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February 8, 1999

Data Gateway

Businesses are adopting the Web portal model as a way of transforming intranets into more powerful data-delivery platforms

By Clinton Wilder, Beth Davis, and Gregory Dalton

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hile huge Internet portal sites such as Netscape and Yahoo battle for consumer traffic, a growing number of businesses are adapting the portal's gateway-to-the-world model as an efficient way for their employees to access critical information online. The concept is so powerful that software vendors throughout the industry are rushing to deliver portal platforms, or at least slap the label on all manner of products and services. That means lots of options-but also plenty of confusion.

In their most ambitious embodiment, enterprise portals represent the latest step in the evolution of intranets from sites that offer mostly static job-support and human-resources data into the starting point for managers and knowledge workers to access real-time and historical information from internal applications, legacy databases, and the Internet-all from their browsers.

As enterprise portals gain momentum, they lend credence to predictions that the browser will replace Windows as the standard desktop interface to access data from any IT source, not just the Web. "This will be the next big user interface," says Meta Group analyst Dave Folger.

The definition of a portal and the technology to make it happen are something of a moving target. Everything from intranets to extranets to plain old Web sites are being rechristened portals. What differentiates portals from their simpler relatives, say users busy working out the details, is their ability to incorporate data from multiple sources in multiple formats and organize it into a single, easy-to-use menu. Portals may incorporate triggers that alert users when new information comes in, or they may kick off events in enterprise applications. Some portals let users conduct business transactions.

"How you differentiate it from a Web site is really a method of categorization," says Parrish Arturi, VP of channel development at First Union Corp. in Charlotte, N.C., which is integrating access to a number of disparate intranets into a single browser-based menu. "The first step is aggregating your basic sources of information, then adding navigation and structure and more information."

Of course, compiling data from multiple sources isn't a new concept. Many technology tools-data mining, data warehousing, knowledge management, business intelligence, even the much-hyped but little-used executive information sys- tems of the 1980s-do just that. What's new with portals is the ubiquity and ease of use of the Web browser interface, and the availability of innumerable new data sources on the public Internet, many of them in real time.

"The question is, is an enterprise portal a product or a concept?" says Jim Balderston, an analyst with Zona Research. Balderston compares the portal phenomenon to the frenzy that accompanied push technology three years ago. "If [enterprise portals] are a concept, then people are chasing something that's ephemeral and very hard to get their hands on," he says. "But if there's a way for companies to manage the fire hose of information that's coming at their desktops, then that's a reasonable thing to do."

That's precisely what Robert Scheer, manager of emerging technology at W.W. Grainger Corp., wants his portal project to accomplish. "The overall concept is great," says Scheer. W.W. Grainger, a multibillion-dollar distributor of industrial and office supplies in Lincolnshire, Ill., is building a portal system that catalogs the company's intranet content, as well as searches and categorizes relevant information from the Internet on the company's market and competitive positions. "It gives you the ability to classify these external sources into some hierarchy," says Scheer.

W.W. Grainger is using Plumtree Software Inc.'s Corporate Portal Server, which retrieves information from the Web and triggers E-mail notifications to inform people that the server has new data relevant to their jobs. For example, a Plumtree crawler can retrieve the financial statement of a competitor, notify the person who would analyze it, and put a summary into a Lotus Notes database. "It makes knowledge more visible throughout the organization," says Scheer. W.W. Grainger has 15,000 employees on its intranet, and Scheer plans to roll out the portal site gradually to various departments.

One of the key benefits of a portal system is the potential to give users organized access to a wide variety of information. "Our primary objective is to make as much information available to as many users across our organization as we can," says Ron Berger, director of IS at Emery Worldwide in Redwood City, Calif. Emery is building an enterprise portal using ReportMart software from Sqribe Technologies Corp. to provide several thousand employees with access to logistical data, financial reports, and customer information, as well as internal information such as an airline travel reservation guide. "The key in the air cargo/air freight business is to provide information as real-time as you can," says Berger.

More Than Data Access
But access to data, even from a panoply of applications and repositories, is just the first step. Like consumer portal sites that offer cybershopping, some enterprise portals will let employees conduct transactions, such as procurement of office supplies. Millennia Vision Corp., a consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., will let its employees make airline and hotel reservations on its portal server. It will also let them share timely client information and project status updates stored in relational databases, flat files, and applications such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and Visio document management.

"Our business is knowledge," says Austin Erlich, Millennia Vision's CEO. "We need to be able to share that seamlessly within our organization." The company will spend about $100,000 a year for ServicePort, a portal-building service to be unveiled this week by Portera Systems Inc.

Procurement may become a common feature of portal systems. PeopleSoft Inc. is working on a portal product that will incorporate the ability to link to enterprise vendors such as office supply dealers. PeopleSoft plans to charge merchants a fee to be represented on its portal.

