Boston, MA, USA and New Delhi, India-- CMS Watch announced today that its updated enterprise portals research finds that technology buyers are facing a dilemma as many portal software vendors are updating their software. IT Directors who are procuring a new portal solution for their enterprises typically do not want to be the first to deploy brand new software. Rather, they want a product that has matured before making any commitment to buy it. With so many major vendors in transition, the market has entered a limbo phase.

These findings come from the latest CMS Enterprise Portal research, which evaluates thirteen portal solutions against many potential use cases.

The latest research has found that product vendors are overhauling their product offerings; Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle are all in varying phases of development.

"This is good news and indicates that the marketplace is active. However, buyers need to remain cautious with any upgrades to ensure that they genuinely understand their respective vendors' product roadmaps," notes Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMS Watch principal analyst.

According to the latest "CMS Watch Enterprise Portals Cross-Check 2010," no less than 6 vendors find a place in the "Overhaul" or "Refresh" sectors, indicating significant changes in future products. "It is rare to see so many products in one market go through such overhaul at the same time, but as portal technology has returned to fashion, the vendors realized that their offerings were overdue for an upgrade," says CMS Watch Analyst Jarrod Gingras.

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The open source section of the portals market is also undergoing a change, and this further restricts buyer options. However, the CMS Watch Enterprise Portals research finds that in a generally healthy open source portals marketplace, there is a period of major restructuring underway with the merging of eXo and JBoss to create the new GateIn option. Enterprises of all sizes are more positive about open source as compared to a few years ago. Of the 13 products that we review, 6 are open source, which represents a good ratio - unlike most other categories of enterprise information software.

Part of the reason for the overhaul among portals is the increased focus on portals as a platform, rather than an out-of-the-box product. Portals now increasingly expose their services to other delivery environments. "Portals are an important component of enterprise architecture, and users expect a portal server to expose all its services in a way that makes them accessible to other environments using light-weight mechanisms," says Apoorv Durga, CMS Watch Analyst.

While the market is currently in a period of limbo, once the new products' solutions are released, CMS Watch expects a strong buying period in late 2010. In the meantime, there are some great deals for an IT Director willing to be an early adopter.