While portals are hotter than firecrackers in the global market, Indian companies are still in the early adopter phase. Prashant L Rao finds enterprise application vendors squaring off for a tussle in this promising segment that offers single screen, single sign-on access to the length and breadth of an enterprise’s data resources

With Gartner pegging the worldwide portal market at $1 billion and IDC projecting a $3.1 billion market in 2006, Enterprise Portals are big business. Conservative estimates by industry sources put the Indian market at a million dollars, while others believe it to be substantially bigger. What all of them agree upon is that this segment is growing rapidly. Retail banking, telecom, insurance and state governments are verticals where Enterprise Portals are most likely to be deployed.

The need for Enterprise Portals derives from the existence of legacy databases that most enterprises are saddled with. These contain data that is manipulated through a variety of code, screens and reports that are hard to replicate. However, these systems are an enterprise’s information backbone and cannot be ignored even though the data often lacks consistency and the systems are so diverse that the average user is familiar with only two or three applications at best. That’s where Enterprise Portals come into the picture—offering smooth single screen, single sign-on access to a wealth of legacy data. Abroad there has been consolidation with pure play vendors being acquired or fading away. In India only the big enterprise software vendors are active in this space.

Bikram Bedi of IBM says the aim of an enterprise portal is to provide a single consolidated view to the user across the enterprise

IBM
The WebSphere Portal Family unifies IBM’s portal offerings for building highly scalable portals, WebSphere Portal Extend Solution that lets portal users act on information and applications accessed by collaborating with other portal users and WebSphere Portal Experience Solution is the solution for developing, deploying, and maintaining enterprise portals. IBM offers a set of SAP Portals iViews along with any of these solutions to integrate key business applications from SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, Siebel, and Oracle.

“The aim of an enterprise portal is to provide a single consolidated view to the user across the enterprise,” says Bikram Bedi, country sales manager, WebSphere & MQ Software, Software Group, IBM India.

A typical implementation can take anywhere between six weeks to six months, depending on the complexity of the requirement. Implementation of an enterprise portal using WebSphere Portals costs anything from Rs 40 lakh upwards.

Gartner says: “IBM has significantly improved its product offering, including consolidating down to one portal product. Its improved product is more off-the-shelf, requiring much less services for deployment. IBM gained significant market traction in 2H01.”

BEA
BEA’s Weblogic Portal offers commerce services, personalisation, and campaign management and lets companies design content. “60 to 70 percent of the required code is built into the product,” says Srikant S Rao, country manager-India, BEA Systems HK. BEA’s portal product is a pure portal and companies need to get a separate product called Weblogic Integration, which provides adapters for 75 applications (ERP, CRM, and mainframe). For home-grown applications there is an Adapter Development Kit. Implementation of a basic configuration can take two weeks. The software is priced at $100,000 per CPU and a base implementation, including hardware and database costs would range from Rs 75 lakh to a crore.

“20 to 25 customers in India are ready for this concept,” says Rao. “India is still a market for core applications such as ERP. The next step will be to integrate applications.”

Gartner is bullish about BEA’s prospects. It says: “BEA Systems’ portal product is new, having been launched in October 2001. It suffers somewhat from immaturity, but is growing up quickly. We expect this product will be a success because of the substantial deployed base of WebLogic application servers.”

According to Pankaj Ukey of Microsoft, Web parts are a critical component of Microsoft’s portal solution

Microsoft
“The front-end in our solutions is the Digital Dashboard with SharePoint Portal Server at the back-end. The Digital Dashboard is made up of many Web parts which talk to back-end applications like ERP and offer collaborative features using MS Office. Web parts are a critical component of Microsoft’s portal solution and these are available on our website for free,” says Pankaj Ukey, marketing manager, Microsoft Corporation India.

Microsoft provides ISVs with the Digital Dashboard Resource Kit. Other features of Microsoft’s solution include Enterprise Search that lets users search for data across the enterprise, be it structured (database) or unstructured (e-mail, Word, Excel and PDF documents). Unstructured data accounts for 60 to 70 percent of an enterprise’s information. Document management is the final element, providing the ability to publish documents and manage the document workflow.

A SharePoint Portal Server installation can go live in a week. Customisation and integration with back-end systems will take more time. The product comes with connectors for SAP, Siebel, Notes, Exchange and AutoCAD. A 25-user set-up would cost roughly Rs 10 lakh, including hardware, software and some customisation.

