Manufacturers increase web portal uptake for collaborative working and streamlining supply chains

Corporate web portals, designed to ease self-service information access from disparate and remote IT systems across businesses and departments, are seeing growing adoption right across industry, and particularly in larger manufacturing organisations, despite a decline in IT spending during 2001. And more than 80% of portal vendor Plumtree Software’s portals have been in production environments. These are the top line results of a survey by Plumtree completed on 24 January 2002 among 110 of its customers. The survey finds manufacturers using portals to streamline supply chain relationships and deliver low cost distributed application functionality, and that implementations are often complete within three months, with 66% up and running in under six. It found that users are indeed employing their portals to empower a broad audience quickly, integrating content first and applications second. In fact, manufacturers’ portals (companies like Boeing, Ford, Staples, Eli Lilly) have audiences as large as or larger than any of their other enterprise applications, increasingly spanning employees, suppliers, partners and customer organisations, although the majority start with their own employees. 12% of Plumtree’s respondents reported that more than 10,000 users visit their portals at least once a week. Most valued of the resources integrated by their portals are documents (with nearly one third of respondents indexing more than 10,000), although application integration (most often of groupware, document management, CRM and ERP) and collaborative working are also prized, and Plumtree reports ongoing growth in new web services for its portal community. Application integration itself remains the most significant hurdle, with most manufacturers having heterogeneous enterprise IT environments, but Plumtree also finds web service standards like HTTP and SOAP are lowering the cost of integrating resources here. Interestingly, portal management remains a resourcing and control problem. Plumtree’s survey shows IT departments currently controlling most development to ensure efficiency and security, but with the generally large number of resources integrated in the portals and the requisite user profiling to deliver them, there is work to be done. Market leaders, according to a broad mix of analysts, are Plumtree, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Broadvision and Computer Associates. Plumtree’s survey is conducted annually and published as a white paper. This year’s is available at www.plumtree.com with the results of the survey and commentary from 23 portal customers, plus data from 15 industry analysts. It includes information on deployment timeframes and success rates, average audience size, volume of content indexed, range of applications integrated and choice of development platforms used to host portal Web services.