AMR Research Releases In-Depth Study on the Portal Market

Leading Analyst Firm Ranks Top 15 Providers Based on Functionality, Technology, Quality, Cost, and Long-term Viability

BOSTON - April 4, 2002 - AMR Research today released the most comprehensive study to date on the portal market, based on extensive research of the top 15 vendors in the space and interviews with more than 75 current adopters of the technology. The AMR Research Enabling Technologies Report entitled, "Portals: The New Battle for the Enterprise Desktop," provides a detailed evaluation and ranking of the leading vendors in the market based on functionality, technology, quality of customer experience, cost of ownership, and financial viability. In addition to the rankings, the report takes an extra step by evaluating the vendor's viability and providing recommendations for customers who have either invested in the technology or plan to do so in the next 12 months.

"Interest in portal technology is on the rise as companies foresee the benefits and applicability of a unified portal framework to other IT priorities, including security, relationship management and collaboration," said Jim Murphy, senior analyst, AMR Research. "While portals allow companies to leverage existing applications and information sources, there is still a wide gap between the enterprise portal vision and the pragmatic reality, both in terms of the products' capability and the customers' readiness."

According to AMR Research, 42 percent of all companies across all industries have a budget explicitly allotted for the development of a portal framework. However, only 11 percent of these companies view it as one of their top three IT priorities for the year. In addition, adopters of the technology interviewed for the study reported that the portal has only been deployed to 21 percent of their constituents, effectively using only 27 percent of the portal's functional capability.

Key Findings and Recommendations

Key findings and recommendations drawn from the research in the report include:

• A crowded, fragmented market makes enterprise portal decisions difficult and bad decisions costly. The entrance of industry heavyweights into the market has confused users and left many of the pure-play vendors scrambling into niche markets.
• Plumtree, Epicentric, and Vignette offer the most comprehensive portal products today, but a slew of powerful vendors, including Oracle, BEA Systems, PeopleSoft, and SAP Portals, will vie for dominance on the enterprise desktop.
• Whether it is a portal or a money pit depends on how easily users can expand and adapt it. The unique, most often unanticipated, and most costly factor over the course of the portal's life is in adding, configuring, and maintaining integration and content elements.
• Companies looking to adopt a portal framework should evaluate potential vendors based on a number of individual factors and priorities, including existing development environment, information sources and enterprise applications, intended scope of deployment, need for delegated administration, and vision of the vendor.

About AMR Research

AMR Research is a strategic advisory firm that provides critical analysis and actionable advice to business and technology executives to help them manage resources, assess and mitigate risk, and increase business value. The company's research initiatives are based on The Performance-Driven Enterprise, a practical approach to understanding how business strategy drives technology adoption. AMR Research, founded in 1986, is headquartered in Boston, MA. More information is available at www.amrresearch.com.