Microsoft is also bundling SharePoint Portal Server with Windows Media Broadcast Services in a solution called Microsoft Solution for Intranets.

“Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server continues to lag the market in features and vision. Release 2.0, slated for 1H03, will be a .NET application, but will continue to lag the leaders in the market,” says Gartner. However it would be unwise to discount Microsoft’s efforts as the company usually manages to get its products up to speed rapidly when a market explodes.

Oracle
The company bundles its portal product as part of the Oracle9i Application Server (Oracle9iAS). Oracle9iAS Portal, is a browser-based utility for creating Enterprise Information Portals. Single sign-on server, the ultra-search engine and the Internet file system are key product features, as is the ability to create a library of portlets that can be published, picked, or removed from the portal by users, giving them the ability to customise their own portal.

Oracle9iAS Portal also lets organisations publish their services as portlets that can be incorporated into a portal. For instance, some Indian news providers (HindustanTimes.com and myiris.com) have published their portlets on My.Oracle.com, and these can be used by any user of My.Oracle.com. 9iAS Portal has adapters for common technologies and applications like IMAP, MQ Series, CICS, Oracle11i eBusiness Suite, SAP, Peoplesoft and Siebel.

“Portal implementation timeframe can vary from a couple of weeks to months, depending on the scope, the level of dynamic content and the level of integration required,” says Gaurav Varma, Oracle 9i marketing manager, Oracle India. An Oracle9i Application Server licence (which includes the portal software among other things), is available at a list price of less than Rs 5 lakh for a single processor unlimited user licence, or under Rs.10,000 per user.

SAP
SAP sees demand coming from manufacturing companies for solutions such as knowledge management. “Portals are generating wider interest than CRM,” says Pradeep Sen, director- manufacturing, SAP India. “Their key advantages are role-based access and single sign-on.” SAP provides pre-configured front-ends such as Purchase Roster and Sales Manager that need minimal customisation. SAP portals provide easy access to an organisation’s internal data stores as well as external feeds such as Reuters. mySAP Enterprise Portal solution offers Unification and iViews that are designed to access legacy and transactional systems; business intelligence provides an analytics platform; knowledge management provides a comprehensive unstructured document management solution, and Yahoo offers Web content and services. iViews provide awareness of events and enable interface and access to enterprise applications and other legacy information sources. iViews are available for various applications like Outlook, Notes, SAP, Oracle, Siebel and PeopleSoft. Unification provides contextual navigation that greatly reduces the time it takes to resolve any event that users become aware of. It does this by breaking monolithic applications into components/transactions allowing users to work with information from different sources by dragging one item and relating it to another to produce instant answers to business questions.

A simple solution covering top management in an organisation across a few applications could take about 6-8 weeks to deliver. As a thumb rule, an Enterprise Portal solution from SAP could cost in the range of 5 percent to 10 percent of the user company’s total IT investment. SAP states that Enterprise Portals help achieve faster return on investment.

Tirthankar Banerjee of Sun expects to have twenty portal implementations in the bag this year

Sun Microsystems
Sun offers a basic portal engine and value-added packs. “Companies want a robust directory, ease of publishing, flexible content management, dynamic channels, mobile access, security, personalisation and whiteboarding, chat and messaging,” says Tirthankar Banerjee, general manager, Strategic Alliances, Sun Microsystems India. Sun sees portal software as infrastructure. It has already implemented the same at Hindustan Times and Esconet. Banerjee expects to have twenty implementations in the bag this year.

A basic implementation of the Sun ONE Portal Server could take two months, with a minimum of six months for a full implementation. A solution could cost anything from $100,000 onwards, going up to $1 million. Portals are versatile—they could be employee portals, insurance portals or dealer portals. “Vortals or vertical portals are in demand,” says Banerjee.

Sun recently announced Sun ONE Portal Server 6 that adds support for application servers from BEA and IBM, and for Windows and Linux. Gartner believes that “Sun’s upcoming support for multiple application servers and OSes differentiates it from large infrastructure player, such as BEA, IBM and Oracle, that view portals as part of a lock-in strategy. Combined with Sun’s recent announcement to bundle its application server with its OS, the bold move of supporting other application servers means Sun’s application server has lost ground in a maturing market and attempts to change the rules of engagement.”

Coming up
These are still early days for Enterprise Portals in India. “We expect Enterprise Portals to proliferate in the next two years,” says Sen of SAP. We expect companies that have deployed ERP and other core applications to move to the next stage deploying application servers and Enterprise Portals in the next two to three years.