Intelligent Enterprise

CA, Day, Hummingbird and webMethods are out, and open-source and business process management-oriented alternatives are in. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and BEA remain in the top-right corner. These are just a few of the highlights in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal Products, released late last month and available here as a free download at Oracle's Web site. Most helpful for would-be portal buyers are the vendor-by-vendor notes on "strengths" and "cautions."

The portals dropped from this year's Quadrant include CA's CleverPath, Hummingbird Webtop, and Day Software and webMethods products that are either no longer actively marketed or that don't derive enough revenue to qualify for inclusion in Gartner's report. Portals from Fujitsu and TIBCO are the BPM-oriented products now included in the report.

Sun's Java System Portal Server 7 is the lone product in the Quadrant linked to an open-source initiative, but Gartner's report speculates that " …the second iteration of vendor-independent portal standards, such as Web Services for Report Portlets (WSRP) v.2 and Java Specification Request (JSR) 286, is likely to promote interest in open-source portal alternatives."

The report also raised the possibility of Software-as-a-Service spin-offs from consumer-oriented Internet portals, saying "personal mashup tools from vendors such as Microsoft and Yahoo could form the basis of enterprise offerings serving as alternatives to traditional horizontal portal products. Many mashup toolkit vendors are already targeting the enterprise space and could attract the attention of some buyers."

Gartner goes a bit beyond common knowledge and conventional wisdom in toting up strengths and cautions tied to the ten vendors covered in the Quadrant, but for a much deeper and more detailed product-by-product assessment, consider the 300-plus-page Enterprise Portals Report from Intelligent Enterprise content partner CMS Watch.