Portal Wars—The Future Frontier of BI Dominance?

As we continue to sift through the coverage of the IBM and Cognos combination and get ready to take a breather for the holidays, we can start to leave the news of the most recent acquisitions in the wake, and focus on the factors that will likely shape the market in the coming years.

One such area where the industry may pivot, surprisingly, is not even in the BI products themselves, but farther upstream, in the portal. As more and more functionality moves into the middleware layer of the IT infrastructure and collaboration becomes easier and more integrated into how we work, (with additions such as process engines to help us along, let’s say), attention is moving to how we access BI in addition to how we use BI (and what BI we actually use).

Several vendors have reported very robust sales for their portal products as the functionality in them improves and more and more content is funneled through this part of the technology stack than in the application layer. And it makes sense for employees. With the personalization and customization that you can do in the portal environment, it’s often times where you start you day. I would completely plead guilty to starting more than one BI demo logging into a dashboard or scorecard and seeing my metrics and goals and confidently stating that “as I log on in the morning, I can see that sales are down” or whatever drivel I would spout. But the truth is that’s a pretty unnatural act for most people. They don’t start the day in a scorecard, they start the day with email, and logging onto the company portal or intranet. Whether it’s company news, useful links, or internal HR information, intranets and portals are the place where most people start out online. And now more and more companies are putting the KPI’s, goals, metrics, and key tasks in their portal so that both individuals and teams can get the most up to date information in the place where they already spend a lot of their time.

This was frankly one of the main reasons why the BI vendors never got the scope or reach they were after in terms of users and seats. The 20% penetration ceiling is due to lots of factors (as we’ve previously discussed here and here), but partly it was due to the fact that they didn’t integrate on a wide scale with the portal technology that had become the corporate standard—i.e. the above vendors.

And since the vast majority of the enterprise customer base now has some combination of Websphere, Netweaver, Fusion, or SharePoint, my sense is that you’re going to see a lot of new features and functionality head here; and once you’re hooked into a portal standard, it’s going to be far easier for the portal vendor to sell you on their other technology that’s already integrated into the portal than it’s going to be to connect another vendor into the portal.

You heard it here—trust the Portal, Luke…