Horizontal portals (world market)

Gartner released another research on a technique "a magic square" for the world market of horizontal portal solutions. Orientation of decision makers to requests of users, socialization, mobile and cloud computing and also development of technology, quickly change an appearance of the market of portals. The magic square of Gartner company this year includes new vendors of portal solutions.

Source of Gartner (October, 2011)

Group of leaders – vendors of portal solutions the Microsoft corporation heads. Follow IBM, Oracle, SAP and LifeRay. In group of applicants for leadership there was only a Red Hat company (JBoss).

To number of seers, i.e. those who develop separate perspective tools, but cannot brag of the width of functionality and universality of the platform, Gartner carried OpenText, Covisint (Compuware), Salesforce.com and Backbase. Among niche players there were Tibco Software, Drupal, DotNetNuke and edge IPK.

Key players

Microsoft

The flagman solution of the company in the market of portals, SharePoint, still is the most quickly developing in a product portfolio of corporation, and with start of Office 365 at the beginning of 2011, SharePoint Online becomes also key component of cloud strategy of Microsoft. SharePoint 2010 achieved considerable success in the market as the platform for joint work and the combined applications. SharePoint develops as the comprehensive platform of experience of users (user experience platform - UXP).

IBM

WebSphere Portal of version 7.0 is a product of IBM, is executed in the form of space for work and a set of services, is often used for implementation of portlets, widgets or other components. From the moment of the emergence in the market of portals in the late nineties, IBM is the leader of this market. IBM continues development of fundamental bases of the portal, providing at the same time a portfolio of more coherent solutions for satisfaction of the needs for different industries of IBM continues to accumulate an extensive portfolio of offers, including content management systems, analysts, social software and software for e-commerce which supplement WebSphere Portal also conduct it by further development of the platform of the user experience.

Oracle

Oracle offers the WebCenter portal which consists of WebCenter Suite, the including WebLogic Portal, WebCenter Interaction and WebCenter Services. Oracle actively develops portal solutions the last several years, and WebCenter rebranding to that explicit confirmation. Oracle continues to resolve issues in a difficult multiportal product within its convergence in WebCenter Portal. According to Gartner estimates, on this product 80% of all income from portals of Oracle is necessary in the future.

SAP

The offer of SAP is NetWeaver Portal, develops in two directions: as set for the enterprise, the portal in property, and as a set of untied services with access through multiple points of interaction, including the application, mobile devices and cloud services. Latest version of product 7.3. concentrates mainly on interaction with third-party portals and content management mechanisms, mobile solutions are also developed. SAP NetWeaver is on the way of development of the platform of the user experience.

LifeRay

It is the company creating products open source. The product Liferay Portal 6.1 was provided in the third quarter 2011 and includes improvements in the field of document flow. Clients of the company often make the choice for benefit of this product for its modest advantages though the company develops the most complete platform of experience of users with abilities to manage content and the product Liferay Social Office.

The main trends in the market

After several years of stable consolidation in the market of portals, extends a sex of potential providers of solutions for this market again. Evolution of solutions moves towards creation of wide and comprehensive platforms of the user experience, further development of services of cloud portals and other new tools.

Portals become the personalized access points to necessary information, business processes and people, providing monetization in three main aspects:

• portals provide to end users uniform, personal access point to up-to-date and reliable information.
• portals provide the commercial organizations with a universal point of interaction, support, training, reaction to requests and actions of clients and other categories of users.
• portals provide to the IT organizations flexible, scalable delivery systems of web applications, the environment for joint work and a possibility of redefinition of powers in business.

In the research Gartner points to significant changes in architecture of portal solutions in recent years. While development of portals was often connected with aggregation, delivery of sources of information, expansion of processes and business applications earlier, new customers of portals recognize that for development of success they need to attract to participate end users in work of the portal.

Old portals did not provide the due level of loyalty of end users that as a result led to decrease in their importance and stagnation in the market. New portals create for consumers who expect high extent of personalisation, socialization, availability, mobility, usability. Besides, the important requirement to portal solutions is the possibility of synchronization with different types of portable devices and communication frameworks.

At the same time, users and consumers have a choice: if they do not like those instruments of joint work which are provided to them by the company, they can easily use other user mechanisms: Google Documents Facebook or Drop Box.

Notes

the Horizontal portal - the portal of the general character offering a set of services, the processes servicing different user subject.