While you weren’t looking, portals grew up. No longer just a souped-up webpage with a stock ticker and a link to the employee handbook, the portal is emerging as a key component of the corporate IT infrastructure. New portal software products aren’t designed, as early products were, solely for managing and presenting Web content. The latest portal products are application-neutral middleware, and many portal vendors supply tools to help companies integrate portals with enterprise applications like ERP, CRM or e-procurement.

As a result, companies are deploying portals to support strategic business initiatives and using them as a tactical tool for managing enterprise applications. A portal helps jet-engine maker Pratt & Whitney pursue a bigger slice of the engine-repair business and enables Menasha, which makes packaging and industrial polymers, to reuse software for multiple business units. Portals also help CIOs get more use out of enterprise systems by hiding their complexity from technologically inexperienced end users.

The importance companies are placing on portals is reflected in CIOs’ spending decisions. Although spending on e-business projects was expected to fall in 2002, more than a third of the 874 executives surveyed by Forrester Research said they still plan to buy portal software. Meanwhile, Gartner Dataquest forecast last summer that portal sales would grow an average of 24 percent a year between 2001 and 2006.

Portals appeal to CIOs because they do a better job than earlier products, including business intelligence software and ERP systems, at delivering custom views of information and applications to end users, says David Gootzit, an analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner. Portals are better at that task than they used to be.

Portals bridge Legacy and New Systems

"It’s hard for people to get data out of our legacy [ERP] system," says Mary Fonder, CIO with Maysteel, a Milwaukee-based maker of components for electronics and electric utilities.

CIOs such as Fonder are using portals to support business strategies and create a competitive advantage for their company. By getting information or executing transactions through a portal instead of by phone or fax, or accessing a legacy system, employees and customers get work done more quickly, which translates into added sales, bottom-line savings or both.

Maysteel’s goal is to make its operations more efficient, in part by standardizing the manufacturing process at each of its six plants in Wisconsin and Ireland. Part of the effort involves scrutinizing manufacturing quality, but getting the right data from the company’s ERP system was too hard for anyone who wasn’t a power user. With the economy in decline last year, Fonder knew she couldn’t afford a new ERP system, so she and her team wrote a portal application that lets Maysteel’s executives and quality control staff access the ERP data they need.