intranet solutions, allows
businesses to aggregate, personalize and deliver necessary content and
services to their employees, customers and business partners globally. With
that delivery comes security, as the information is protected behind a
company’s firewall.
In a complementary play, Yahoo! also upgraded its portal building
software, Yahoo! PortalBuilder 2.0, which will enable
wireless access, and several new Corporate Yahoo! partnerships in the
future.
Co-developed with real-time solution provider TIBCO Software Inc., Yahoo!
PortalBuilder server software allows portal administrators to control the
aggregation, personalization and delivery of content, services and
applications that will be accessed by end-users.
Features for the new software component include:
- Support for enabling users to access content via wireless devices,
including Web-enabled phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and pagers
- Improved roles-based personalization, including the ability to control
portal look and feel, access to portal modules, and default portal content
by organizational role - Enhanced ability to localize content for global deployments, utilizing
Yahoo!’s platform across 24 world properties and in 13 languages.