Some users are extending the portal concept beyond the intranet. BankAmerica Corp. sees the ease of use offered on Web portals as a good model for acquiring and retaining customers who do business online. "Customer loyalty is, in part, defined by how easy it is to get at the information,'' says Man-Wai Lee, VP with BankAmerica's private banking technology and operations.

BankAmerica is building a portal system to let customers in its private bank division-the unit that services high net-worth clients-to generate reports on the fly, such as online statements or cash projections, that draw data from the bank's back-end relational databases. And that's just the start. "The bank plans to provide customers with access to its other products, such as mortgage loans and credit cards, and to eventually search and index all the information in their customized user interface.

Because portal technology is so ill-defined and immature, users need to decide whether to build the systems themselves or buy packaged products. IBM sells a portal application called Enterprise X-Span, which is based on its Lotus Domino platform. Microsoft says some customers are creating portals on its Site Server product.

US Web/CKS, a Web service provider in Santa Clara, Calif., developed its enterprise portal in-house. Dubbed Central, the portal features databases of active and completed client engagements, marketing materials, specific employees' technology expertise, and even pieces of reusable code for software development projects.

"The first thing we do on a project is check Central, and the last thing we do is file all the completed project information back in there," says US Web/CKS CEO Robert Shaw. The company recently began helping its clients build their own portals. "Every customer that sees it says, 'I need one of those,'" says Shaw. "It's a logical way to get your arms around all your intellectual capital, and we think there's a huge business in it."

Ambitious Project
But a portal project can be an ambitious undertaking. Emery World- wide initially looked at building its own enterprise portal using standard Web technologies, but it proved too expensive and time-consuming, says Nina Brandt, manager of enterprise architecture. HTML pages could handle only a certain amount of data, and there were questions about security and scalability.

"With our current staff, it would have taken 18 months to put most of the mission-critical functionality into the portal," says Brandt. Using Sqribe's technology, the company expects to have portions of its enterprise portal running by midyear, with the potential to scale to several thousand end users.

For companies planning to go the "buy" route, most enterprise portal products coming on the market are from small vendors such as Plumtree, Portera, and Sqribe. Also, there's a wide variety of products that bill themselves as portal technologies, most of which provide some form of data access and integration.

For example, this week InfoRay Inc. will debut Info X-Ray, which the company describes as "information portal" software. The tool creates views or "X-Rays" of a company's information sources, such as relational and legacy flat-file databases, OLAP (online analytical processing) systems, data warehouses and data marts, and enterprise resource planning applications. It also shows how those sources are linked.

While Info X-Ray functions more like a data mining product than a portal, it validates the concept of the integrated data interface. In the textbook division of Houghton Mifflin Co. in Boston, sales and marketing managers are using Info X-Ray to tap into mainframe, rela- tional, and Notes databases of sales information to gain a customer-focused view of the division's sales for targeted marketing campaigns. "In the old days we would just flood the market with [product] catalogs," says Mark Mooney, Houghton Mifflin's chief technology officer. "Now we can do more targeted mailings."

PeopleSoft's portal product is a more ambitious undertaking. "Today, people jump from E-mail to ERP applications to a Web site just to complete a single business activity," says Ray Gadbois, VP of marketing for PeopleSoft's new E-business division, called PeopleSoft Business Network. "We need to converge all that content into a single point and provide access from a number of sources."

Just as Yahoo organizes and catalogs the mass confusion of the Web, PeopleSoft maintains that it can bring organized content and business information to the individual. The idea is that the employee comes to work on Monday morning, switches on his or her computer, and logs into the equivalent of "My PeopleSoft."

Everything the employee needs to do his or her job will be there, according to Gadbois. For example, if you need to order office supplies or change your 401(k) benefits, there will be hot links to the appropriate information and service providers such as Charles Schwab or Office Depot. The PeopleSoft portal will also provide access to data and content that resides inside the ERP backbone and related analytical applications. Senior-level executives, for example, could receive critical business information such as product sales per region on a timely basis. PeopleSoft plans to release its portal-building software by year's end, with beta tests to begin in the next few months.

The biggest barriers to successful enterprise portals aren't technological, but organizational and human, many users say. First Union's Arturi notes that departments often assert their ownership of specific data, which can slow down the process of sharing and merging information.

W.W. Grainger's Scheer agrees. "It's not just an IT project," he says. "It takes people time to manage the process [of information-sharing]. It takes subject-matter experts to monitor this, out in user departments."

USWeb/CKS has created the position of "knowledge captain" to do just that: keep information current and relevant, as well as train users. The company says it has filled four of its 12 budgeted positions. "That's what you need to get the real benefit of the portal," says Shaw.

The real benefit of enterprise portals has yet to be realized. But if the growth and success of consumer portals on the Web is any indication, realizing those benefits may not be far away.

With additional reporting by Tom Stein and Rick Whiting

See related story "Consumer Portals Talk Business"

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