SharePoint 2010 Leads Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals for 2011

SharePoint 2010 Continues to Lead Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals for as per Gartner (October 2011 ), Gartner positions Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant on the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals based on an evaluation of completeness of vision and ability to execute.

SharePoint 2010 gets a better position in the magic quadrant compared to 2010 report (for 2010 report click here).

Microsoft SharePoint's sweeping growth in the portal market is largely a factor of its appeal to business users, rather than the portal's IT owners. Until recently, most portal providers appealed to enterprise IT leaders first, often emphasizing the security and compliance counterpoints to this new, flexible, yet seemingly risky, user-centricity.

Market Overview

Portal Customers and Vendors Focus on the User Experience

Gartner client discussions point to significantly altered portal emphases in recent years. Whereas portal initiatives often involve aggregating and delivering information sources and extending business applications and processes, new portal customers recognize that they must engage end users to ensure the success of their portal efforts. Organizations are finding that older portals do not (or never did) garner significant adoption and loyalty from end users, which has led to significant portal failure and stagnancy.

Consumerization is largely responsible for this trend, with Web consumers and information workers bringing greater expectations into the workplace. Consumers have far different expectations of their organizations' portals and websites than what they had only a few years ago. They expect portals to be highly personalized, engaging, social, accessible, mobile, easy-to-use and synchronized across a wide range of channels.

In the meantime, users and consumers have a choice: If they don't like what their business gives them to support their information and collaboration needs, they can easily use consumer mechanisms, ranging from Google Documents to Facebook to Drop Box. Although organizations can still compel their internal users toward their own portals for access to enterprise applications and processes, person-centric activities such as collaboration and knowledge management tend to split off into numerous silos. This trend raises risks for the enterprise, creating new and more widespread privacy and compliance concerns, as well as new levels of knowledge and information management chaos. Rather than using portal technology only to gather value for themselves, enterprise IT and business organizations must ensure valuable and engaging experiences for their end users, whether they're employees, partners, customers or citizens.

Clearly, IT organizations, their business leaders and their end users need platforms that offer value and provide a balance of control and flexibility. Portal vendors are quickly realizing that they must enable flexibility and manageability by business users. They must offer social experiences and mechanisms that enhance usability and ensure end-user adoption of their products. Meanwhile, enterprise portal vendors must bring the appropriate level of user appeal into a productive, reliable, extensible and secure portal environment.

The user experience trend also means that portal providers must rely less on consultants, system integrators (SIs) and designers to ensure an engaging and productive user experience. That is, they must provide a shorter path to a fruitful user experience out of the box.

"Portlets-R-Us": The Portlet Catalog Becomes the App Store

Portal customers and vendors seeking to respond more readily to business needs are also revisiting and relabeling fundamental portal concepts. To accommodate more business needs, respond to consumerization, delegate capability to the business, improve extensibility and interoperability with third-party providers, and cultivate developer and vendor ecosystems, many portal providers are building or reviving their portlet catalog capabilities. Some vendors are starting to refer to them as "App Stores." Now that consumers and developers alike have grasped the concept (largely through their smartphone and tablet experiences), the market seems ripe for the concept.

Portlet catalogs typically offer portal components, modules, skins, themes, templates and connectors that customers can easily plug into their portal frameworks to improve usability and design, or to offer industry- or application-specific capability. The portlet store concept is applicable to internal scenarios, where organizations want to provision certain capabilities that can be readily and safely invoked by their business users and departmental developers, as well as to external communities, which use the portlet marketplaces to share and sell their components to other organizations. Internal portal app stores can be used to enable IT organizations to deploy useful, compliant and secure portal components that site administrators and end users can then plug into their personal or group sites.

Vendors including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Liferay, Backbase, DotNetNuke and Drupal support the portlet store concept, and many are relabeling their efforts to align with consumer app store trends. Vendors are also supporting consumer-Web widget standards, including OpenSocial, to leverage widely available components, such as Google Gadgets.

The Portal Market Split: UXPs and Lean Portals

The horizontal portal market will serve as a foundation for emerging UXPs (see "The Emerging User Experience Platform"), which provide the integration of technologies used to deliver portals, mashups, rich Internet applications (RIAs), Ajax-enabled websites, Web content management (WCM) and mobile applications. This integration can take the form of a set of separate, yet integrated, products that can be delivered as a suite or as a single product. Early examples of UXPs are largely derived from traditional portal technology, and include Microsoft SharePoint, Oracle WebCenter and IBM's broadening WebSphere Portal, with its related collaboration and content management portfolio, which is evolving toward a more cohesive UXP.

