Connecting the Enterprise: Building an Enterprise Portal

By Robert Breton

The Internet has become a pervasive network used by a large majority of organizations worldwide and has caused a fundamental transformation in the way business is conducted. Enterprises are rapidly moving to global e-commerce, electronically linking their customers, partners, employees and suppliers from around the world. In effecting this transformation, Internet applications are no longer confined to the periphery of business applications, but are being extended for direct customer access and competing to provide the most rapid and personalized information delivery in the connected economy.

Today, every part of the enterprise – from hardware to applications – is either being exploited by the Internet or is about to be. To support this ubiquity, the Internet infrastructure of a corporation must undergo a fundamental transformation. IT is taking on critical importance as the Internet infrastructure is not only required to host high-volume, 24x7 applications with high performance and availability, but also required to enable tight integration with legacy data, business events and packaged applications. Additionally, the infrastructure is expected to deliver a seamless, personalized view of information and content to each user from these disparate sources.

Enterprise Portals – The E-Business Solution

Driven by these requirements, a new market segment is emerging: the enterprise portal (EP). An enterprise portal integrates the entire business environment and presents it through the Web, personalized to the needs of the business community. Enterprise portals are applications that allow companies to give their customers, partners, employees and suppliers a single gateway to personalized business information and applications in order to make informed decisions, take action and relate with other communities of common interest.

Enterprise portals catalog and track unstructured information such as word processing documents, streaming video and e-mail, and deliver it to each user’s desktop. EPs can also access content from the Internet and filter it according to the user’s business needs and organizational role. An EP provides transfer of data and information over both open and closed networks and brings the data closer to its users.

Enterprise portals make it easy for customers, partners, employees and suppliers to interact and conduct business. It handles transactions as well as content and enables businesses with similar interests to interact with each other. EPs increase efficiency and reduce the cost of doing business by freeing resources to focus on new challenges and markets. By creating interactive and personal relationships with customers, partners and suppliers, EPs can reduce production-cycle times and deliver new products and services faster and more efficiently, improving customer service. Through the outsourcing of functions and processes that are incidental to core competencies, enterprise portals make intra- and intercompany communications and transactions more effective, thereby increasing revenue and extending market reach.

To help corporations make e-business success a reality, EPs must provide the comprehensive tools and services to deliver integrated and personalized access to content, commerce and communities via the Internet.

Tying the Enterprise Together via an EP

An enterprise portal should provide a complete product solution for rapid development and deployment of e-business solutions. Rather than replacing established systems and rebuilding from the ground up, an EP must integrate existing business processes and solutions. It should offer continuous availability capabilities for maintaining service to the end user and scalable capacity to handle the unpredictable demands of the Internet. An EP solution should provide a full spectrum of technologies required for the following critical functions:

• Continuous availability
• Integration of existing business processes
• Personalized information delivery to end users

Continuous Availability

Non-stop, continuous availability is absolutely critical in today’s business environments. The very nature of an e-business dictates that back-end failures – even scheduled downtime – cannot interrupt the user experience. A portal must be able to maintain service availability by transparently migrating client connections to backup servers without the end user having to re-login or relaunch their application.

An enterprise portal must also support load balancing and high-availability clusters to provide scalable capacity and consistent performance in the face of the unexpected demands of e-commerce.

Integration

As businesses become increasingly more Web centric, it is imperative that they migrate from historically fragmented environments to highly personalized and dynamic business experiences. An enterprise portal must have the breadth of integration options required to connect the entire business environment including structured and unstructured data, business events, applications and major industry databases. An organization’s competitive advantages are contained in existing business systems, both packaged applications and proprietary systems. Through an enterprise portal, a company is able to leverage these systems, integrate them and make them ready for e-business.

In today’s business environment, customers do not have the time to contact service departments for technical support, sales departments for product upgrades or user groups for peer intelligence. They need customized information delivered at their convenience. Companies that continue to do business in this antiquated model will quickly find themselves losing market share.

Personalization

An enterprise portal must be able to personalize critical business information and transactions to each specific user. Role-based personalization allows companies to target customers, partners, suppliers and employees individually with business functions and information that is relevant to them.

An enterprise portal should include integrated personalization technologies for content management, content profiling, content retrieval, content publishing and content personalization, reducing the time and cost for development.

Building an Enterprise Portal Solution

When an organization first builds an enterprise portal, it is important that it supports countless users and a vast range of information and business events. These factors are important for organizations that want to create an enterprise-wide portal strategy. Without such a strategy, significant integration problems may develop, defeating the key objective of an enterprise portal – presenting the entire business environment through the Web. An enterprise portal has three critical aspects: applications, management and integration.

