Portals in the Enterprise Workplace: Key Building Blocks or Aging Stepping Stones?

This IDC study explores the role that portals will play in delivering a variety of technology functions in the context of a business process to the end user. Software vendors seeking to offer solutions to corporate customers, without duplicating functionality in which customers have previously invested, are increasingly launching packaged composite applications (PCAs) to provide process automation to unique segments of the business operation while reducing development and maintenance costs for each additional composite application or business problem solved. The emerging architecture for information workers that IDC calls the "enterprise workplace" challenges portals and PCAs to either provide key building blocks that will enable the enterprise workplace to be realized or serve as the aging stepping stones for other technologies in the future.

"The enterprise workplace poses both an opportunity and a threat to portal vendors. Portal vendors who have not been working toward offering better process integration and improved composite application development will feel the threat of being replaced," according to Brian McDonough, research manager for IDC's Enterprise Portal Software and Packaged Composite Applications research. "However, portal vendors that have focused on providing value to the business user by enabling interoperable aggregation of a variety of applications information sources in the context of a business process are well positioned to lead the market as it evolves toward the enterprise workplace."