Although a dozen years of evolution and consolidation in the portal market have brought us sophisticated and versatile products, they've also brought functional bloat and technical complexity. Many organizations want lean portals: simple, more cost-effective products that focus on the portal's primary proposition and provide a personalized point of access to relevant information, business processes and people. Lean portals rely on modern architectures and representational state transfer (REST)-oriented standards for interoperability, often bringing customers faster time to value, without violating software standards in adjacent spaces, such as content management and analytics. The tendency toward lean portals accompanies a desire for lower costs, so it's a space in which open-source providers are playing a more prominent role.

The portal market's bifurcation is opening opportunities for software and service providers on both sides of the rift. Backbase and edge IPK, which is new to this year's Magic Quadrant, qualify as lean-portal providers. Although Liferay is beginning to broaden and deepen its portal capability with a view toward UXP, most customers acquire it for its lean-portal qualities. Open-source products such as DotNetNuke and Drupal are also entering the market with a lean proposition. Salesforce.com enters this Magic Quadrant combining a lean proposition with a software as a service (SaaS) model, which is aimed at lowering costs, easing accessibility and ensuring adoption.

On the UXP side, although they didn't meet the criteria for this year's portal Magic Quadrant, vendors such Adobe and Cisco loom large as potential players in the emerging UXP market, entering via content management in Adobe's case and collaboration in Cisco's.

Market Definition/Description

Gartner defines a portal as "a Web software infrastructure that provides interaction with relevant information assets (for example, information/content, applications and business processes), knowledge assets and human assets by select targeted audiences, delivered in a highly personalized manner." Enterprise portals may face different audiences, including:

·         Business-to-employee (B2E)

·         Business-to-consumer (B2C)

·         Business partners (B2B)

Of course, the public-sector corollaries to these three high-level audience types are also considered applicable. A portal product is a packaged software application that is used to create and maintain enterprise portals. These products can be used to design vertical or horizontal portals:

·         Vertical portals focus on accessing specific applications or business functions.

·         Horizontal portals integrate and aggregate information from multiple cross-enterprise applications, as well as specific line-of-business tools and applications.

Inclusion And Exclusion Criteria

To be considered for the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals, vendors must meet a combination of criteria. They need to provide technology supporting deployment in a variety of scenarios, including employee, customer/constituent-facing and partner portals.

The vendor must provide the following capabilities:

·         A container or framework and component model (i.e., "portlets" or a similar component model)

·         Security administration, including the ability to manage security rights and privileges by individual, group or role, such as single sign-on

·         The ability to integrate with a wide range of data sources, applications, content, and services via various mechanisms, such as enterprise service bus, REST, Really Simple Syndication, Web services, iFrames and screen-scraping

·         Personalization, including the ability to direct relevant content and information to individuals, groups and roles; change the content and behavior of page components, pages or page groups; and provide end-user customization (personalization may be driven by any number of static user-centric attributes, dynamic session-centric attributes, collaborative filtering or social relationships)

·         Content management, including the ability to create, organize and publish content in the context of the portal, as well as search and content aggregation

·         Business process management (BPM), including some means of providing or integrating with workflow and BPM tools or platforms

·         Support for multichannel and multidevice delivery and presentation

The vendor must provide sales and support for the portal product in at least two of the following five geographic regions: North America; Latin America; Europe, the Middle East and Africa; Japan; and the Asia/Pacific (APAC) region.

The vendor must support clients in more than one industry vertical.

The vendor must have achieved one of the following:

·         At least $4 million in annual portal-related product and service revenue as of 2010

·         An installed base of at least 100 enterprise customers

Added

DotNetNuke, Drupal, edge IPK and salesforce.com met the criteria for this year's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals and have been added to this assessment.

(Note: Tibco Software did not respond to requests for supplemental information or to review the draft contents of this document. Therefore, Gartner's analysis is based on other credible sources, including public information, Tibco's website, more than five discussions with PortalBuilder customers, our day-to-day interaction with Tibco users and information provided to us for the 2010 edition of this research.)

Dropped

No vendors were dropped from this year's Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals.

(Note: To support this research, Gartner collected information from vendors on their offerings, organizations and strategies through an extensive request for information, as well as supplementary briefings. We also surveyed and interviewed portal customers, some of which were provided by the vendors and some of which we located on our own. We also used information and experience gathered in our numerous client inquiries and other customer interactions.)

Click here to Read the full report, enjoy it