Applications

The EP application layer is the software module the user interacts with, often through a browser interface. EP applications provide an integrated user environment while empowering users to make informed decisions, act on them and build relationships with others. Furthermore, the application should:

• Be designed for casual users.
• Be customizable and allow personalization and role definitions.
• Offer intuitive classification, searching and filtering.
• Be cost-effective and allow mobile deployment.
• Allow users to make informed business decisions through use of integrated business intelligence.
• Support both access on demand and push technologies to support real-time publication of critical business events to Web sites, through e-mail and to wireless and mobile devices.

Management Services

Management services are the foundation of EP applications and are critical to the success of portal implementations. Management services can be categorized as either:

1. Integrating operational systems, unstructured documents and workflow information.
2. Delivering integrated services with an extensible application interface.

These services include security, meta data catalog, role-definition storage, indexing and authorization for EP applications. These applications must provide an infrastructure that can handle large enterprise systems, meeting their scalability, availability and reliability requirements. Users will expect EP service features such as load-balancing, distributed transaction control, message translation and the ability to handle multiple component types (CORBA, EJB, COM). This allows EP services to handle custom or partner-enabled technology components.

Integration Services (Content, Events, Applications, Data)

The EP integration services are a set of applications that integrate a wide array of technologies found in today’s IT organizations. Examples of these services include integration of client/server systems, legacy systems, enterprise applications and unstructured text. In addition, the integration services need to handle workflow and events in supply chain applications. The technologies of EP integration services provide:

• A single, integrated view into the content and data distributed in the enterprise.
• A single, integrated view for driving, managing and automating business processes within the enterprise.
• A single, integrated view into interaction with external services.

Business Drivers

The rapid adoption of enterprise portals is being driven by the following market conditions and business indicators:

EPs Give Companies a Competitive Advantage

An EP converts data from corporate data stores, data warehouses and documents into usable information. It enables a business to move information rapidly – both inside and outside the organization – and delivers it via a Web browser. Streamlined information delivery combined with the ability to bring separate groups together results in increased productivity and provides the right information to the right users on demand. The benefits of this include reduced costs, increased sales and better resource deployment. By bringing data closer to users, companies can increase competitiveness and improve customer service.

EPs Provide Access to All

The Internet is a crucial, yet inexpensive and reliable, distribution channel that empowers all users with access to information: from small companies and large enterprises to all employees, customers, partners and suppliers.

EPs Can Reduce Cycle Time for Business Processes

A portal’s focus on integration reduces the time required to complete a business transaction. To illustrate, suppose a customer has implemented a Web-enabled order entry system to collect online orders. However, at the back end, the orders are still manually routed to the shipping systems while inventory systems are manually updated to maintain stock levels.

By implementing an integrated, portal-enabled architecture, not only are orders entered online, but inventory levels and shipping systems are automatically updated online. Therefore, the customer should never be offered an item that is not in stock. The historically disparate systems are integrated together, significantly reducing the time it takes to complete the business process, increasing the accuracy of the business transaction and improving the customer’s experience.

EPs Have the Flexibility to Support New Business Models

The rush to do business online has highlighted the need for adaptability and support for new business models. For instance, if the marketing department of a corporation is chartered with a direct mail campaign to their customer base, and the IT department determines it will take three months to implement an appropriate system to perform one-to-one e-mail marketing, the only option to meet the short lead times would be to outsource the project. However, outsourcing will introduce another problem: there is no way to integrate the work generated by the outside vendor. A successful portal should be built on open standards that can integrate with external systems. A portal should provide the flexibility to support new business models in this fast-paced Internet environment.

The Future of Enterprise Portals

According to Tom Koulopoulos, president of the Delphi Group, "An enterprise portal is a survival mechanism – you have to have it just in order to do business, going forward. In the e-conomy, there are many ways that people will use enterprise portals to compete, but first and foremost, you must have one in place just to survive."

At one time, the question was if a company should implement an enterprise portal. Now, as companies have become dependent upon quick and efficient access to the information that drives their business, the questions are how and when will a company implement their enterprise portal.

Robert Breton is senior director of product strategy for Sybase’s Enterprise Solutions Division and is the spokesperson for Sybase’s Enterprise Portal initiative and is responsible for development of Sybase’s Enterprise Portal strategy. Breton was formerly senior director of product management, overseeing the product planning team within the Enterprise Solutions Division research and development group. He previously held positions in Sybase as director of engineering for Sybase’s Replication Server product line and senior manager of product management. Breton has been with Sybase for more than six years and has been in the software industry for more than 17 years.