Portal Market Flattens, Changes?

July 18, 2006 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

When I saw the "Application Integration & Middleware Technologies / Portal Software" market projection sidebar on the cover of KMWorld this month I thought "Great, 5 more years of solid growth for portal license revenues." Then I looked at the numbers.

BEA's State of the Portal Market 2006 in Portals Magazine cites a Gartner study stating $6.4 Billion in 2005 software license revenues and an estimated 2.6% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through 2010.

The growth bars looked great but makes you ask questions when a basic benchmark like the consumer price index, at 3.2% in 2005 according to the World FactBook outpaces it.

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Discounting inflation, market growth is flat or negative. What's happening? The BEA Report:

  • Tells us that 51% of companies have portal software fully deployed, though 53% have portal projects on their project lists this year.
  • Points to integration of collaboration functions, SOA, and deeper portal integration as drivers for portal market stabilization.

While the enterprise market for portals saturates, portal software must extend its reach into adjacent spaces, like collaboration and business process management, to stay competitive.

This change opens opportunities for integration and cross segment competition that lets in new super-platform competitors and "Enterprise 2.0" applications.

Further detail in the Gartner Report as reported by Intelligent Enterprise shows Oracle and Microsoft growing at two to six times the rate of incumbents IBM and BEA.

Its harder to quantify the degree to which intranet applications like wikis and blogs are affecting the portal market, but informal polls of IT mangers at the Collaborative Technologies Conference and the Burton Group Catalyst Conference suggest they can be found in many, if not most, enterprises.

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