Making portals work: Enterprise portal services outlook

• In 2002, the majority of revenue from EPS engagements were IT-related, principally derived by systems integration, application development and IT consulting activities. Overall, revenue from business-related engagements or activities are relatively small, driven predominately by business consulting activities. Business activities led by consulting are expected to grow fastest in 2003.
  
• Discrete manufacturing, central (or federal) government and process manufacturing are the industries most frequently targeted by providers.
  
• The vast majority of the revenue that is generated by the services providers included in the study is from large and very large companies. In fact, large and very large customers accounted for over 95% of revenue in 2002.
  
• Employee headcount associated with portal implementations exceeded 10,600 employees in 2002 and is expected to show 32% growth in 2003. Service delivery professionals ranged from 20 to 3,000 employees (part-time and full-time dedicated portal services employees).
  
• There is a noticeable shift among services providers to augment their services organizations with professionals with business skills, rather than just IT skills. In 2003, EPS consultants with business skills were expected to be the fastest-growing category, followed by professionals that have a combination of both business and IT skills.
  
• While from a regional headcount perspective, Asia/Pacific and EMEA are expected to represent the fastest-growing regions, the majority of employees will be based in Americas region.
  
• The number of anticipated implementations is expected to grow by 41% in 2003.
  
• Not all enterprise portal implementations represent standalone opportunities for services providers. On average, standalone EPS engagements account for 51% of the implementations.
  
• There is a noticeable trend toward faster, more modular implementations. The average portal implementation time frame appears to be on the decline, reflecting that modular nature.
  
• When providers integrate portals with a customer's existing technologies, integrators cited e-mail systems, ERP or HR applications as the technologies most frequently integrated.
  
• When providers integrate portals with technologies newly purchased to specifically support the portal deployment, integrators cited content management, search engines and collaborative applications as the most frequent. • When it comes to evaluating portal software partners, the most important criteria that services providers consider are their partners' financial health, product quality, product functionality and open standards.
  
• CPU- and user-based pricing models are the most widely preferred by services providers from their EPS partners.
  
• The majority of the partnerships established are contractual or formal in nature. However, partnership arrangements do not always result in revenue for either the ISV or the integrator. In fact, only 63% of the EPS partnerships currently result in revenue-generating relationships for the systems integrator and the ISV.
  
• Plumtree appears to have established the most formal and/or informal partnerships with the system integrators listed in this study. Following closely are both SAP and IBM, with 15 partnerships each, and Vignette and BEA, with 14 each.