Enterprise Portal Market Expected to Grow Immensely

If Research and Markets is correct, then your company might be getting ready to buy an enterprise portal to interface with your end users, your customers, and your partners. According to the market researcher, the enterprise portal market accounted for $1.1 billion in sales in 2005, but its analysts are projecting that this market will boom to $9.9 billion by 2012.

Research and Markets has just released a gargantuan report that cases the enterprise portal space, and of course, it wants to sell that report to you and your software vendors. But, to drum up interest in the report, the company, like other market researchers, release a few teaser details to pique your interest. Research and Markets reckons that IBM had the dominant position in the enterprise portal space in 2005, with 48 percent of sales, which works out to about $530 million. The company said that Oracle, BEA Systems (including the recently acquired Plumtree), SAP, Vignette, TIBCO, and Microsoft are all players in the enterprise portal space, but did not provide market stats on these companies. There are lots of other players in this market, too, and a number of them provide portals specifically for AS/400, iSeries, and System i5 platforms. BCD Software‘s Nexus portal immediately comes to mind, but there are others written for Java and Notes/Domino, too, that run natively on the OS/400 and i5/OS platform.

The reason why portals are so important is because they allow different kinds of content to be mixed and matched–what is called a mashup among the kids these days–and delivered to all kinds of devices, be they PCs, PDAs, cell phones, or whatever. Portals also increasingly include features for collaboration across multiple systems and, thanks to the Internet, geographies and time zones. And they do this without requiring the same level of coding that hand-made Web portals would require.