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Janus Boye

Are portals walled gardens with proprietary content?

28-Nov-2007

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Building Business Case, Industry Standards, Marketplace at Large

In an interesting quote from Google Analyst Day last month Jessica Ewing, who works on the iGoogle team answered her own question on whether iGoogle is a portal by saying:

"Portals are walled gardens that lock users into proprietary content"

Perhaps the remark was actually more aimed at Facebook, rather than the enterprise portals space, but personal portals have always been about getting outside the walled garden, something that MyYahoo achieved back in 2000.

Part of my fascination with the portal market is that it continues to be fueled by dual innovation: on the consumer side by organizations like AOL, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo!, and then on the software side by large vendors (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP), spezialized vendors (BroadVision, Vignette), and finally a growing group of interesting open source projects.

Some enterprise portal projects are certainly walled gardens, but increasingly with the popular usage of web feeds (ATOM/RSS) and rare occasions various widgets like Google Gadgets, the wall is coming down, and enterprises are extending beyond their usual boundaries.

As a technology buyer it is easy to be taken away by the hype, but there is a frequent disconnect between marketing and reality. Portals offer unique opportunities and problems, but in general portals are not any more expensive than other related technologies, and you don't need to be an sophisticated enterprise to get started.