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.
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.