Industry
N E W S  A N A L Y S I S
by REMI DUBOIS
 
 

Recasting Data Access --Putting A Fresh Face On The Intranet Via Enterprise Information Portals (EIP)

A New Web-based Information Delivery Platform That Securely Extends The Benefits Of Web-based Data Access And Distribution Within And Beyond The Firewall

DELIVERING INFORMATION ACCESS to all corporate employees is high up on the want list for most major companies today. Business decisions can only as good as the data used to make them. That makes the ability to provide specific corporate information directly where it is needed, regardless of its source a key competitive differentiator. To make universal data access a reality, IT departments have made significant investments that enable enhanced connectivity across their enterprise systems while maintaining access to legacy data and applications, extending the use of previous IT investments.

Yet accurate information can still remain out of reach. Because users, spread across multiple departments, are forced to utilize so many point solutions in their quest for data the results are often unacceptable inconsistencies. For example, different departments may report conflicting values for revenue, because they might have applied different business rules against different databases using different analysis or reporting tools.

And with the rise of e-business applications that utilize information on both sides of the corporate firewall, companies that previously relied on client/server business intelligence solutions alone will be hard-pressed to overcome new the challenges.

A Facelift For The Corporate Intranet

What companies need is a way to provide users with a single, browser-based window that provides all the personalized enterprise information needed to make informed business decisions in the same manner that internet content portals, like Yahoo, act as gateways to content on the web -- a facelift for the corporate intranet.

Enter the information portals. Using server-side Java and other distributing computing technologies, several software companies are delivering products, based on the Web concept of a portal site, that let organizations deliver information from a variety of sources to potentially thousands of end users.

Developers including Sqribe Technologies Corp., recently acquired by Brio Technology, Information Advantage Inc., Viador, Inc., Plumtree Software Inc. and Actuate Software Corp. are all shipping or readying enterprise portal products with the common goal of providing easier access to corporate data.

One Intranet, One Source For Enterprise Data

The concept, also called Enterprise Information Portals, describes a system that can be used to combine a company's internal data with external information, providing a single decision-support environment or single point of information collection or repository.

One of the more complete offerings is from Viador Inc., formerly known as Infospace. As a recast of its former Space Enterprise suite of query, reporting and OLAP tools that share common access to a central repository and backend datasources, the Viador E-Portal Suite adapts the concept of Web portals to decision support. It allows Web users to search, access, view, navigate, and analyze a broad range of decision support information.

The new portal suite combines and integrates both relational query and reporting technology along with multidimensional OLAP query and analysis technology that Web users can use to pull information into their browsers. Plus, they can use the portal’s publish and subscribe facilities to push the information out to others. Through its server-based, web-architected product suite, Viador’s solution can scale up to serve thousands of internal and external users. And by using central administration for a single set of users and their security profiles, the Viador approach should be easy to manage and consequently deliver a low TCO solution.

Adaptable And Integrated Architecture

Via the application programming interface (API), customers can build their own custom portals that leverage the Viador Java application server architecture. Corporations can also securely access all of their existing business intelligence implementations within the Viador portal, thereby leveraging existing IT investments. Viador's 100% Pure Java server runs on a wide variety of hardware and operating system platforms, ranging from Microsoft Windows NT to the IBM S/390.

The suite is an integrated system that includes Viador Sage, a browser-based client; Viador Information Center, middleware that links with back-end systems; and Viador Sentinel, an extranet option that permits companies to set up a secure gateway for sharing information with business partners and customers.

The Yahoo For The Enterprise Effect

For businesses, portals could be organized so that it not only launches a company site explaining business issues, but also allows users to send analyses of the type of data that are needed by others as it pertains to those issues. For users, the Viador E-Portal Suite delivers a searchable repository for business information that is as easy to use as Yahoo, yet is customizable to meet specific requirements for information access, content presentation and delivery.
 
An example is Charles Schwab & Co. They are using the Viador product to build an automated decision support system and secure extranet application to provide Web-based access to data both inside and outside the company. The system allows Schwab management and authorized users at more than 300 mutual fund companies to use a Web browser to download or dynamically generate one of a number of defined reports about the performance of any mutual fund. It also permits managers to look at how much money is coming in, or how buys, sales, and exchanges are driving prices-and other information that affects the financial decisions they make.

Towards Dynamic Content

Portals may have the potential for changing the way business is done, especially as the portal software arena quickly mushrooms over the next year to eighteen months. The intranet portal as a concept is new and not yet exploited by the larger software companies, but that may change quickly. Forecasts predicting that the sales of enterprise portals, and related systems including data warehouses and business intelligence, could reach over $14 billion by 2002. With those kinds of predictions expect more entrants quickly into an evolving EIP marketplace.

With their capability to potentially link-up dynamic data and reporting streams with users and devices, Web portals stand to become indispensable additions to enterprise businesses’ Internet/intranet strategies. As more people, and automated systems, demand live and dynamic Internet information, as opposed to the static content we see today, that may actually happen -- even sooner than we think.

  ---Remi DuBois