Prepare for portal power yet to come

We are witnessing the dawn of the next major phase in IT – portals will not only change your business worlds as ‘collaborative commerce’ in enterprise IT becomes far more commonplace; it will also change that of your IT suppliers. The web portals bandwagon is rolling, and as it gathers momentum, technology support and a plethora of ‘standards’, so it grows in scope and power. It also, however, gathers hangers on – and businesses looking to their future ‘knowledge strategy’ and IT infrastructure need to sort the proverbial what from the chaff. Martin Butler, self-styled manufacturing business IT guru and chairman of analyst Butler Group, reckons that “self-service”, not oil, cars or even computers, was the single most important factor in driving economic change in the last century. The notion of self-service, he says, has in recent decades transformed the way we live our lives, and today, with the latent power of the web it’s accelerating that change. He gives the example of call centres’ fortunes – set up and already being torn down, as ‘always on’ self service consumer-to-business and business-to-business web enquiry mechanisms slash costs and increase convenience, both for people and for businesses. By a couple of orders of magnitude. Make no mistake, portals will carry this transformation forward. Not portals simply as universal, browser-based user interfaces to information and applications – these are powerful and can be cathartic, but in a sense Citrix and terminal servers can do some of this. But portals imbued with Web services, acting as a conduit, a ‘process port’, through which applications communicate and interact with one another automatically on demand, without prior exact direction. Web services, in the context of application interaction standards, are the key. This is what builds the potential for the creation of casually and temporarily connected web-connected pseudo applications. It’s about gaining global ‘knowledge capital’. “What we’re looking at now,” says Butler, “is a golf ball which will become the size of a whole universe.” And that’s without thinking about Web services as web-served application components from which we will supposedly pick and choose in true, granular ‘best of breed’ style. Sounds fancy, but it means people and systems sucking in relevant information from each other, running applications spontaneously through that port, answering queries, gaining and refining understanding and content without caring where it comes from or how it’s formatted. Sounds far fetched? Not really – it’s speed and reach of intelligence, whether that’s operational data, workgroup data, deep database information, whatever, wherever. In a sense it’s building on what the likes of portals vendor Plumtree are already doing successfully with companies like Pratt & Whitney and with Ford. This level of intelligence, says Butler, will be embedded in applications during this decade. And that’s beyond the current fad for ‘intelligent agents’. It’s arguably artificial intelligence as it always should have been – with potentially unlimited access to information and derivation power. Today we’re at the employee self-service portal stage – internal company intranet systems for expenses, indirect materials procurement and so on. Already, there are also role-based configurable interface systems, many from the ERP vendors, able to look beyond, say, the ERP modules normally accessed to provide a single interface also to external web-served information whatever they might be. CRM (customer relationship management) may well shortly be turned on its head by this. As Butler says, customers don’t want to be cross-sold, up-sold or any other sold. They don’t want to be managed; they want to manage their relationships with their suppliers themselves. Portals may yet deliver ‘CMR’ – customer managed relationships. Who will be doing it? Enterprise software giant SAP, or rather SAP Portals, reckons it will, along with IBM and “one of Microsoft or Oracle.” So says John Bell, European platforms director for that organisation. Butler reckons that in this ‘portals as the infrastructure’ vision, the ultimate providers will be “IBM, Microsoft probably, SAP probably and then diminishing possibilities with some of the others, like Oracle and BEA.” When will it start to bite and transform ‘collaborative commerce’ for the majority in the SME range of manufacturing industries? Butler believes we’ll have to wait for Novell, or perhaps for Microsoft, which is late to this particular game, when it upsets the applecart with shrink-wrapped systems as only it seems to know how. But happen it will: over the next very few years, from humble beginnings now we can expect a new era of computing. It doesn’t change today’s need for functional applications like advanced planning and scheduling and the rest. It might make you think a bit about what’s fact and what’s fantasy.