Butler Group Report reveals the Enterprise Portal is not asilver bullet, and companies need to be realistic about ROI time frames

London, 02 April, 2003 - According to Butler Group's latest Technology Evaluation and Comparison Report, Enterprise Portals - The Key to Collaboration and Information Sharing, whilst the various systems and processes used in all types of business deliver ever-greater volumes of structured and unstructured content, it is a reality that greater information does not always aid decision-making, and neither does it aid certainty. Enterprise Portals offer the benefits of pertinence, focus, automation, and control of content and access.

Butler Group has long argued that an Enterprise Portal is the most strategic IT investment that an organisation can make. This latest Report argues that the implementation is not a 'fire and forget' action. The most successful deployments are those which start with low functionality by widest access, and are actively marketed and monitored to ensure acceptance. New functionality should be introduced on an incremental basis, targeting business 'pain points' that deliver the quickest returns and establishing 'buy in' by the users.

The deployment of an Enterprise Portal is a strategic decision and it must address the organisation's business goals. The reality is that there is no 'silver bullet' in deploying an Enterprise Portal - one size does not fit all. There has to be a balance between functionality and the price that the organisation can afford.

Mike Davis co-author of the Report, and Senior Research Analyst at Butler Group, commented: "The decision on an Enterprise Portal should be taken in light of the long-term business aims of the organisation, but the new realities of a downturn in the economy mean that organisations expect short-term Return On Investment (ROI), increasingly within the first year. This is a conflict that must be addressed in any investment strategy."

The Report predicts that there will be further consolidation in the market place with the major application platform vendors coming to dominate and replacing the best-of-breed pure play vendors. IBM, Oracle, SAP, BEA, and Microsoft will take the most significant share of the Enterprise Portals market by 2006.

Mike Davis continued: "In the near future, the deployment times and cost of an Enterprise Portal will be dramatically reduced and, therefore, the ROI to be gained by the exploitation of a portal installation will be much higher. Despite the economic downturn, the interest in portal technologies has remained strong precisely because of the clear benefits associated with the control of content and access to that content."

The Report contains in-depth Technology Audits on the following vendors: Autonomy, BEA, Computer Associates, Corechange, Fujitsu, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, Plumtree, SimplyTrading, and Vignette. Also in the Report are Vendor Profiles including: Active Navigation, Autonomy, caatoosee, Compuware, Convera, Hummingbird, Inxight, iOra, Mediapps, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Sun Microsystems, and Sybase.