BEA Systems releases 2007 State of the Portal Market report

* BEA is announcing the release of its annual state of the enterprise portal market report, which is available for download at http://bea.com/whitepapers/portal-market.
* The report reveals that portals remain a top priority for CIOs at large enterprises for the sixth consecutive year.
* The report compiles survey results from over 540 customers, which indicates that portals will help introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies in the enterprise.

BEA Systems today announced the release of its annual report on the state of the enterprise portal market.

The new report: "State of the Portal Market 2007: Portals and The Power of Participation", synthesizes original research, market and custom survey data into a densely packed analysis of this vibrant market.

The report reveals that portals remain a top priority for CIOs at large enterprises for the sixth consecutive year. It also substantiates industry consensus that portals remain ideal platforms for consolidating applications, helping enable the integration and re-use of existing systems and data, and helping companies introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies to their increasingly tech-savvy user communities.

The BEA report features survey data on deployment and adoption patterns gathered from more than 540 BEA portal customers, and synthesises over 100 analyst reports and industry articles covering the portal and allied markets in the past 12 months.

The report incorporates independent analysis and industry trends into a comprehensive perspective of real-world deployment practices, trends and ROI anecdotes for portal technologies. This original study is available for download exclusively at http://bea.com/whitepapers/portal-market.

Key findings in the BEA report include:

* Market: The enterprise portal market continues to grow over 9% annually, with an estimated $1.4 billion in annual sales by 2011.
* Audience expansion: Despite efforts to consolidate, the number of portals deployed in an enterprise is expanding. This expansion is not necessarily due to technical limitations of software, but to the increasing number of audiences being supported by portals, and by the improved flexibility of portal technology as a framework to speed application development and deployment.
* Business and IT agility - BPM and SOA: The increased adoption of business process management (BPM) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives are both driving portal usage. This is because portals already utilise many SOA principles and can deliver and manage premium interaction and contextual experiences.
* Business participation - Web 2.0 and the new enterprise: After witnessing the revolutionary impact of Web 2.0 companies on the consumer Web, leading-edge companies are embracing those principles for use in the enterprise. Portals are the leading vehicles for delivering Web 2.0 and enterprise social computing capabilities because of the rich user experience and interactive capabilities they offer.
* Segmentation: Portal vendors are expanding their offerings to take advantage of BPM, SOA and Web 2.0. Because of the loosely coupled aspects of those technologies, the leaders in the portal market are those that can be the most open while still offering enterprise-grade capabilities like security, branding, personalisation and search.
* Benefits: In addition to the revenue-generating benefits reported by the studies, BEA portal customers report additional benefits ranging from increased employee productivity and efficiency, reduced support and service costs, increased customer loyalty, consolidation of IT infrastructure and lower operational costs via reduction in paper-based or manual processes.
* Deployment costs: For 77% of BEA portal customers, the cost of consulting services for deployment or customisation of software was less than licence costs, demonstrating the portal`s value as a rapid, flexible deployment vehicle for a broad range of company initiatives.

"Today, enterprise portals have moved beyond simple integration frameworks to embrace the user in a way no other enterprise application has done before. Instead of just presenting information, modern portal technology can allow end-users to be part of information creation and sharing," said Martin Percival, Senior Technology Evangelist at BEA Systems.

"Companies that embrace these ideas and products built around these principles can have a significant advantage over companies stuck in the past with an outdated view of business participation."