InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Users can personalize the way in which they see the data and access unstructured data such as Microsoft Word documents and HTML files. For example, a salesperson can access a point-and-click wizard to build a sales report that breaks down figures by states, regions, and customers, and then, with another click, graph it in a 3-D chart.

Vision:Kaleidoscope has a three-tier architecture that includes access to back-end data sources, Web clients, and a middleware application server. It's based on the Java 1.8 specification. Sterling plans to upgrade to Java 2.0 when it's more stable, says Ken Horner, VP of marketing with Sterling's information-management division.

But portals do have drawbacks, at least for now. DynaMark Inc., a St. Paul, Minn., company that builds and maintains data warehouses for marketing departments, wants to implement portal software so its customers can use client software that requires less maintenance. With a portal, "When you upgrade the software, you don't have to upgrade all the clients, just the server," says Jack Hillyer, a systems software engineer and trainer at DynaMark.

But Hillyer-whose company has tested portals from nearly 50 vendors, including Sterling-is concerned with response time. "We have multiterabyte databases," he says. "With that much data, the response is too slow." Hillyer concedes the problems may be with bandwidth, not with the portal software. However, performance is a drawback, he says.