ERP and Portal Markets Consolidate
Although midmarket ERP vendor consolidation has begun (e.g.,SSA's recent acquisition of Infinium and CA application products), package selection has become even more confusing, as Tier 1 ERP vendors move down-market and Microsoft aggressively enters the fray, suggests Dwight Klappich, Application Delivery Strategies (ADS) analyst for the Meta Group.
"While viability concerns continue to plague more traditional midmarket ERP vendors (e.g., Ross, Fourth Shift, Frontstep, Epicor, Made2Manage), this alone should not force companies to make rash buying decisions. Given the current climate, we believe users should be increasingly pragmatic in determining when to enter the market. For companies that must invest soon, switching-cost risks demand that vendor and product viability equal or exceed functionality and price as key evaluation criteria" he says.
Companies must start developing contingency strategies for migrating to new ERP packages, but should wait until it is necessary and prudent, he suggests.
In a related note, Craig Roth, Web & Collaboration Strategies Analyst for Meta Group, says that portals will increasingly become aggregation and delivery frameworks for business processes; IT groups must prioritize integration capabilities (e.g., content, applications, collaboration) and linkages to infrastructure services Portal market consolidation reflects maturation in customer
requirements and economic pressures says
Acquisitions (TopTier by SAP, SilverStream by Novell, Epicentric by Vignette, DataChannel by Netegrity), bankruptcy (InfoImage), and retrenchment (Yahoo, Bowstreet, Netegrity) illustrate this transformation. Companies should segment the market by platform, enterprise application,
and standalone players. We expect infrastructure platform players (e.g., IBM, BEA, Oracle, Sun, Microsoft) to lead by 2007. Enterprise application vendors (SAP and PeopleSoft) remain
strong, but portals will become embedded within their overall solutions. Organizations should identify rewards that outweigh risks before undertaking enterprise standardization.
The absence of portlet standards raises issues concerning product dependencies, infrastructure overlap, and switching costs through 2004, says the analyst.
Enterprise portal frameworks market, however, consists of vendors of standalone enterprise portal frameworks (i.e., not portal interfaces tied to a specific application). According to analysts at Meta: " Portal frameworks provide a complete set of services - personalization, end-user customization, profiling, application integration and access, content access and delivery, search and categorization, collaboration access and delivery, and presentation integration and aggregation - and a programming interface for plugging in portal components. Portal frameworks can be used to build portals that address employee, partner, supplier, and customer needs. We expect 341% revenue growth for this market in 2002, 151% in 2003, and 161% in 2004."
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